Returning from a long hiatus, I found notes for this blog post languishing, waiting to be written. What I call the “globalization paradox” is actually an observation on the ubiquity of global brands and culture in remote regions. I’ve been surprised throughout my travels by the level of penetration by certain branded products (e.g., Coca Cola, Pepsi, Frito Lays) or pop culture in seemingly isolated areas where other signs of development and plugging into the mainstream switchboard are rare. Despite the fact these areas are apart from the interconnected world, the exposure to globalized products and media is extremely high.

Anecdote #1:

On a minibus ride through northern Lebanon last year, I met a young architecture student of the University of Tripoli. He spoke no English and only fragmented French, but when he passed me his mp3 player for a listen, I was surprised to hear Akon, One Republic, and other American artists. It was surreal – he had all the latest hits. I offered to send him music recommendations via email, but was once again surprised to hear that he had no email account. He candidly told me, “my sister has a hotmail account, but my friends are in Tripoli or in my village so why do I need email to contact them?” I was bewildered. Here was someone who was voluntarily isolated from the external world and yet was an avid follower of American pop music, in a language that he didn’t even speak. How does one explain this pop culture phenomenon?

Anecdote #2:

A couple months back, I visited a few tribal villages in Jharkhand, who intentionally limit their contact with mainstream society. These villages mostly subsist on sustainable farming with a little income from government rural employment programs. On average, these families earned 40 – 100 rupees per day; most of them didn’t leave the village aside from occasional trips to the market in larger towns. Yet, in the center of each village, a small Airtel PCO sign would hang outside a doorway announcing cell phone recharge station and the existence of the kirana shop selling all the familiar branded goods from bottles of Pepsi to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate bars. In these villages, people spent their incomes the same way we all do – on junk food and mobile minutes. How are these supposedly segregated tribal villages so far from mainstream and yet so tied to the same commercial brands as we are?

***

What fascinates me about this “globalization paradox” is its potential as a solution to the social development sector’s last mile challenge problem. In spite of the isolation of many areas, the deep penetration by mass market brands and culture give us a channel to reach the bottom of the pyramid. Like the proposed matchbox ad campaign article featured on ThinkChange India last year, soda bottles could be the media for awareness campaigns in rural markets. As American cereal boxes feature brain teasers and puzzles, we can place educational games on the back of potato chip bags to promote literacy and arithmetic.

The fact that there are global brands and songs penetrate deep into difficult-to-reach markets is a hopeful sign the last mile problem. In the social sector, maybe we should stop asking for monetary corporate sponsorship or investment and ask for more in-kind real estate on their packaging to further our marketing reach. And maybe we can canvass popular artists to dedicate a few lines of their work to a development cause. Whatever the method, the “globalization paradox” provides some food for thought on how we can reach out to the bottom of the pyramid.

Originally written for the Villgro Research Blog, I’m re-posting my article here. For those short on time and patience, I would recommend just reading the last two paragraphs on the need to address the technology gender gap.

Technology and innovation are two words that form a pillar of social enterprise – even social enterprise itself is still considered an innovation. Social enterprises seek to develop technologies with the underlying assumption that they will increase productivity or create opportunities for social economic advancement. Some technologies are simple like the treadle pump, and others are complex like solar lanterns, but all of them help the BoP and it’s this latter benefit that we invest in. As social entrepreneurs, we’re obsessed with measuring this benefit and finding new ways to scale the impact further – in short we want to know that everyone who can benefit from this technology is adopting it. All the aforementioned statements are frequently discussed, but what we don’t hear enough about is whether these successful innovations are reaching men and women equally or whether there is a gender gap to adoption of technologies.

The International Council for Research on Women recently published the report “Bridging the Gender Divide: How Technology can Advance Women Economically”, which focuses on understanding how technology for the BoP differs in its impact on men versus women and what measures can be taken to ensure more inclusion of women. Four main barriers to adoption were identified:

-          Lack of education and technology literacy: women are often excluded from opportunities to learn the new technology

-          Time poverty: domestic responsibilities leave limited disposable time for tech exploration

-          Social norms: women are often not in the habit of operating technology, or adoption would require women to enter a public arena (i.e., market) outside their customary comfort zone

-          Limited economic means: domestic finances are most often controlled by the men of the households, leaving women unable to make a purchase decision to adopt innovations

These barriers can be overcome when developers of the technology or the social enterprise promoting the innovations take efforts to address the root causes, starting with including women in the design process. ICRW gives an example of the the Upesi rural biomass stoves, which were designed with inputs from women and consequently were adopted. I find this point to be one of the strongest recommendations – it addresses a systemic concern that prevents women adoption. As long as technology continues to be designed by men, women adoption will be low, perpetuating social norms that continue to support the existing gender gap. Sometimes, the solution is as simple as making a technology like a cooking stove, a height that women can reach. ICRW also suggests that inclusion of women in the design process can help to overcome many of the technology literacy and social norm barriers.

