A particular line from this week's assigned reading “It’s not all about growth for social enterprises” caught my eye which reiterated the primacy of the social ventures in scaling impact and not necessarily gauge growth in terms of traditional metrics used by fast growing startups such as funding raised, people hired, customers acquired or revenue produced. I was immediately reminded of the curious case of Arunachalam Muruganantham, India’s menstrual man & his quest for scaling a social venture aimed at changing the accessibility issues around feminine hygiene products. Though listed as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by TIME magazine in 2014, his story is marked by social ostracization for his indulgence in the taboo topic of menstruation in India.
Shocked at the state of the rags used by his wife during menstruation, he rushed to the city to buy her a sanitary pad only to realize that its cost was approximately 40 times the cost of its raw material, i.e. cotton. Gaining an understanding of the product design, he found that the machine required to break cellulose into pads costed thousands of dollars. Thus, this became his motivation to locally manufacture low cost sanitary napkins for which he persevered for 5 years to create a low-cost production method. I was intrigued whether such a social enterprise format which is based on novel product innovation follows the seven organizational capabilities necessary for scaling social ventures, as was cited in our weekly prescribed readings. Thus, attempting to draw parallels, I was surprised to find that Muruganantham’s social venture exhibited most of them:
- Staffing - Recruited & trained women responsible for the production and sale of sanitary pads to the consumer
- Communicating - Empowered local communities in rural hinterlands to produce the napkins relying solely on word-of-mouth publicity
- Alliance- Building - Venture primarily targeted at NGO and local women’s self-help groups responsible for the on-ground impact of his venture
- Lobbying- Though not directly involved in lobbying, his concerted efforts helped shape the regulatory ecosystem to subsidize sanitary products for low-income women
- Earnings Generation - Each of his low -cost machine converts 3,000 women to pad usage, and provides employment for 10 (producing 200-250 pads a day with a sales prices of £0.025 each)
- Replication- Cautious acceptance gradually leading to ventures in 1300 villages
- Stimulating Market Forces - Introducing barter system in some cases, helping women producers choose own brand name for products
His invention of a low-cost sanitary pad making machine has thus engendered change at the grass-root level by generating awareness about traditional unhygienic practices around menstruation in rural India. His machines can manufacture sanitary pads for less than a third of the cost of commercial pads and have been installed in 23 of the 29 states of India. He is currently planning to expand the production of these machines to 106 nations. His strategic vision is very much in consonance with the prescriptions of the assigned article (referenced above), which is about first establishing proof of the concept and then think in terms of multiplying the impact, not merely focusing on growth of the organization.
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