Archive for June, 2009

I have been doing a lot of listening, watching, and thinking lately. Tom Friedman wrote in his June 17 column, “During the past eight years, in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt, spaces were opened for more democratic elections. Good news. Unfortunately, the groups that had the most grass-roots support and mobilization capabilities — and the most energized supporters — to take advantage of this new space were the Islamists. That is, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, the various Sunni and Shiite Islamist parties in Iraq and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The centrist mainstream was nowhere.”

But now, in the past few weeks, “Hezbollah was defeated in the Lebanese elections. Hamas is facing an energized Fatah in the West Bank and is increasingly unpopular in Gaza. Iraqi Sunnis have ousted the jihadists thanks to the tribal Awakening movement, while the biggest pro-Iranian party in Iraq got trounced in the recent provincial runoff. And in Iran, millions of Iranians starving for more freedom rallied to the presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, forcing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to steal the election. (If he really won the Iranian election, as Ahmadinejad claims, by a 2-to-1 margin, wouldn’t he invite the whole world in to recount the votes? Why hasn’t he?)” » Continue reading “The Movement For Change”

Mirakle Couriers

We’ve recently forged a relationship with a Mumbai radio station (Radio One on 94.3) to promote awareness of social enterprise and social entrepreneurs.  On Thursday nights, the radio jockey Miss Malini will be doing short interviews with local social entrepreneurs.  Malini is using entrepreneurs that Beyond Profit has covered or that our parent company Intellecap found through our social enterprise sector-building event, Sankalp. Unltd India, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs in India, is also supporting this initiative.

Malini did the first short segment last Thursday.  The interview was with Dhruv Lakra, founder of Mirakle Couriers, a courier company that employs disadvantaged people from the deaf community.  Dhruv is a recent graduate of Oxford’s Said Business School, a 2008 Skoll Scholar, and a 2009 Echoing Green fellow.  We included Dhruv in the first issue of Beyond Profit.

LISTEN to Dhruv Lakra on Radio One.

Radio One plans to do a short segments on social entrepreneurs for the next few weeks!  Tune in tonight at 10 PM to hear from Inir Pinheiro founder of the social enterprise Grassroutes.

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.” -Robert F. Kennedy

Last weekend, I came across a few young people who, like Robert Kennedy, believe that through small acts, they can redefine this generation. In India, a country still riddled by the barnacles of a caste system unwilling to let go, seeing young people working together across class to make change proffered hope for a new India.

While waiting for the monsoon to arrive in an auditorium in Mumbai, I met a series of social entrepreneurs, part of Ashoka’s Youth Venture program, who have taken on the responsibility to change our world, with perseverance and steady energy.

Eighteen year old Shubhangi has started an initiative to inform her community about child sexual abuse. Monika is 15, and raising awareness of substance addiction among young people in her neighborhood. Prabal has started an alternative magazine called SLAP. Prashant is sending drop-outs back to school.

Each of these projects is led by a young person (15-24) and has produced measurable results. 18 conversations about alcohol abuse. 12 drop outs re-enrolled in school. 4 girls returned to school.

As I watched the video about a young woman helping send girls back to school, I caught myself in a wave of cynicism. Four girls, I thought. It’s quite a small number. But then, I tried to imagine the girls. In a classroom. Learning. Playing. Reading aloud. Proving their point. » Continue reading “Blurring Social Divides”

In the last decade, the sheer size of the lower-income market has enticed multi-national companies and investors to search for ways to reach this customer base.  While some have made successful forays into this market—for example, microfinance or small unit products—there is a new set of emerging enterprises being shaped through disruptive innovation.  These innovative products and services not only create consumption, but also create entirely new markets.  Hari Nair, partner at Innosight Ventures, explains his company’s philosophy, and explains how innovations that are smaller, cheaper and simpler than the market leaders can often reshape a market.