Other recommendations are centered on customizing the last mile distribution to address the awareness training needs, purchasing financing, and distribution through channels catered to women. By providing financing or bringing the innovation directly to the women, rather than relying on market place distribution, women are enabled to make the adoption. It is only through active efforts of the social enterprise to convert women adopters that this is possible.

ICRW provides the example of Solar Dryers in Uganda, which were financed by a partner NGO, enabling women to dry fruits for commercial consumption. As in the Solar Dryer example, technologies which can either create income generating activities or increase the productivity of women can go a long ways to contributing to their economic advancement. In addition, ICRW cites that the indirect benefits of increased productivity can also reduce the barrier of time poverty.

Overall, what I find most compelling and the most important point to takeaway is the need to examine and reevaluate how we think about the potential impact of a technology on helping the BoP. Social enterprises need to be more conscientious of the gender gap in innovation adoption and need to be vigilant in their efforts to address this gap.

One particular example comes to my mind of an innovative successful business model, who could benefit from thinking about their social impact with respect to an adoption gender gap. VisionSpring, an organization recently partnered with Villgro, uses a high touch-point sales distribution model to bring low-cost reading glasses to the BoP across southeast India. VisionSpring’s customer demographics are heavily skewed towards men even though there are many women who attend the eyecamps and should be customers. There seem to be two primary reasons for the gender divide between VisionSpring’s customers. The first is that eyeglasses are perceived as aesthetically unappealing, which trumps the value of clear vision. The second is that women are less likely to have disposable income and the economic means to make the purchase. Both these reasons are problems that should be and can be addressed by the social enterprise. Awareness campaigns for the importance of proper reading glasses in the preservation of vision, not to mention the benefits of increased productivity, can be conducted to overcome what is essentially a misguided social norm that is a barrier to wearing glasses. Women can also be engaged in sourcing frames that are more aesthetically appealing. Finally, some form of partnership with a microfinance institution to finance the purchases is also possible to overcome the economic concern.

The point I want to emphasize is not how VisionSpring can work to increase its female customers, but rather that it needs to proactively think and evaluate the impact of its technology to identify how to overcome the gender gap. This is true across all social enterprises. Even though many social enterprises have introduced game changing technologies to the BoP, I think if we look closer, we would see a divide in the impact by gender. This gap is one that needs to be overcome if we truly want economic advancement for all of the BoP – of both women and men.

When we first established our operations to produce Coir Atlas units a few weeks ago, we encountered an unexpected difficulty in getting a steady workforce of women. It seems like a simple equation: Decent Salary + Clean Working Environment + Lack of Employment Opportunities = Loyal Willing Workers. We had spread the word around the surrounding villages and poor colonies and expected to be flooded by eager employment seekers. We were quickly taught how wrong we were. The first day, we had one girl show up. We diligently trained her in the assembly process and taught her how to stitch and knot. She didn’t come back the next day.

We kept getting new women each day who would stay for one day of training never to return again.  “Why?” we asked. We found that there wasn’t enough traction and the women were hesitant about working in a newly established organization with no track record and no steady employees. It would seem shady to me too if I showed up to a workshop and I was the only girl working. Finally, when we managed to get three women to show up together, they all bunked the next day. They complained about the compensation structure, which was Rs. 50 during training days (the first week). Given our payment incentive of Rs. 15 per unit after training, the women who produced more than 3 units during training felt that we were cheating them out of their rightful earnings. So we changed our payment structure to whichever was higher, either Rs. 50 per training day or Rs. 15 per unit made, and also shortened training to 4 days instead of 7. We introduced a Friends & Family policy, where anyone who introduced a new worker who stayed received a Rs.50 bonus.

To assuage their fears of this unknown workshop, I used my physical presence as a female and someone they could relate to. For the entire first week, I sat with the women, teaching them the assembly process and making units alongside them for encouragement. Believe me, this is far from glamorous nor instantly gratifying. Training was difficult given my limited Hindi, ergo it became more of show than tell, which frustrated all parties involved. In the afternoons, our public electricity would often experience load shedding and the fans would come to a dead halt. Together, we sat in sweaty solidarity, sewing jute.

