I just read the great book When Markets Collide. Published this year, the book comments on events that were occurring in the financial market as recently as the spring of this year. Author Mohamed El-Erian is the former head of the Harvard endowment and current co-CEO of PIMCO, one of the largest investment management companies in the world (he also spent 15 years at the International Monetary Fund). In the book, El-Erian says that when asked what career he would suggest a young women go into he replies “structured finance” without hesitation. His point is that while we are in a cyclical move away from structured finance due to excessive risk taking, the structured finance movement will continue to dominate financial markets over the long term.

All of this brings me to a great session I attended at the SoCap conference in which my friend George Overholser of NFF Capital Partners described how grantmakers can inject capital into a nonprofit debt financing deal to make it more attractive to for-profit lenders. The idea is that if a profit seeking lender will only lend to a nonprofit at a 10% interest rate, they may be willing to lend at a lower rate if a philanthropist puts up capital that will act as a “first loss” cushion. Let’s say that for example the loan is for $5 million. The philanthropist might put up $500,000 that the lender could lay claim to if the nonprofit was unable to fully repay the loan. This reduces the risk to the lender and therefore lowers the interest they are willing to accept to complete the loan. The philanthropist is willing to put up the money because the injection of a relatively small cash cushion can unleash much larger new cash flows into the nonprofit system. While the provider of the “first loss” cushion can achieve a maximum financial return of 0% (just getting all their money back if the nonprofit doesn’t default on the loan) and a maximum loss of 100%, this actually compares favorably to the guaranteed 100% “loss” that occurs when you make a grant. While a first loss capital cushion is not superior to making a grant, it is another tool to be considered by high-impact grantmakers.

This brings me to a recent announcement by Schwab Charitable (the national donor advised fund) of its pioneering program to allow their donor advised funds to put up capital to guarantee microfinance loans. The program is being run in collaboration with the Grameen Foundation. According to the press release:

“‘We are excited to be partnering with Schwab Charitable to expand the reach of microfinance loan programs around the world,’ said Alex Counts, President of Grameen Foundation. ‘Historically, guarantee programs have only been open to large foundations or to the very wealthy. This program opens up participation to a much broader range of donors, democratizing access and building a solid base of ongoing support.’
…Donors who agree to participate will recommend that up to 10 percent of their Charitable Gift Accounts be set aside for a period of 24-36 months to help guarantee microfinance loans. Any funds used to guarantee microloans will stay in their accounts, will continue to be invested for the entire period and will be applied to the guarantee only if the microfinance program has losses in excess of reserves. In addition, Schwab Charitable will report back to participating donors on the social and economic impact that these microfinance loans provide to their various recipients.”

Like all tools, structured finance can be used in inappropriate ways. As El-Erian points out in his book, the “securitization” of home loans (pooling them and reselling the loans to investors) was a positive development. However, misaligned incentives encouraged excessive risk taking that is now coming back to haunt the mortgage markets. Structured finance is a powerful tool and powerful tools can be dangerous, but I think the development of social capital markets towards more sophisticated forms of structured finance is inevitable. Let’s work on getting it right.

Sean Stannard-Stockton is a principal and director of Tactical Philanthropy at Ensemble Capital Management. Ensemble Capital provides families both traditional investment management and philanthropic planning. He is the author of the blog Tactical Philanthropy and writes the column On Philanthropy for the Financial Times.

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person microlending Web site, empowering individuals to lend directly to an entrepreneur in a developing country. Combining microfinance with the power of the Internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending.

From a handful of friends and family lending $3,000 to seven entrepreneurs in Uganda, in less than three years since Kiva’s inception, the organization has facilitated nearly $40 million in loans from 330,000 lenders to 60,000 entrepreneurs worldwide.

Kiva has had a number of outstanding corporate partners along the way who have catalyzed our work and helped us create a long-lasting Internet public good. PayPal, for instance, provides Kiva with access to technology, research, workplace resources, employee volunteers, and free payment processing (Kiva’s largest variable cost), thus enabling 100 percent of the loaned funds to reach entrepreneurs in developing countries. Oliver Wyman provides dedicated, ongoing support from their consultants, who spend between four to six months at Kiva’s San Francisco office working alongside Kiva staff to tackle pressing business issues. Yahoo! provides free Yahoo! Search Marketing keywords, and several Yahoo! employees are helping Kiva develop a more robust online platform. There are many more. We’re deeply grateful to all of these innovative, socially-minded organizations for their partnership.

And we’ve been thinking more and more about the individuals who make up those companies, and the tools they need to work together on Kiva more easily. Soon, Kiva will make it even easier for any group of individuals—whether a corporation, school, religious organization, family, or group of friends—to get involved as a group, and show organization-level support.

This fall, Kiva will launch a new feature allowing Kiva users to create or join lending teams. Each lending team will have a page on the Kiva Web site to track and summarize the lending activity of all individual lenders associated with that team.

The way Kiva works is not changing. People will still make loans as individuals. But now, they’ll also have the added option of teaming up with like-minded lenders, inviting others to join in and having their loans count towards a team total. Our hope is that lending teams will provide an easier way for Kiva enthusiasts to spread the word at work, at school, and elsewhere. Keep an eye out for this exciting new feature!

Kiva operates on a simple, but powerful premise: A loan of $25 can change a life. We hope lending teams encourage people to get involved and then involve others in a meaningful way.

