I was not a great fan of Self Help Groups (SHG) when I first heard about it. I thought the ultimate result of their borrowings without collateral just put them deeper in to debt. I was wrong. The women in these groups knew what they were doing. I came to accept the fact that they needed to spend for their child’s wedding or for other rituals. A lot of the expenditure they made seemed unproductive to me. But I learnt that everyone must hold their head up in the community they live in and therefore some of these expenses were necessary.

More than that the biggest thing to change my mind was when Rosie, my assistant in field work at Melur, Madurai, pointed out to me during a particularly noisy SHG meeting that the women were talking. I could see that and hear it very well. Then she went on to explain, that these women were talking and expressing themselves not just in the SHG meetings but also during the panchayat meetings and their voice was getting more strident as their economic power in the household increased. If our country has to regain its former greatness it will be by the strength of our women.

Artificial Insemination technology that BAIF introduced and spread throughoutt India (see http://dev.ikf.in/baif/about_us_about_baif.asp)  has gone towards improving cattle livestock, improving milk yields and better remunerations for farmers. There was another technology breakthrough implementation that gave dairy farmers raised incomes and better input quality control for the milk processing plants.

A small company called Shree Kamadhenu Electronics Pvt. Ltd. pioneered the technology and implementation of Milk Collection Systems.

“Shree Kamdhenu Electronics Pvt. Ltd. (INDIA) provides one stop solutions to the dairy sector Since 1996 under the brand name ‘AKASHGANGA‘ ™. We offer a total integrated solution for Automatic Milk Collection Systems (AMCS). More than 3,252 AMCS units are already installed. Simple, but appropriate solutions to facilitate timely collection of milk and thereby generating higher earnings for the rural milk producers by introducing Quantity, Quality based Payment System for the Milk Producers.”

(see http://akashganga.in/index.html)

The company is being modest on its own web site. The really important piece of technology they introduced was a means of quickly measuring the % of fat in the milk brought to the collection centre by the farmer.

This measurement when integrated with the existing Automatic Milk Collection System  gave farmers more transparency, better incomes (higher milk fat means higher earnings) and better quality control for the milk processing plant. The system helped remove the practice of dilution of milk with water practiced by farmers and rewarded them for offering a better product.

“One key operation is to measure/weigh milk, indicate fat percentage, price payable to the supplier, indicate customer number, date-time and session of supply through a printout. For the record of Village Cooperative, a report is generated at the end of each session containing customer  number, milk  procured in litres fat content, amount payable to each customer separately for Cow milk and Buffalo milk. This report also contains additional feature to print total weight and average fat for Cow milk and Buffalo milk separately. Every ten days customer wise ledger containing information on total milk supplied and the amount payable to the customer for the period is generated.”

(see http://akashganga.in/KeyBenefits.htm)

One small company with a daily impact on a very large number of small dairy farmers.

In this chapter, Gopinath dabbles in politics by running for the position of MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly). This development is in some ways consistent with what the reader learns of Gopinath in previous chapters.

Firstly, in Chapter 3, Gopinath mentions that he is becoming increasingly well-known, both because of his silkworm and other businesses, and because he wins the Rolex Award for Enterprise. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) asks him to be the president of the party in Hassan.

Secondly, in my post on Chapter 3 I mentioned an incident when Gopinath offers help even to those who ransack his farm. In this incident, Gopinath displays an ability to stand up to people when he looks the marauders in the eye, raising his voice but nevertheless reasoning with them. In this chapter Gopinath both argues with Vajpayee at a dinner attended by leaders of the state BJP, and with Deve Gowda, a powerful politician. In the latter incident, Deve Gowda violates the election code of conduct by arriving to speak around 20 minutes early, with a procession and drums. Gopinath, incensed at Deve Gowda cutting into his time, refuses to call off or even temporarily stop his meeting.  Gopinath eventually prevails.

As early as Chapter 2, Gopinath also displays his skill in fundraising. He starts farming on 30 acres of land, 20 of which belong to his uncles. He tells his uncles that he will pay them a much higher amount than they would get by selling the land, and higher interest than that offered by the banks, but from the sale of his crop (in the future). In this chapter, Gopinath faces a much larger fundraising challenge when he has to organize a rally for the visiting BJP leader, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He realizes that if he organizes the rally using his own funds he will become bankrupt, and decides instead to publicize the function through local artists, traders and contractors. Yet the reader can question the ethicality of this decision, as it is likely that many of the traders and contractors invested in Gopinath in the hope that if he came to power, he would “reward” them later with development contracts.

Gopinath says that he did not have time at that moment to consider the ethicality of his decision.  However, another ethical decision that he struggles with in this chapter and resolves somewhat more satisfactorily is over whether to represent a party with communal overtones.  Gopinath joins the BJP only when he is assured by the party that they are a separate and independent identity from the communal RSS, and that there will be no interference in his functioning.

Gopinath’s strong sense of equality, instilled in him both by his father and his experience in the army, is evident in this chapter not only in his statement that, “…there is only one caste, one community, and one religion: of being an Indian,” but also in his decision to contest from the agrarian constituency of Gadsi, rather than from the cities of Bengaluru or Hassan where he would win votes on the basis of his caste.  There is also an incident where party workers and leaders gather on his farm, and refuse to eat the food cooked by Raju because he belongs to the scheduled castes. Gopinath asks Raju to serve him first, and everyone else follows.