I find that people, particularly in the developed world, like to romanticize the poor and the notion of poverty – emphasizing the generosity which the poor show each other or relating how they instantly felt akin to a poor woman they worked with.  The reality is gray. While our women helped each other out, teaching someone who was new, or lending a hand to finish a unit, they were also competitive and possessive of limited supplies because they were paid by the units they made. Similarly, the women and I didn’t start out fond of each other; some of them were in fact quite difficult to work with and they viewed me as their boss who was not thinking on their behalf. They were also hesitant of each other, as everyone was competing for their own interests. Generosity and mutual understanding can’t come if it’s at the direct cost of potential income.

Camaraderie only developed over the course of our days working side-by-side. While our hands tied knots, we talked and learned about each other. Standard topics of conversations included: marital status, number of kids, age of their kids and what kind of food they cooked. I learned that Ratna, one of our best workers, is Tamilian but raised in Jamshedpur, so she likes to make South Indian dosas for her 2 sons on Sundays, her day off, because dosas are only good when they’re hot. Other days, she cooks a day’s supply of rice and daal before coming to work so that her husband and kids have meals during the day. Asha was someone I initially had difficulty teaching, but who has developed into a solid Coir Atlas maker; she is Bengali and so likes to make Bengali curries for her husband and two daughters. The women also developed friendships amongst themselves, joking with each other, and walking home with each other at the end of each day. But none of this happened overnight; it took time to build this mutual respect.

It was from the friend groups that formed that we decided to implement a group production model. We divided our 12 women into four groups of three. Each group is given a common supply of jute fabric, bamboo, thread, etc. and would be compensated for their total production rather than their individual production. Without our direction, the groups developed division of labor on their own. E.g., a particular member who was better at the finishing process took over that task while the other two women prepared the structural parts for her. It was incredible to watch them help each other within their group, but also develop a friendly competition with other groups. In the first three days of individual production, four women produced 14 units in total, which was frustrating when I could produce 8 units on my own in a day. Now, the groups are making 100+ units per day and they proudly and eagerly tell me how many units they’ve made each day.

***

Saturday was our first official payday, and the women were excited to find out how much they had earned. Our payment model is simple, Rs.15 per unit produced or Rs.100 per day, whichever works out in their favor. All of the women who were making units earned more than Rs.100 per day, which is often1.5x what they were previously earning. Four of our women workers come from Bagbera, a slum near the railway station. They used to earn daily wages of Rs. 60 rolling agarbatti (incense sticks), a common trade for poor women. Heera, our top performer, was an agarbatti roller who now earns an average of Rs. 130 per day, which supplements the income that our husband, a construction site worker makes. For Puja, another worker, this is her first job and the income she earns helps her family of 6 siblings to make ends meet because her father isn’t around anymore. It was eye opening for me to hear the story that each of our women had to tell for why she was here earning what equates to ~$3 a day.

As each woman was paid her salary, she was asked to sign her name in the ledger and it was then that I discovered that a number of our women were illiterate. Several of our top performers, who are deft in stitching and bright learners, were unable to sign even their own names, providing their thumbprints in place of a signature. Even many of those who could write their own names, did so laboriously in the handwriting of a child. Manju, who was a fast learner and made 6 units on her first day, couldn’t write the 3 letters that form her name in Hindi. She also wasn’t interested when I tried to teach her to write her name, because there was no income generation value in knowing it. It was hard for me to grasp how these smart and competent women, whom I respect, could not know how to sign their names.

***

Setting up operations was and is challenging and taxing. There are constant setbacks and disappointments in the production performance. And when all the women appear each day, clad in brightly colored saris, with gold earrings and nose rings, I often wondered if these were truly women in need. I doubted the social impact that our operations had. For me, these uncertainties have been laid to rest. Even though our impact is small right now, the employment that we are providing is giving our small group of women a meaningful amount of extra income. Over the last weeks of working with and getting to know them, I came to develop a sense of kinship with and responsibility for them. My only worry now is on the business side of how to keep sales coming so that we can keep them employed. Because now that I know them, I don’t want to disappoint them and have them return to rolling agarbatti for $1.50 a day.

Since the inception of the double bottom line after Shell’s PR nightmare with Greenpeace, and now the triple bottom line, corporate social responsibility has become the favorite all-encompassing term and budget for all corporate communication efforts to win over public opinion. Suddenly everything from sponsoring sporting events like Premier League games to building schools and cultural spaces falls within the scope of CSR. Viewed from another direction, CSR is really not much different from buying ad space on billboards except that even non-consumer corporations are doing it – i.e., large industrials like steel manufacturers.

