I’ve got an interesting gig coming up; I’m going to have a one on one with Craig Barrett, Intel’s CEO to talk about venture capital investing in the developing world. It’s got me thinking.

One thing I know; syndication and co-investing in the developing world means working with multiple forms of capital. For example, I think that mobile banking, for poor people who don’t have a banking relationship, related to peer to peer lending and remittances are among the biggest opportunities, both financially and for social impact.

But the biggest investment in the area so far was the $24 million grant the Gates Foundation gave to CGAP to figure out how it might work, what models could fly, what changes need to be made to adapt to a hodge podge of disfunctional regulatory issues, etc.

That’s the way it should be; a smart, strategic philanthropic funder gives a grant to establish a piece of infrastructure and that can allow market based, for profit initiatives that could transform people’s lives by delivering to them a transformative, potentially empowering piece of technology. Venture investors placing bets to help erradicate the digital divide will have to work alongside ngo’s multilateral institutions, foundations, grass roots donor groups, government agencies, etc. Innovation and behavior change are coupled more deeply when resistance change is the cultural norm than they are in a culture where change is seen as something to be welcomed. The impatient Silicon Valley mindset can run into walls it never even saw coming. I know that from my experience with malaria projects in Swaziland and Mozambique.

And managing the multicultural relationships between those organizations and people and across deep cultural divides will be one of the biggest challenges investors face once the foundations seeding of the ground has borne fruit. From PSID blog