This case examines how CARE, a non-profit international development organization, begins to pursue a market-based approach to meeting its poverty-reduction mission. Specifically, a CARE project manager explores how previous work with low-income livestock herders in drought-prone eastern Kenya might offer an opportunity to work with value chain actors to improve access to markets and increase farmers’ incomes.<br><br>With the Kenyan livestock project as the pilot for this new approach, Case (A)’s main decision point concerns a strategic choice on what role CARE should play in the value chain to support low-income pastoralists. Options include 1) becoming directly involved in value chain transactions, buying and selling livestock, and providing inputs to farmers or 2) acting as a value chain facilitator to provide the information and incentives to existing actors to make the value chain more efficient and inclusive for low-income producers. This strategic decision is part of a larger proposal that students are tasked to create for CARE’s market-based livestock project.
The founder and executive director of E+Co faces the challenge of ten-fold growth and reviews the core parts of the company's innovative business model, the changes in the energy markets around the world, and the rationale for local solutions to energy scarcity and inefficiency. Also presented is a set of entrepreneurial growth strategies that preserve the core of the model - i.e., simultaneously tackling energy poverty and energy waste, and bringing people up the energy ladder with locally suitable and affordable solutions. These strategies help consolidate and leverage E+Co's 12 years of experience and strong local presence through an innovative combination of complementary wedges.
<p style="color: rgb(197, 183, 131);"><strong> AWARD WINNER - Dark Side Case Writing Competition</strong></p><br>This case examines how the Tanzania government intends to address a pressing deterioration in the infrastructure and services of Dar es Salaam's Water and Sewage Authority. The decision process unfolds in the spring of 2002, on the heels of the Cochabamba uprising in Bolivia and an increasing dispute over the involvement of the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank in other water development projects in Ghana, Mauritania and South Africa. At that time, the World Bank was already sponsoring similar projects in Angola, Benin, Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Rwanda Sao Tome and Senegal, despite some vocal local opposition. This multi-part case series is ideally suited for core or elective courses in strategy and sustainability to illustrate the types of ongoing tensions and divergent decision angles that influence the formation and performance of public-private partnerships and managing in a global context. It also provides a rich and graphic account of the special threats and opportunities in the water sector - a wealth of complementary teaching resources can also stimulate larger debates by juxtaposing the case decision with a broader crisis of confidence in for-profit solutions to water and sewage provision in Africa and in Latin America.
This is a supplement to City Water Tanzania (A): Water Partnerships for Dar es Salaam, product #9B07M025. It details the terms of the lease contract with an international operator, Biwater, and discusses the alternatives that were considered and discarded, the bidding process, and the roles and motivations of the parties. The key questions revolve around a) the adequacy of the decision, b) the responsibility for the next steps and c) the milestones and metrics to gauge the success of the privatization.
This is a supplement to City Water Tanzania (A): Water Partnerships for Dar es Salaam, product #9B07M025 and is a two-part role-play. In this part (A) role-play, students take the position of Edward Lowassa, Tanzania's Minister of Water.
This is a supplement to City Water Tanzania (A): Water Partnerships for Dar es Salaam, product #9B07M025 and is a two-part role-play. In this part (B) role-play, students take the position of Cliff Stone, Biwater's former director of sales for Africa and now chief executive officer of City Water's management.
This is a supplement to City Water Tanzania (A): Water Partnerships for Dar es Salaam, product #9B07M025. This case summarizes the decision of the negotiation: the break up of City Water Tanzania and its aftermath, including litigation and forgone opportunities to meet the needs of the local residents.
This case describes E+Co's approach to promoting clean energy entrepreneurship in developing countries and its current strategic challenge; how to scale up its business model to reach 100 million unserved or underserved people in the developing world by 2020. In the last 12 years E+Co was successful at demonstrating and validating an "enterprise centered model" which offered reliable access and improved energy efficiency to the poor in emerging economies. Its approach to bringing the poor up the modern energy ladder, one step at a time, was initiated in response to a challenging project for the Rockerfeller Foundation, marked by a radical departure from the top-down, large scale infrastructure projects sponsored by international institutions. So far, these models had left 2.5 million people trapped into the double bind of energy poverty and energy waste. E+Co's approach was working well; by September 2006 it had invested in 138 enterprises in 30 countries. These local entrepreneurs currently provided clean energy to more than three million people. The next issue was scaling it all up; however, this risked straining the resources of E+Co's global team of 38 employees and could change the services the company provided to local entrepreneurs. Tenfold expansion within these constraints required an innovative growth strategy. Supplemental case, E+Co: The Path to Scale (B), product 9B07M055, presents a set of entrepreneurial growth strategies that preserve the core of the model.
This B case presents a conversation between E+Co's co-founders and an employee in Latin America who had raised the tough question of scale at E+Co's 2006 annual retreat. One of the co-founders' response for getting E+Co 10 times more impactful in emerging economies was to adopt what he called a strategy of wedges. Also presented is a set of complementary strategies that together could help achieve steady local impact and rapid growth. The conversation also exposes some of the strategic experiments attempted by E+Co during the past 12 years that did not achieve the expected goals yet inspired new paths to scale. This is a supplement to E+Co: A Tipping Point for Clean Energy Entrepreneurship (A), product # 9B07M054.