In developing countries like India, CSR initiatives are even more amorphous, as many corporations assume roles and responsibilities that are normally handled by the public sector. When industries set up new manufacturing plants in a rural area, they inevitably also bring economic growth as well as infrastructural development. For example, Visa Steel in Orissa builds roads for the communities around its steel mills; Vedanta Aluminum and NALCO all have health clinic initiatives for the surrounding rural villages; and of course, there is Tata Steel, which outright adopts villages and takes over most municipal functions (my city, Jamshedpur being case in point). It’s a strange niche that CSR fill in India that straddles the public and private sectors as corporations to contribute to the community’s growth and fill in gaps where the public sector fails.

What strikes me, however, about these CSR initiatives is how unrelated the various community programs are to the core business of these industries. Each company sponsors a women skills development program, a cultural sports and dance event, a basic health clinic, etc. The cookie-cutter similarity of these programs seems to me to be an indication of the lack of internalization of CSR as a core business activity, even though indirectly, they do contribute to the continued success of the corporation. I was at the Confederation of Indian Industries’ CSR conference last week, during which, each industrial panelist presented the exact same set of CSR initiatives. Of the ten panelists, there was only one representative from POSCO Steel who expounded on why CSR initiatives are crucial to the successful gaining the approval of the local community for green field projects. In my opinion, ALL CSR representatives should have demonstrated why and how their initiatives were contributing directly to the company’s bottom line. Otherwise, CSR initiatives become an unsustainable fringe department of a corporation, subject to the fancies of the budget allocator.

The good news is that there do exist progressive CSR programs, which are moving towards an inclusive business model. At a subsequent International Business Leaders Forum last week, CSR representatives and NGOs discussed how to internalize the benefits and impact of social initiatives in the company’s bottom line. Roads that are constructed in a rural village benefits the community, yes, but it also eases the transportation logistics for the industrial corporation. Even sponsored cultural dances and sporting events help a core business operate by raising the goodwill of the community and preventing bandhs (strikes). These “inclusive business models” are focused on measuring and quantifying the benefits of seemingly normal CSR activity to calculate it into the company’s P&L statement. The result is a more sustainable form of social impact activity, which is unlikely to disappear when CSR goes out of fashion.

The bottom line is that whether it’s called corporate social responsibility or inclusive business, all social initiatives taken up by a private corporation should have an impact that is measured and shown to contribute to the core business. Only then, will CSR stop being seen as a form of corporate philanthropy and be seen as a necessary part of doing business.

Given that today is Earth Day, it seems an appropriate time to introduce Coir Atlas, the green innovation company to which I dedicate my waking hours. The product is a simple one, that serves a niche market, but which has an amazing potential to impact the environment and lives. Let me explain:

Context:

India’s steel industry is the third largest in the world today at 80 million tons per year, which is expected to grow to 120 over the next 2 years. About 50% of these are flat sheets and coils, which are transported by road, rail, and sea to their destinations. An estimated 400,000 trees are required each year to sustain the packaging needs of the Indian steel industry and this number will grow in correlation to the growth of steel production.

It takes 20 years for the trees to mature enough to suit the requirements of the industry – at 400,000 trees annually this is a highly unsustainable situation. Procurement officers of steel plants are having an increasingly difficult time obtaining the needed timber as forests disappear.

In a few developed countries, the steel industry has looked to create synthetic alternatives to wood pallets (e.g., hard plastics). But even these synthetic alternatives come at a hefty price to the environment, because what happens after their useful life is finished?

So, Coir Atlas was born as the all natural, sustainable alternative for “packaging” wood. Its composition of bamboo and jute are completely bio-degradable and eco-friendly.

What is it?

Coir Atlas is a range of products, made of bamboo and jute, which are meant to replace the timber used during the packaging of steel for transportation. The main product is essentially an imitation wood log. Cross sections of bamboo are placed in a row and enveloped in layers of jute fabric. The end result is used like a wooden log, where steel sheets or plates can be placed on top.

Coir Atlas supporting steel plates

Other products under development include a bamboo pallet that will substitute wood pallets and could have a wider application beyond the steel industry.

Why bamboo?

I often get asked the question of how using bamboo is any more sustainable than wood and the answer boils down to: bamboo is not a tree, it is grass and therefore its growth is different. Bamboo grows 6x faster than wood, so while it takes 20 years to grow a tree to industry standards, it takes 4 years for bamboo to become viable. You can also grow 20x the amount of bamboo on the same amount of land as compared to timber.

