I’m back home in Washington after attending the ANDE Latin America Conference in Granada, Nicaragua. It was one of the most exciting trips I’ve made representing NextBillion. Granada was spectacular and the ANDE Latin America Conference stood out in many ways.

The open and generous tone of the event was remarkable, and was evident when planning for the event started almost six months ago, and the host organizations (Agora, Root Capital and Technoserve) reached out to the rest of ANDE and asked what would make a Latin American conference truly unique. The answer was collaboration, which is only possible by creating spaces in which trust is built through genuine interactions among representatives of different organizations. A true ecosystem (the biological metaphor that is more and more the buzzword of the industry, and signifies the mutual dependence and reinforcement of the organizations in it) will work only if its parts know each other well – not only at a general level but also, and most importantly, at an operational level of daily challenges.