Reinventing the wheel

The most important challenge with international development is to get the right resources at places where people need them most and to ensure that the model is sustainable. Lack of comprehensive knowledge about ground realities could lead to failure of the model.

Ideas need to come from decentralized sources to get maximum advantage[1]. Instead of having a few intelligent people in a room develop a product and sell to people, modern civilization has reached a stage where it has become mandatory for entrepreneurs to reach out to the target audience to understand the problem statement and come up with effective solutions. The bottom-line is that people will not buy anything that is not useful to them. Design thinking recognizes a need for this bottom-up approach.

A wonderful application of this approach is the concept of Wello water wheel:

[A woman using the Wello WaterWheel. Source: Wello]

Water, transportation and hygiene are constant challenges in northwestern belt of Rural India. Women often own the burden of having to walk up to five miles every day to fetch water.  United Nations has estimated that women in rural India spend about 25 percent of their time each day collecting water[2]. Cynthia Koenig, a social innovator and her team proposed a new way to make this task less difficult and improve the lives of people. They designed a rolling 50-litre cylindrical barrel to roll water from water sources rather than having women carry 10-20 litre containers over the head. This improved the efficiency by 400% whereby one person can now do the work of four people in less than half the time.

[Representation of efficiency of the system. Source: Wello]

Cynthia and her team did not propose this system in a single day. All they wanted is to reduce the water crisis and improve lives of women in Rural India. They used the idea of design thinking to lay out this success story.

The project was the result of a three-step process[3] [4]:

1. Inspiration:

They came out with a clear problem statement after interacting with local women. This step was to understand the problem statement and not come up with solutions.

2. Ideation:

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas" - Linus Pauling

They brainstormed many ideas and eliminated not-so-good ideas to come up with a design that is convenient, hygienic and durable. They created a basic design that could give rise to continuous innovations like utilizing the barrel for energy generation, advertising and so on.

3. Implementation:

They introduced a prototype and gave to sample public to use. They refined the model on receiving continuous feedback from the end-users to ensure that the model is foolproof.

Now that we have seen the benefits of the bottom-up approach, I have a few questions - 

Is a bottom-up approach always a viable option?  What could be the cases where a top-down approach in social entrepreneurship has an upper edge over the bottom -up approach?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Fortune-Bottom-Pyramid-Eradicating/dp/0131467506

[2] http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/learn/en/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABJ41yVClvs

[4] http://wellowater.org/

Public Policy in Action: Sindh Devolved Social Services Program

Public Policy is becoming increasingly important to support Social Entrepreneurial Initiatives and providing critical funding for their growth. Many social organizations, who are achieving concrete results and impact, simply do not get the right environment and supplementary support from the public sector in order to grow and tackle social problems at a large scale. Recognizing this need the Government of Pakistan has established the Sindh Devolved Social Service Program (SDSSP) as an effort to create a favourable environment for the social sector growth.

Sindh is one of the poorest and least developed provinces of Pakistan. The low social indicators of the province are having a serious negative impact on the regional economy and political stability. In response, the provincial Government of Sindh has put a policy framework in the shape of the Sindh Devolved Social Services Program. The program, which is administered by the Provincial Department of Finance, supports greater involvement of community-based organizations (CBOs), nongovernment organizations (NGOs), and the private sector. The objectives of the program are:

1. Further administrative devolution of social services

2. Improve social sector financing and flow of funds

3. Promote participation, linkages, and public accountability

4. Rationalize services and set minimum standards

5. Encourage public-private partnership

For further information about the scope of work, reform process and ongoing activities please visit the following website:

http://www.sdssp.gov.pk/index.htm

The Sindh Devolved Social Services Program made me think about the following questions:

1. Provided the widespread corruption and lack of transparency in the government departments in Pakistan, will this program deliver?

2. What are the accountability and evaluation measures, if any?

3. Will other Provincial Governments follow suit? Especially in Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where social conditions are in dire straits.

4. Should the Federal Government recognize the need and establish a central policy framework to achieve the same objectives, as the SDSSP, at the countrywide level?

Implementing Social Innovations for Development & Growth of BoP Ventures

The operating space of ventures of social enterprise has expanded its domain (Alboher: 2009 New York Times) from merely constituting social sector ventures, to also including the participation of for-profit businesses having ‘social mission’ as the core purpose of their existence. This interesting and emerging development introduces a greater scope for the integration and coordination of activities in the formal and social sector.

Thus, social entrepreneurs are afforded a window of opportunity to act on the implication behind removing the legal distinction between, the incorporation and registration of, the memorandums of association for profit companies and non-government not-for profit entities. The implication of this new development is, market orientated solutions for mobilizing capital in more formally established financial markets can thus be innovated for the purposes of funding capital formation and infrastructural developments targeted at the poorest regions of the world.

This development is based on developing a ‘social venture capital market’ for mobilizing capital from surplus agents to deficit agents pursuant to achieving a social mission. The volumes of capital which are mobilized create a far greater leveraging effect than traditional micro-financing institutions that operate at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

The Human Acumen Fund (http://www.acumenfund.org) is a non-profit social venture capital non-government agency which focuses on financing and consulting social enterprise ventures with the ethos ‘meeting urgent needs with patient capital’ (Case Study: Market Minded Development). Their social innovation is designing investment vehicles for small cap start ventures that cannot service debt under the terms of established merchant banks, as these ventures need patient financiers to grow. Social venture capital markets could therefore spark the next Greenback revolution in the history of usury and its impact on social change.

A Thought on Sustainability

For pundits and apprentices alike, social innovation requires clarity on the issue of sustainability. In order to add social value or have a positive social change, an innovation must observe the triple bottom line of financial, social and environmental sustainability. A myriad of examples are out there of innovations that appear to add social value but in the long run they do not: subprime mortgages, easy access to employment in fast-food restaurants, and corn-based ethanol. The way to test their sustainability is to project an innovation to a global dimension and conduct a cost-benefit analysis of its consequences: recession, obesity, and high price of a staple food like corn which feeds tens of millions south of Rio Grande. The fact that hundreds of millions of people in developed countries have a very comfortable lifestyle and human development indicators show significant progress over the course of a century, does not imply that this development has been achieved in a sustainable manner. In fact, it hasn't: if every human being on the planet had consumption habits as Americans (or rich people around the world, for the matter), we would need 5.4 planets Earth to support our lifestyle (National Geographic State of the Earth 2010, p. 2). [For more on the human footprint on the planet, see here] Therefore, much of the social and technical innovation that has thrusted wealthy nations to improve their standards of living has come at a cost to everyone living in the planet. So far, the problem is not as grave as it will be when China and India -a third of the world's population- reach such levels of consumption. At the pace they have been growing this is expected to happen in the coming decades. This problem adds a constraint to social entrepreneurship, as it does not suffice to add social value, but it must be maintained in the long run as well. Do the test yourself: take any innovation, project its scalability at a global level, and if its financial, social or environmental costs exceed its benefits, then it may need a bit more thinking.