The kicker is that bamboo forests actually die if not harvested regularly, so by harvesting mature bamboo, it actually helps to maintain the forest. And given that India’s 10,000 hectares of bamboo forest are underutilized, it’s actually beneficial to find more uses of bamboo.

Bamboo supporting my weight

*Did you know that bamboo has a tensile strength of 26,000, which is stronger than steel? One Coir Atlas unit of 4 bamboo sections can support up to 50 tons of pressure!

What is the potential impact?

The dual mission of the company is to have a positive environmental as well as social impact. The environmental impact is quite clear – save trees by using a more sustainable alternative. The potential to save 400,000 trees is quite encouraging.

The social impact is less obvious, but just as important. The design of Coir Atlas is simple enough that given a week’s training, unskilled women can easily be taught to make the units. An experienced woman can make hundreds of units per day, which translates into an average of Rs. 300 in earnings. That’s 3x the amount provided by government employment programs (i.e., NREG) and a decent wage for her family. What’s more, many steel plants are located in the poorer regions of the country where rural unemployment is high. Jharkhand, which is home to both Tata and Bokaro Steel, the two largest steel plants in the country, is also one of the poorest states. The creation of small cottage industry groups to produce Coir Atlas would have a significant impact on the lives of the people in the area as well.

Where we are at:

While Coir Atlas sounds like a dreamboat, there are many challenges that we face in dealing with an industry that is slow to change and isn’t well known for innovation. The steel industry is an insulated group of target customers that is difficult to break through. Even when contacts are made, it’s difficult to convince the various chains of command that they should take the risk and try something new when the old ways work just fine. The mentality of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” can be difficult to overcome. The inertia against which we’re fighting is huge, but slowly the tides are turning.

Most recently we received an order from JSW, part of the Jindal Group, to begin using Coir Atlas at their Bellary plants in Karnataka. The Jindals are particularly forward thinking and progressive with their CSR initiative, which is rare in this industry. They see and understand the potential benefits of saving trees and increasing employment. I see this as a milestone for us, as we continue to push into this industry. And so we keep prodding and pushing to move these tons of resistance.

Frequent field visits to rural villages also mean many long and uncomfortable bus or train rides. During a recent visit to villages around Tanjore in Tamil Nadu, the Villgro fellows logged over 11 hours on public buses in one day. A number of factors contribute to an extremely uncomfortable trip: 80% humidity in 40C weather, many human bodies squeezed into a limited space, general dusty and traffic polluted air, and ultimately too many hours sweating into the same clothes.

At first, I rationalized to myself that the discomfort was only bothering me and in my head because my North American accustomed self was not acclimated yet. But the reality is that time doesn’t bring immunity to the heat, because the other fellows (including a Tamilian) were just as sweaty and uncomfortable as me we began to stick to each other – real fellow bonding. So instead, I sought comfort in the thought of eventually reaching our guest house in Tanjore, where a shower and an A/C room would grant me relief. That was my light at the end of the tunnel.

It occurred to me then: that light at the end of the tunnel is a privilege that 60% of India doesn’t have. It isn’t a real struggle for me to sit through a day of sticky bus rides nor, if extrapolated further, is it really courageous of me to quit my management consulting job for the social sector in India, because at the end of the day (or year), there’s always an emergency eject button. If I were really miserable in my fellowship project and wanted to return to the comfort and luxuries of the developed world, I can opt out of India. In fact for many of us working in the social development sector, this job is a choice that we have made and a choice that we can undo.

Next to my apartment is a construction site, and through the window is the sight of women in colorful saris balancing pans of sand or concrete on their heads transferring building materials to the masons. They work through the day, in the hot, stifling 45C heat of Jamshedpur, hotter than Death Valley in the States. I can safely say that no one gets accustomed to working in this kind of heat, but what choice do they have?

The rural poor don’t have a call option out of these harsh conditions. They don’t have the savings, the education, or the opportunities to opt out of their discomfort and misery. They must continue to toil without the comfort of seeing an end in sight.  The unforgiving harsh conditions of India’s climate and poverty are their everyday reality, but that’s why social entrepreneurship is important. We are working to give them a call option to get out.

The discomforts that sometimes come about while working in the developing rural sector serves as a good reminder of the important potential of the impact achieved by the work that we do. If social enterprises can achieve providing the poor with that light at the end of the tunnel, it will be worth all the sticky bus rides we have to sit through.

