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?

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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.

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.