Author: Jose Miguel Lopez Cantal Sanchez

February is off to an exciting start as our winter 2014 Scouts head off the beaten track to social enterprise and impact investment field assignments in India, China, Kenya, Tanzania and the US, to name a few. After two weeks of intense training and mentoring in Monterey, recent trainees will embark on what promises to be a career defining and life changing experience at a range of social enterprises including, but not limited to: Waste Capital Partners, Village Capital, Karibu Solar, iKure India, Points of Light Civic Accelerator, Socap, Unreasonable, One Degree Solar  and Hub Oaxaca.

On assignment, Scouts will spend 3-12 months providing due diligence for investors and technical assistance for entrepreneurs with the goal of generating high-quality deal flows and supporting portfolio companies at a low cost. Scouts provide much-needed human capital to help small and medium-sized social enterprises scale.

This year’s winter 2014 cohort is the 7th generation of Scouts to complete the training program. To date Frontier Market Scouts has trained over 240 social enterprise professionals from 20 countries.

About Frontier Market Scouts

The Frontier Market Scouts (FMS) Program selects and trains social enterprise professionals who desire a career in social venture management and impact investing. Jointly developed and managed by the Monterey Institute of International Studies, Sanghata Global, and Village Capital, the FMS program turns compassionate and capable professionals into talent scouts and investment managers serving local entrepreneurs and social-minded investors in low-income and weak-capital regions of the world.

For more information, visit www.fmscouts.org. Read our blog at blogs.miis.edu/frontier/. Follow us on Twitter @FMScouts and on Facebook at facebook.com/frontiermarketscouts.

Some of the scouts enjoy a detour to the Golden Gate Bridge prior to the event

Our scouts took a well-deserved day off last Monday but showed no sign of slowing as they travelled to San Francisco to take part in a special networking event. On hand were members of the impact investing community of Northern California; current and former scouts, including Ravi Kurani, an FMS alum and founder of ImpactSpace, an excellent open data source in the impact investing world focused on bringing together and powering the global impact market. Also on hand were several highly regarded impact investors, many friends of FMS interested in impact investing and even the Honorary Consul of Romania in San Francisco, George Roth! Who expressed particular interest in our program and its possibilities in Romania.

It was a wonderful event in downtown San Francisco allowing the scouts to network as well as get to know the arena they will be working in and the people they will be working with. Within a short time frame and a room full of eager professionals, the scouts achieved no small task in advocating their abilities and aptitudes in fine form.

For live updates, follow @fmscouts

One of the two winning teams: Fish in the Fields showing their fish faces.

The Winter 2014 Scouts are hard at work creating business models for their ideal social enterprises.  Five groups created the next wave of socially conscious businesses with top to bottom sustainability in mind.

The Scouts started with a dream company of their own creation and turned them into a business model to present.  Each team presents the dream company of one member and the entire team completes a business model based on that company.

Going from an idea to a model in two days of Yuwei’s class was a true challenge that our scouts accepted with grace and executed with hard work. They utilized their bright minds by working together through the challenges of social entrepreneurship. Here are the teams:

Team A – Peregrine Impact Plus is a lean startup focused on enabling migrant laborers in India to become vocationally and financially trained.  Their business model establishes a connection between employees, and vocational and financial education to create stronger employees.

Team B – Frontier Data & Distribution is bridging the gap between social enterprises and their constituents by utilizing a business model based on data acquisition and analysis. Selling market data to social and corporate enterprises for Bottom of the Pyramid customers.

Team C – Fish in the Fields addresses the question of how to raise baitfish utilizing rice paddies. By focusing on environmental and social impact, they are on the forefront of sustainability by selling bait-fish grown in Northern California rice paddies to fish farmers in Mexico – creating an entirely organic supply chain.

Team D – Pense provides financial products and services to small shop owners in East Africa through banking and financial knowledge. It works with M-Pesa to facilitate capital flows and also provides sales data.

Team E – Power2thePeople sells renewable energy to rural communities and addresses this with small-scale solar development for the 1.2 billion people don’t have access to reliable energy.

Our Winners, Fish in the Fields and Pense, each received a bottle of California Pinot Noir and the admiration of their colleagues for outstanding business models. Congratulations to all scouts for pulling together such excellent and thorough models in such a short amount of time.

For live updates follow @fmscouts