On language: goodbye SME, hello pathological collaboration

Emily Davila, our Beyond Profit Guest Blogger, reports from the Clinton Global Initiative.

Part of the fun of being a part of a cutting edge sector is defining the terms for what we are doing as we do it!  This morning’s CGI session on “deepening financial inclusion” created some new terms and deleted some common ones:

Ones you can delete from your vocabulary:

Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid –  Sorry guys, there is no fortune here.  Building up services for the bottom billion will take a lot of work over a long time and subsidies will be necessary.   We need to be honest about the work ahead of us.  We need to name the partners that need to work together.  For instance, the government’s

social ministry needs to talk to its financial ministry when they are doing cash transfers to the ultra poor.  And the NGOs who can implement financial literacy programs need to talk to the banks that can invest in them.  By the way– this fortune will be measured by more than the money in the bank.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) – There is a big difference between a small micro-entrepreneur – say a food stand employing three people in rural Kenya — and medium enterprise like a factory employing 200 people in a peri-urban area.   While both need greater access to capitol, lumping them together isn’t helping anyone.  However: “community banking is ideal place to make funding available to both,” said Mary Houghton, President, Shore Bank Corporation.

Social Entrepreneurship —  “We need to erase dichotomy between where we make our money and where we do good. There is going to come a day is where every business entrepreneur should be social entrepreneur…” ironically this was said by Sally Osberg, President of the Skoll Foundation,  a funder of social entrepreneurs.

Here’s a word combo to add:

Pathological Collaboration:  This one is about getting everyone to work together – banks to fund organizations that can do the deep hard work of reaching the bottom billion, governments who can reinforce
with policies.   It was coined by my new favorite public speaker William Foote, the CEO of Root Capital. “We need to create a social movement for finance like the civil rights movement that has the vision to unlock financial for one billion people.  We need to think seriously about legislation that reinvents foreign assistant, not dead aid but vitally live aid.  We need pathological collaboration.” President Clinton repeated the phrase in his closing remarks, so I think its safe to say we just coined a new term!