Access to healthcare has become the topic du jour thanks to the monumental legislation in progress in the United States. On this side of the world also, healthcare accessibility is also a pressing problem, but on a level that Americans would have a hard time fathoming. Most of the rural population in India are more than 3km from the nearest Public Health Center (PHC) which makes it extremely difficult for them to access health care. Even more concerning is that basic maternal healthcare is still unavailable in many rural villages. The UNDP estimated that 60% of births in India are still unattended by a medical professional.

A number of social enterprises have risen to the challenge and have low-cost models for providing the essential basic healthcare that each person deserves. The Villgro fellows visited with a few during the past month of training (both models are public private partnerships):

• Byrraju Foundation runs a healthcare clinic in each of its adopted villages, where patients can seek diagnosis and treatment for common conditions – e.g., hypertension, diabetes, etc. These patients pay a nominal fee of Rs. 20, which allows them to get a routine check-up from a nurse and a consultation with a retired doctor.

• Health Management and Research Institute (HMRI) runs a mobile clinic program, where once a month, a healthcare van with medical supplies, 2 qualified nurses and pharmacist operate a temporary clinic in the village.
  

  HMRI Mobile Clinic Van

  Patients are provided check-ups, medication, and if necessary, consultation referrals to the nearest PHC. The emphasis is to encourage villagers who normally wouldn’t seek treatment for ailments at the PHC due to the distance to come forth and get treated. Particular emphasis is placed on maternal health, where the local ASHAs are charged with the task to get pregnant women to come to the clinics for monthly check-ups.

Both of these models are providing great services to the rural villages, but it’s still not enough. While visiting HMRI, the district manager told us that these clinics faced a difficulty in getting pregnant mothers to come for check-ups – their husbands often prevented them from going to the clinics. This deeply disturbs me. By denying their wives access to pregnancy check-ups, these husbands are risking the lives of both the mother and child. There are a few reasons, both rational and irrational, for why this is so:

1. 1. Opportunity Cost of Time – going to the clinic, even in the village will take half a day of the mother’s time, which is also equivalent to half a day of wages. Pregnancy check-up is not valued highly enough to justify the lost wages
2. 2. Distrust of Nurses – distrust of examinations that may compromise her modesty is a perceived barrier that is reinforced by cultural tendencies to shelter women from the public arena
3. 3. Undervaluing Women – although less frequently an explicit reason, there is still a systemic undervaluing of a woman’s life that leads a husband to bar his wife from receiving free clinical check-ups. There still persists the idea that a man can remarry easily, or to put it bluntly – she is replaceable

HMRI has counseling and intervention systems in place to deal with the first two reasons. The ASHAs as well as HMRI personnel who are trained will prevail upon the husband to help him understand the value of regular check-ups during pregnancy. Often, it’s merely a lack of awareness and education and the problem can be corrected.

However, the third reason is more insidious and is a cultural problem that many developing countries face. Women still need to be empowered all around the world to be able to exercise their right to seek healthcare, particularly maternal healthcare. The WHO estimated recently that for every 100,000 births, there are 540 maternal mortalities. That is an astoundingly high number, which organizations like HMRI are trying to improve. But unless women can actually access the care made available by HMRI, the high maternal mortality rate will persist. For all the women that HMRI is able help, there are many more who are unknown to HMRI who are prevented from receiving care.  For those women, it’s not the access to healthcare that we need to worry about, but rather the right to access the existing healthcare that we need to fix.

Woman Getting Water from Naandi Plant

Yesterday was World Water day and my recent visits to the field made me pause and think about the tremendous strides that have been made in parts of India to bring clean water to every village. Just last week, the Villgro fellows were in Hyderabad, visiting the rural water plants of Naandi and Byrraju Foundations. Both organizations have similar operations of establishing water filtration plants in rural villages, which provide clean water for consumption at a price of ~Rs. 2 per day for each family (assuming a consumption of 12L).