Jessica Jackley Flannery cofounded Kiva, the first peer-to-peer microlending Web site, and believes that microfinance, relationships, and stories are powerful tools for change. She holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Increasingly, people are calling for the new energy models in developing nations to be “sustainable” and drawn from “clean” and renewable sources. The accepted belief is that if we can get developing nations on a path of adopting clean technologies, they can completely leapfrog the dirty, self-perpetuating system we have created in the west. However, there are barriers to establishing renewable energy projects at the BoP, on both the supply and demand side. One recently-launched for-profit social enterprise that hopes to revolutionize financing in this field is MicroEnergy Credits Corporation (MEC), and I had the wonderful pleasure of conversing with its founders, April Allderdice and James Dailey, last week.

Allderdice and Dailey both have impressive resumes, from Peace Corps to Columbia Business School to McKinsey and Grameen; they have the research and the on-the-ground experience to move this field forward.

MEC realizes that even though clean technology pays off in the long-run compared to conventional sources, very few BoP consumers can afford to pay high up-front costs when they are concerned with day-to-day survival. According to Allderdice and Dailey, BoP consumers “cannot afford to pay extra for environmental or even social benefits, and therefore adopt traditional energy.” And let’s be honest, who are we to tell others that they should sacrifice their meager income to save a planet which we are primarily responsible for destroying? In addition to the high up-front cost, there has not traditionally been a local broker to provide financing to the poorest and the most remote clients who do want to adopt clean energy projects. That is where MEC hopes to create change.

MEC’s solution is to use existing Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) and the recent developments in the carbon credit markets on the supply side to facilitate the adoption of clean energy at the BoP. According to Allderdice and Dailey, “Putting a significant portion of the world’s population on a clean energy path could have a huge impact in the long term, and is an opportunity that should not be wasted.” Their idea has been well-received, by both the Tomberg Family Philanthropies and the judges at the Global Social Venture Competition.

To provide financing on the ground, MEC will go through the MFI network, since MFIs are embedded in the community, especially rural off-the-grid communities that need decentralized solutions. This is a very timely post, as Derek’s post last week highlighted in CGAP Senior Advisor Katharine McKee’s article on microfinance and climate change, which said that “A number of respected MFIs and networks – including ACCION, BASIX in India and Equity Bank in Kenya – are exploring products to respond to climate change.”

MFIs have expertise in structuring deals, establishing appropriate loan repayment schedules and interest rates. According to Dailey, “MFI field officers meet with millions of households every week; they are a channel to market for financial services, and financed energy services are a natural outgrowth.”

MFIs such as ACCION and Grameen have also proven to be incredibly scalable, and they can spin off renewable-energy focused businesses; the most notable example of this has been Grameen Shakti, a member of the Grameen family that provides renewable energy technologies for rural households. Allderdice recently worked for Grameen Shakti, and says that it is “currently scaling faster than Grameen Bank was at year eight.”

The other piece of the puzzle on the supply side is to provide incentives to the MFIs through the evolving world of credits for renewable energy projects. Carbon finance is a valuable source of capital, yet it is a complex and evolving field that is difficult for the traditional on-the-ground MFI to tap into. In order to reduce the transaction costs of carbon financing,

“MEC provides MFIs carbon revenues on a per unit basis for each system they finance. This gives them near term access to finance for the seed costs of starting an energy program. As their program scales up, they can pass on the subsidy to end users which enable them to achieve greater volume by reaching poorer clients.”

Allderdice and Dailey have developed two credit instruments, Microfinance-originated Carbon Credits and Millennium Development Goal (MDG) credits. With the first, MFIs can receive revenue when they lend for energy systems that create verified carbon emissions reductions, such as solar PV systems, improved cookstoves and biogas digesters. With the second, MFIs can receive MDG Credits when they lend for an intervention that enables an MDG household to meet all or part of an MDG. According to Allderdice, “There is no established market in MDG credits yet, but MEC is building the infrastructure to enable it.”

When I asked the founders about the possibility of using Kyoto-established Clean Development Mechanism credits, which I wrote about last month, they said that “MEC’s unique approach will create extremely high quality transparent, and verifiable carbon credits that will first be sold on the voluntary markets and as CDM policies evolve, MEC will be among the first to tap the CDM markets.” Well, I guess that there is my answer for the possibility for CDM credits in the short-term.

The hope for the future is clear – to put households and communities on a clean energy path that allows them to be owners of their own reliable and renewable systems. This is what Allderdice was able to see first-hand during her work with Grameen Shatki in Bangladesh:

“some villagers now use solar for electricity, light, tv and radio and biogas for cooking and heating. They are full owners of their own energy generation, without being susceptible to the price of oil, or the fallibility of the electric grid. And they enjoy the environmental benefits of clean, silent, reliable, continuously renewing energy. As their income increases they are demonstrating a preference to buy another solar panel for a fan or a color tv — rather than switch to a diesel genset, or pay a high connection fee for unreliable grid connected service. Once they are on the clean energy path, there is less incentive to get off it.”

Grace Augustine is a research associate with the William Davidson Institute, an educational institute focused on researching and supporting organizations in emerging markets. She writes for the NextBillion blog and has an interest in economic development and clean technology for the world’s poorest citizens.