Nevertheless, at this point in the book, it is difficult to discern a clear progression in the opportunities that Gopinath chooses to pursue.  Although he loses the election, it seems just as feasible that had he won, he would have become a politician as the founder of Air Deccan.  This led me to think about entrepreneurship education, and the theories behind it.  One theory could be that some people are “born entrepreneurs,” and that entrepreneurship education will uncover these “hidden” entrepreneurs.  Another theory could be that entrepreneurship education exists to educate everyone on entrepreneurship as a possible career option.  For people like Gopinath, who seem to be interested in several career paths, entrepreneurship education could steer them in the direction, or at least make them aware, of entrepreneurship as one amongst these options.

Ayllu (pronounced ‘i-you’) started out with the idea of “spreading social enterprise through franchising” but as the Founder Melissa Richer was doing the research to start the organization she noticed that everyone she was interviewing was more interested in the data she collected than the concept she was researching.  Based on this experience she decided to shift her focus toward the company’s current mission which is to “provide updated, centralized information to help social enterprises, investors, and supporters learn from each other so that decisions can be made and scale achieved more easily, quickly, and cheaply”.

The choice Ayllu made to switch missions has proven to be extremely beneficial to the social enterprise industry as they have garnered support from NextBillion, OpenAction, IRIS, GIIRS, Acumen Fund, the William Davidson Institute, Santa Clara University, and Artemisia International to develop iuMap – the “public face” of Ayllu’s internal database.  It is currently the world’s largest directory of market solutions to poverty listing the majority of the world’s social enterprises (450 enterprises in 65+ developing countries), and has been visited by users in 133 countries!  Ayllu envisions it as a valuable resource for practitioners, social entrepreneurs, funders (investors and donors), students, academics and generally those interested in social enterprise.

Two of the latest iuMap features include an ability to filter the map based on location, issue, legal structure, and supporters and ten sector pages with reports, case studies, commonly used metrics for the sector, twitter feeds from the sector, all the businesses they have listed, and links to other online resources.  In the next few months Ayllu will release an Energy Map focused on social enterprises delivering energy solutions to the poor by surveying 60+ enterprises and an India Map focused on social enterprises in India facing enormous growth challenges by surveying 50+ enterprises.

Ayllu has been utilizing the help from any volunteers who want to submit enterprises missing from their database.  This has been fairly successful allowing them to grow by 50% in the last few months.  They are still encouraging submissions which you can do here.  Feel free to contribute because Ayllu says “the more we map, the more we’ll share.”  They have hopes that iuMap will one day by be a tool for accessing data and analysis like best practices, trends, connections, and benchmarks.  The growth of this company and tool has been remarkable to witness and it has come just at the right time.

You can see this link for a rundown of the new iuMap features as well as links to their partners and a video explaining how everything works.  Check it out today!

Lindsay Clinton of Beyond Profit magazine offers her thoughts in her recent article on the GOOD Business website. To find out what makes India tick, click here.

This was a good thing, because it recongized that ‘a system focused on profit maximization’ to the exclusion of all else was destined to explode.’ The crisis lead to several positive results for the social entrepreneurship sector: it opened up the way for impact investing, social entrepreneurs challenge singular goals and advocated balanced scorecards, governments and large corporations are now setting out to learn from the sector, and help build it, and lastly there is increased interest in working in the sector, in addition to interest from business schools and universities.

Tell us what you think of Rob Schwartz’s take on this. What do you think was the most important thing to happen to the sector this decade?

Atleast that is the suggestion made by Atreya Rayaprolu and Sree Kumar, in their article “Are Investors Ready to Ride the Third Wave of Indian Microfinance?” In their article the authors suggest that because so much attention has been paid to the sector during this crisis, there is a growing recognition of the need for balance between profitability and impact. Because of the pressures excerted by the system, the authors suggest that the third wave of microfinance will see a growth in client-centric innovations. This is unlike the earlier waves, where the NGOs and investors respectively were centric to the microfianance model.

The authors are of the opinion that this model will ultimately lead to further opporunities for investors, for whom the third wave presents several attractive investment opportunities.

Read the entire article here.

Read the entire article here.

The case study takes a look at the model pioneered by KaBOOM!, a US based non-profit that is dedicated to building playgrounds across the United States. After several years of successful growth, KaBOOM! saw that real growth would come not just by engaging with communities directly, but to take their model online. The internet held the ability to help them build hundreds of thousands of playgrounds across the country. The did this by putting their resources online so that communities could organize themselves and build their own playgrounds using free resources and guidenlines avialable on the KaBOOM! website.

The KaBOOM! example holds lessons for other social businesses too, particularly those focused on delivering a service. Read the entire case study here.

In their paper, “Freeing the Social Entrepreneur,” authors Chantal Laurie Below and Kimberly Dasher Tripp present steps that a social enterpreneur must take to create a strong team as well as five leadership roles that an organization must have for it to be successful in its early stage of development. They cite the example of Jordan Kassalow of VisionSpring to highlight their case.

Read the entire article here.