How it works:

1. Villages demonstrate that they want and can support a water plant by collecting a portion of the funds to contribute to the building costs, which also creates a sense of ownership

2. Naandi and Byrraju Foundations conduct due diligence on the village including a feasibility study and evaluation of need

3. Local panchayats (village heads) allocate land or a building for the installation of the water plant; Naandi and Byrraju work with the community to plan the building to make sure that the community’s needs are incorporated

4. Naandi and Byrraju raise the additional funds for the cost of building and installation of the water filtration system

5. Local people are trained and employed to be the plant supervisors and managers (Naandi’s model has 2 employees per plant vs. 4 employees per Byrraju plant)

6. One employee serves as a sales and awareness building representative, who encourages village households to use the facility

7. Each household pays an initial ~Rs.100 – 150 for a 12L or 20L water jug as a membership fee and then pays a monthly ~Rs. 60 for daily water usage; purchases are tracked with a membership card

8. Operational costs of employee salaries and filtration system maintenance are covered by the pay-per-use model

Best Practices

Visiting both facilities, there were also a few best practices which I think are worth sharing:

1. Instill practices to encourage usage of clean water – Naandi’s membership card has 30 slots for each day of the month. When households come to collect their water each day, the appropriate slot is marked off. Households pay Rs.60 for the monthly card of 30 days and cannot roll over any missed days. According to health studies, 12L is the amount that an average household needs to consume daily, so the objective here is to encourage households to consumer only clean water by forcing them to collect 12L per day or losing that option value.

Byrraju Water Plant

2. Make it a water party - the water plant in Nellutla that we visited was a community center as much as it was a clean water source. The multiple taps and self-service model encouraged villagers to come in the mornings and evenings around the same time to commune as well as to collect their water. The plant was also located right by the village temple. The village also hosted parties around the water plant, since it was centrally located and was a natural gathering place.

3. Increase transparency and accountability of the NGO – at the Nellutla water plant, there was a prominent plaque on the building displaying the donors who contributed to the building. But what was more remarkable was the display of the responsible parties and their contact information. The manager of Naandi’s water project was clearly listed along with his mobile number. Any time that the villagers had a problem with the plant, they knew who to call.

It may sound simple, but it is truly impressive what Naandi and Byrraju have done in just the last few years. Naandi aims to be in 400 villages by the end of the year, which at an estimated 2,000 people per village could potentially impact 800K people! Both Naandi and Byrraju currently operate in Andhra Pradesh, which has one of the country’s greatest needs for clean water. The lessons learned there will certainly need to be brought to other states in India – there are still millions of people waiting for access to clean water.

Last week, the 2010 Villgro fellows took a trip out to Gobichettipalayam, site of Villgro’s pilot project of 10 retail agricultural supplies stores. Located in the Erode district of Tamil Nadu, Gobichettipalayam is the heart of paddy (rice) country. According to Wikipedia, the fertile paddies of Gobi are the cause of the perpetual influx of Tamil dancers and singers who like to film amidst all the lush greenery. The same lush fertile paddies were also the same reason that Villgro decided to pilot its retail store model in Gobi – the local farmers had steady enough crops year round to be willing to try out new agricultural products. Gobi was just ripe for retail agriculture.

The Model

Villgro’s retail model revisits an old-fashioned salesman model that has since gone out of fashion in the West – the Avon model (see model in photo).

In order to address the challenge of reaching small rural farmers, Villgro has come up with the concept of a Village Level Entrepreneur (VLE), who are local farmers and act as the direct sales representatives for Villgro. Each VLE is responsible for 4 villages, and each Villgro store has 5 VLEs, thus each store can reach 20 villages in an are. Like the Avon ladies who go door-to-door to sell cosmetics, the VLEs reach out to each individual farmer in their village to demonstrate and sell crop fertilizers and animal feeds. VLEs help to increase the credibility of the products by providing local endorsements. In addition, each Villgro store conducts pilot tests locally of each product before they are sold. The pilot tests serve to both demonstrate to farmers the value of the fertlizers / feeds, as well as increase the brand visibility. All of these labor and cost intensive measures are necessary in order to overcome the difficulties of building the trust and distribution channels for sales penetration of the rural market.

We visited with several VLEs and farmers who were conducting pilot tests for Villgro products around the Gobi area. They weren’t the most sophisticated business people, but they were financially savvy and understood the cost-benefit analysis behind the fertilizers and feeds that they used. They said that they saw dramatic benefits in terms of their crop yields and dairy production when they used the organic products distributed by Villgro. The farmer pictured below is a woman with 5 acres of land on which she grows 2 seasons of sugarcane and 1 season of rice. She stands amidst a health strong sugarcane crop that is fertilized using one of the organic products tested by Villgro. Even though she had little knowledge of the Villgro brand, she trusts the VLE who sells products to her and above all, she trusts the results that she sees from usage.

