Of this week’s
readings, the piece by Hugh Whalan, “How Misinformed Ideas About Profit Are
Holding Back the World’s Poor,” struck me as particularly interesting in light
of this past week’s lectures and their focus on the importance of designing and
innovating for an audience or target demographic. Germane, too, is Dan
Lockton’s guest lecture from Thursday 07 September, when he spoke about how imaginaries govern our relationship with
the world around us and how perception is often far more important to our
understanding than is reality. This seems a fortuitous intersection of ideas
because Whalan makes a compelling case¾as does his company’s growth and social impact profile over
the past couple of years¾that a
profitable business and a positive social force need not be mutually exclusive
concepts.
What Whalan’s
examples show has been the focus of Lockton and Dr. Zak’s lectures over the
past three class meetings. The strategies of these companies, and perhaps their
successes, seem directly attributable to their embrace of geographic and
population-governed product diversity. Jamii Bora, the aforementioned Kenyan
microfinancier, was created specifically for its target demographic, a customer
base of now over 360,000 Kenyans who previously had no access to banking and
have since been given the opportunity to serve as agents in the improvement of
their lives rather than merely recipients of well-meaning aid.[1]
The bank’s founder, Ingrid Munro, talked about the access to financial services
as being rungs on a proverbial ladder out of poverty; amongst the original 50
clients of Jamii Bora are former beggars who now run their own businesses and
employ others. As a consequence of the very visible success of the bank’s
customers, the organization has experienced such growth since Whalan’s article
that they’ve announced that the bank will continue their shift from a strictly
mobile model to having “fully-fledged bank branches” as well as expand outside
of Kenya.[2]
This is, arguably, directly attributable to their focus on the needs of their
population¾unlike Coca-Cola or Diageo, though, which
are able to enter the market from an external position of power and tailor a
beverage to suit a resource and taste, the success of Jamii Bora and PEGAfrica
arises from their ability to function within localized economies (within Kenya
and Ghana, respectively) with specific needs.
This is where those
imaginaries live. Whalan and Munro
each identified a specific problem and set about finding a solution that would
work specifically for and within the population in which they had identified
the problem. This doesn’t seem like a spectacular leap of logical reasoning,
but one can find dozens (if not hundreds, or even thousands) of examples of
organizations and efforts that have been created in order to address a problem
who set about to do so by imposing their solution onto the population
experiencing the problem. I would argue that this mindset, and not whether a
solution comes from the for profit or non-profit side of the economic aisle, is
what makes the difference when it comes to success or failure. The people that
Whalan and Munro have assisted have been given agency for their own success.
They have been given access to technology or systems previously unavailable to
them, but by means that make sense for them both socially and economically. They
are not trying to change the people; they are changing what the people have the
means to do. And that might make all the difference.
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