Greg Van Kirk

Organization: Community Enterprise Solutions

Country: Guatemala

Greg has developed the MicroConsignment Model as a sustainable, replicable means of delivering health-related goods and services by (women) entrepreneurs in remote Guatemalan and Ecuadoran villages. He spreads the model to organizations worldwide to lower risk and create viable bottom of the pyramid markets.

Greg Van Kirk is leading the development and spread of the MicroConsignment Model (MCM), which fosters entrepreneurship in developing countries and creates unprecedented village-level access to health-related goods and services. Participants in Greg's programs have successfully sold eyeglasses, wood-burning stoves, solar lights, water filters – among other items – in over 2,000 remote village campaigns at affordable prices, improving both public health and economic welfare. The model provides these products to local entrepreneurs at no cost, thus circumventing the burden of debt payments that commonly pushes rural entrepreneurs further into poverty. Once the entrepreneur completes a sale, she pays the supporting organization, pockets her profits and then restocks her inventory. The model combines economic and public-health benefits – creating income and cost savings to local entrepreneurs and consumers, and delivering important health-related products and knowledge to underserved markets. Furthermore, the majority of MicroConsignment entrepreneurs are women who otherwise have no opportunity to generate additional household income. Having established the viability of the model through his core operations in Guatemala and begun to replicate it in Ecuador and Nicaragua, Greg is now looking to spread his operations to at least ten additional countries in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

In Guatemala, Greg’s team has already trained over 200 local entrepreneurs to execute village sales campaigns, creating gross revenues for the local social enterprise his team created of approximately $350,000, net profits of nearly $65,000 for entrepreneurs, and savings/increased productivity for rural consumers in excess of USD $1 million while delivering previously-unavailable products to improve health and well-being. To deal with the startup costs of creating entirely new markets in rural settings, he has developed an approach to maximize leverage utilizing an intricate funding/human resource structure combining grants and donations through Community Enterprise Solutions with income earned through local social enterprises, and fees paid by the student interns of the sister organization he created, Social Entrepreneur Corps. Greg plans to spread this model aggressively, leveraging other leading social entrepreneurs as strategic partner distribution channels and spreading awareness, training and resources related to his approach through online platforms. Greg is currently working to establish a footprint in Argentina, South Africa, Brazil and Egypt. His team is vetting new solutions such as SolarEar. He plans to expand the model to 15-20 countries throughout Latin America, Asia and Africa within the next three years. Greg is well on his way to creating continuous and sustainable access to essential products and services in thousands of previously underserved communities by unleashing the potential of rural entrepreneurs across the developing world.