Sustainability

It’s undeniable that sustainability is a key issue in this model. Not only are there great risks in the VLE model, the same ones that have led to the negative perceptions of Avon and other pyramid schemes in the US, but there are also risks with the cost-heavy structure of the sales process. However, there are great benefits to be considered as well, which is why Villgro is hoping to roll out 20 more stores within the next year. The benefits are that farmers are finally aware of the products that are available to help them increase their income generation. The other benefit is also the development of a whole new level of entrepreneurs within the villages. VLEs, who undergo significant training and who develop these businesses, may just lead to the next generation of rural innovations. So even though the risks are high, it is a worthy undertaking and if Villgro can succeed to create a rural distribution channel to take it to that last mile, then we all profit.

This article was originally published by the Wall Street Journal on February 24, 2010, “Budget 2010: Will Rural India Get a Fair Deal”. Within the article, Ms. K. Seeta Prabhu of the UNDP in New Delhi raises a number of extremely relevant concerns about the rural poor of India:

• 42% of rural farmers live under the poverty line
• Small acreage farmers compose 84% of total farmers
• Low agricultural productivity
• Lack of permanent shelter
• Lack of electricity and highly inefficient energy usage
• Lack of employment opportunities outside of agriculture

The situation described demands attention. In response, Ms. Prabhu recommends that the government should take action by injecting massive amounts of stimulus money into large public work projects to build crop warehouses and public toilets, to usher in another “Green Revolution”, to incentivize the installation of bio-plant stoves, etc. The litany of public projects that Ms. Prabhu wants the local governments to undertake is daunting. I find no fault with the problems identified and the end objectives cited, but I do doubt the realistic feasibility of the list of public projects. These proposed solutions are in fact not new; they have been discussed by the development community for some time. The problem doesn’t lie in the solution ideas themselves, but in the implementation – what has been coined as the “last mile challenge”. It’s agreed that these solutions need to happen, but how?

In my opinion, the government is not the agent of choice for solving this implementation problem and promoting large public works projects is certainly not going to address the rural poor’s needs. Ms. Prabhu herself points out that past governmental initiatives to create employment have failed:

“The implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Program has offered some succor but due to various constraints, the promised 100 days of employment have been provided only in the state of Rajasthan. In fact, the performance of the program is quite low in the states of Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand, which have large numbers of the rural poor.”

The NREG program is a perfect example of how the government failed to reach the last mile. A Villgro associate recently visited with farmers in the impoverished state of Assam and asked them why they were not in the NREG program, which could have more than doubled their current annual income (~Rs8,400 or $170USD). The Assamese farmers said that they weren’t aware that such a program existed. The local governments in charge of the NREG hadn’t publicized the program and so, those funds disappear off into a vacuum and failed to reach the rural poor. How then, will more public programs and government projects help the rural poor climb out of poverty?

Instead of encouraging more public works programs, Ms. Prabhu would do better to promote additional funding for the existing social entreprises who have made immense progress in helping the rural poor increase their income. In Out of Poverty, Paul Polak specifically discusses how rural innovations such as the treadle pump have helped increase the crop yield and income of small acreage farmers far more more than the first “Green Revolution”. Millions of rural farmers have used drip irrigation systems, treadle pumps, and other agricultural innovations developed by social enterprises to grow off-season crops which generate more income or to grow crops during the dry seasons.

There are also other entreprises that are addressing the other problems faced by the rural poor. In fact, Villgro has incubated a number of enterprises that address each of the problems cited by Ms. Prabhu. Innovations such as the Venus Burner help to make energy more efficient; the Pin Pulverizer is a small grinder that allows farmers to mill their grains before they spoil; Desicrew and other rural BPOs are creating lasting employment for women and youth. The list of rural innovations that are practical solutions addressing the needs of the poor continues to grow and their impact has been dramatic.  Although the implementation is still difficult, social enterprises have devised ingenious methods for distributing and marketing to that last mile. But most importantly, because the profitability and survival of these social enterprises is dependent on the adoption of the product or service, there is a guarantee that these solutions will actually reach the rural poor.

As the rural poor begin to increase their income through growing multiple crops per year (aided by drip irrigation), cost savings on more efficient energy and other activities, they can begin to invest their additional income to build the infrastructures that they value. Education, health, and permanent shelters are the next logical investments that the poor make, but they have to increase their income first in order to get there. If addressing the needs of the rural poor is the aim, Ms. Prabhu would be better served to support budget allocation of funds to existing social enterprises and the development of rural innovations rather than additional government stimulus and public works programs that fail to actually reach that last mile. The rural poor need practical solutions that place chapattis on their plates and rupees in their pockets, not grand social infrastructure schemes and empty government programs. After all, it’s only a fair deal if the rural poor actually benefits from it.