Global Good Fund & Pay-as-you-go Solar-powered Irrigation

In our last blog, we looked at KOHLER’s work with water filtration in Ghana.

Today we will take a look at the Global Good Fund.

The Global Good Fund was established to invent technologies to address some of humanity’s most daunting problems.

They came to us with the desire to launch a new solar-powered pay-as-you-go irrigation product.

But first, we wanted to answer: What is the “best” market and partner to test a new solar-powered pay-as-you-go irrigation business model?

We decided to develop a 53-point country-level evaluation matrix and set up a 10-member expert panel. From there, we distilled insights from 100 pieces of existing research and assessed 60 potential partner organizations. Our next move was to create a heat map identifying the “best” markets to target to achieve the fund’s objectives.

From all of that research, we came to the conclusion that the “best” market depends on the revenue, impact, and time objectives of the fund. In this case, a business model innovation around credit evaluation and decision making matched Global Good Funds objectives. It was more needed by market players than a new product.

As you can see from our last five posts, including this one, water businesses make a profit while making an impact. And we love working with our partners to discover how to adapt impact-minded business models to local needs.

In our next blog series, we will look into clean energy. Stay tuned.

Discovered Markets works with businesses solving some of the world's most pressing problems. This blog is a part of a series of posts covering water issues and what businesses are doing about it (Part 5/5)

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Despite over-performing returns, venture capital investment in emerging markets accounts for only about 10% of total VC capital invested, and a significant financing gap remains for small and growing businesses (SGBs) in these environments. Why is that?

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Thank you for following along with our "Issues in Clean Water" series. We hope you learned more about the role business can play in making practical steps toward resolving these issues.

Click to view an overview deck of the series. If you are a business or fund looking to impact this space, please reach out to us.

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listening and responding to stakeholders in crisis

Current events have changed us all, including our business's stakeholders: partners, vendors, distributors, investors, customers. To respond, organizations need to re-evaluate their systems to listen, design, and respond in changing environments.

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Discovered Markets works all over the globe, from Malaysia to Uzbekistan to Malawi to Sierra Leone. While this can mean travel for some, we have set up systems and networks to allow speedy market interviews, observations, and testing almost anywhere in the world.

We often used the line: "We may not know, but we know how to know." While the team has experience across a diverse set of sectors from project work and prior professional experience, we will never know an industry as intimately as our client or other stakeholders do.

The majority of partners we work with have existing products or services. When taking a user-centric approach, however, this can create conflict.

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