Disruptive innovations are all around us, either creating new markets or challenging entrenched incumbent technologies or products.   Internet blogs for example have challenged mainstream media like newspapers and magazines, while Apple with its Ipod or Nintendo with its Wii game console has engaged a large group of otherwise non-consumers into purchasing music and video games.  While disruptive innovations are seen and used at all levels of the market spectrum, their focus around closely meeting consumer needs via combinations of customized functionality, specifications, and higher affordability, make it a valuable tool in creating products and services that connect with the circumstances of members of the lower-income population. Typically, with less emphasis on technology and more concentration on situational applications, they help shape meaningful solutions that offer convenience, affordability, access, and utility to lower socioeconomic groups that current alternatives may not provide. » Continue reading “Shaping For-Profit Enterprises Through Disruptive Innovation”

In the first chapter of the new World Bank book, Moving Out of Poverty: Success from the Bottom Up, the authors posit a thought-provoking question: Is being poor like being left handed, or like having a cold?  In other words, is being poor a characteristic that one is born with, an inescapable part of one’s identity?  Or, is it conditional, a short-term situation defined by experience?   We tried to find out the answer to this question and more in a conversation with Ms. Deepa Narayan, the lead author of the book.

There is a misconception that poor people are either complacent, or trapped by the culture around them. Some think, if they really wanted to move up and out, they would.  The foremost principle in this new study of 60,000 poor people, finds that not only are the poor not trapped in a culture of poverty, they actually fall into it nearly as often as they fall out of it. However, that’s not always clear by the way poverty figures are reported. Narayan explains, “The focus is always on average poverty numbers. If you read any newspaper, it will talk about the fall of average poverty rates. That’s fine, but it’s misleading to make policy based on these figures.”

In the book, Narayan points to one of their sample communities for further illustration.  In Malawi a community registered a marginal increase in net poverty of less than 1%. Sounds not so bad, right?  However, upon closer inspection, they found that while 10.2% of all Malawi households had moved out of poverty, nearly 10.6% of households fell into poverty.  The “fallers” cancelled out any progress made by the movers.  Being aware of this fluidity is important, Narayan says, for policy making.

» Continue reading “Is Being Poor like Being Left-Handed, or Like Having a Cold?”

I think we can all agree on the merits of market-based solutions. They have attracted strong interest in the campaign against global poverty. They give low-income people better access to socially beneficial products and services. These services genuinely and directly improve the quality of life and livelihood for the poor. And the list could continue…

After recently reading Monitor’s “Emerging Markets, Emerging Models” Report, I was particularly taken by the concept of paraskilling. It was new to me, and it really struck a chord!

Essentially, paraskilling is when a service or a process is reengineered such that it can be performed by much lower-skilled workers. Tasks are disaggregated, simplified, standardized, and broken into discreet parts. Workers without specialized qualification can perform these tasks on a high-volume basis many times per shift or per day.

My initial reaction was, “oh yeah, you go get ‘em” paraskilling.  I thought it a savior, that which we had all been waiting for. It could easily be applicable to healthcare, education, financial services. » Continue reading “Impersonal Education?”

If you are at all interested in the “development conversation,” you could not have missed the Canadian doubles match that was played last week between Dambisa Moyo and William Easterly on one side versus Jeffrey Sachs on the other. It has been more exciting than watching Roger Federer win his first French Open (albeit without defeating Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros) and tie Pete Sampras’s record of 14 majors. What started out as a critique of Dambisa Moyo and her new book “Dead Aid” by Jeffrey Sachs morphed into a full-on war – Jeffrey Sachs and the pro-aid establishment vs. William Easterly and the aid skeptics. (Somehow, Moyo and her book have been lost in the fray.) It started on the Huffington Post but crept into mainstream media and even Twitter!

These two scholars have tried to make the aid debate black and white.  If you are pro-aid, you are somehow painted as a rent-seeking idealist (ironic, I know). If you are against it, you somehow want Africa to starve, both literally and metaphorically. But the debate around aid needs to be viewed on a spectrum: there is more to this than meets the eye. In fact, although aid has its obvious shortfalls, it broadly works: poverty would be higher in the absence of aid. We must look beyond reasons why aid has failed to reasons why aid has not worked better. » Continue reading “A Third Way”

“When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.

Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.”

- New York Times, May 29, 2009

We like the idea but have doubts about whether it will have a lasting effect. We do believe that there is increasing interest in business and business leaders being more ethical, but we wonder if these graduates will take this oath seriously (how many people do you know that adhere to university honor codes?) and why is it something only 20 percent of students chose to adopt. Have you read the article?

Given the current financial landscape and ethical problems that have come to light recently in mainstream business, will this concept of “good” business take off? Perhaps most importantly, do you think that it is GENUINE?

For an interesting and pointed perspective on the role of top business school grads in the global financial crisis, click here.