Sagar Gubbi

“The Skoll World Forum seems to be just a gathering of idealists”. This was the comment made by a friend of mine, who is one of those very few in this town not charmed by the Forum yet. Well, he must be cursing himself for having said those words – I ended up lecturing him for half an hour on how ill-informed he was. It is probably true that most of the Forum’s delegates are idealists to some extent. But hey, it’s the Skoll World Forum. The crème de la crème of the Social Enterprise world is here. And most of them work on the ground on a day-to-day basis, at grassroots levels, fighting obstacles, finding practical solutions to problems such as poverty, social injustice and climate change. So, when someone at the Forum says ‘I am changing the world’, you better don’t dismiss it as an idealistic rhetoric. If you don’t believe me, then take a quick glance at the kind of people that I met at the Forum today – Jean-Philippe de Schrevel from Blue Orchard; Chetna Gala Sinha, who runs Mann Deshi Udyogini, a Business School for rural women in India; Peter Scheuch from Ennovent; John Goldstein from Imprint Capital Advisors; Kailash Satyarthi who leads the Global March Against Child Labour; my fellow Social Edge blogger, Kjerstin Erickson from Forge….and many more!

The Skoll World Forum is here! After spending the last 24 hours understanding inflation, money supply and economic growth (I had an exam on Macroeconomics yesterday afternoon), I ran up to Said Business School in the afternoon to collect my Forum registration kit. I had a few fleeting meetings with some of the delegates, including ‘edgy’ Victor. I have known him for nearly 2 years now and I had never met him in person. I simply loved his remark when we met: ‘So there is an actual person behind the blog ‘Sagar Gubbi’! I was off to my exam after that, in Oxford’s Summertown, a bit up north from the city centre. I was done by 4.30 and I rushed back to the city centre, still wearing my sub-fusc (my Oxford academic attire), as I didn’t want to miss any part of the Forum’s opening plenary. Alas I was late, late enough to miss the ‘Taiko Meantime’ musical performance. Nevertheless, I was glad I didn’t miss hearing the evening’s speakers.

It has been more than a year since I started blogging on “The Edge”. It has been an amazing journey, filled with learning, self-discovery and some recognition. This blog has been the medium through which I have expressed my thoughts, described what I have known and learnt about Social Entrepreneurship and profiled inspiring social enterprises. The fact that this blog was hosted on Social Edge pushed me to explore the social enterprise space deeper and thus, helped me emerge with a stronger understanding of the space and with a lot of self-awareness.

Let me enumerate what I have been upto for the past few months. I quit Bosch about 5 months ago, so I am no more a techie (notice the change in my profile on this blog..:-)). I worked as an intern with Unitus for the last 4 months in their Bangalore office, in the team which is exploring non-Microfinance Social Enterprises to partner with. Victor (Social Edge’s director) and this blog played a major role in my landing this internship and I can’t thank them enough. The experience at Unitus was wonderful to say the least and I really wish it wasn’t just four months long.

I have also been running a small Clean Energy and Carbon Credits Investment advisory firm from Bangalore for the last six months, called EcoForge. I started it with a friend of mine and given the current situation of global financial markets, I think we have generated quite a good amount of traction. It has been exciting and frustrating at the same time, though we have learnt a lot about the Clean Energy and Carbon Trading over the last 6 months. My friend will continue running it from Bangalore even after I leave.

The last and probably the most exciting update is that I am gonna be a student again, starting from next week. I move to the UK this weekend, to spend an exciting year studying for an MBA at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. Yay! The School has an exclusive Social Entrepreneurship research centre, which is run by Skoll Foundation and which, as you all know, conducts the Skoll World Forum every year. I can’t wait to get to Oxford, meet the rest of my class (which I hear, attracts a lot of students with Social Enterprise focus) and explore the hundreds of opportunities offered by the School and the University at large. I get to live in the student accommodation offered by the 700-year-old Oriel College, which I hear, has a lively college bar.

The Oxford MBA program is gonna be hectic and Victor and myself thought it would be right to end this blog, as I am already being way too irregular in posting. However, I definitely intend to participate in the discussions on “The Edge” and as I have promised Victor, I intend to be back after my MBA.

I would like to thank all readers of Social Edge for reading my blog, posting comments and also for egging me on to explore this space deeper. Thanks a ton Victor for letting me blog on the Edge. I am sure many of you will be in Oxford/UK sometime during the year (atleast during Skoll World Forum 2009) – so drop me an e-mail (sagargubbi@yahoo.com) and we shall meet up. Even if you are not, drop me an e-mail if I can be of help somehow or if you simply want to discuss something about Social Enterprise, Oxford MBA, EcoForge or a job offer..;-)

Namaste; Goodbye; Auf Wiedersehn; Au Revoir; Adios!

Al Hammond's Transformative Sector Strategies and the six comments can be found here. This blog post is a re-run of my comment on Al's model, which was originally posted on www.nextbillion.net.

When I first read the BoP article by C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart three years ago, it triggered several thoughts in my mind and I remember having endless discussions with my friends on the ideas put forth in the article. Reading through Allen Hammond's posts this week on ‘Transformative Sector Strategies', I have experienced a sense of déjà vu, with a lot of thoughts being triggered in my mind all over again. If the work carried out by people like C.K. Prahalad, Stuart Hart and others was responsible for triggering widespread interest in the BoP, WRI's model, outlined in Al's posts, has the potential to take it to the next level.

If the previous level saw the birth of Social Venture Funds, Social Entrepreneurs and Corporations targeting the BoP, this new model can create financially successful enterprises and corporations making a real world impact on the triple bottom line. The model's focus on developing sector-specific scaling strategies can make BoP businesses more evolved and, in a way, more mainstream.

The rural connectivity example from Vietnam, cited in Al's second post, is a very interesting experiment and the results are very encouraging. A similar pilot project is being tried out in India by Ericsson - the Gramjyoti rural broadband project. It is India's first 3G wireless network (based on Wireless CDMA/HSPA technology) and it is being pilot-tested in 18 villages and 15 small towns near Chennai in Southern India. The results of this pilot are not yet available, but the Gramjyoti business model is quite interesting since Ericsson has tied up with domain experts (Apollo Hospitals, Edurite Technologies and Turner Entertainment) to offer healthcare, e-learning and entertainment services to BoP customers through the Gramjyoti network.

The rural healthcare examples, cited by Al in his third post, also throw up some very interesting results and the combination suggested - franchise pharmacy and remote diagnostics - has a definite potential to bring quality healthcare to the BoP. Bangalore-based Vaatsalya Healthcare has already implemented the distributed system model and works closely with Neurosynaptic (which manufactures "ReMeDi" range of low-cost remote medical diagnostic equipment) to offer healthcare services to its BoP customers.

The challenge now is to put this model into practice worldwide. Perhaps, the most important aspect of scaling up and replicating such sectoral strategies is adaptability. The BoP in each country, probably in each region in a country like India, has its own needs. For example, how to offer affordable internet access to a rural community, where mobile phone penetration is already high? The Wi-Fi service implemented in Vietnam can be a good solution here, if it is packaged as an attractive alternative to mobile phones, by offering Skype-style internet-based calling facility and value-added infotainment services.

Another important aspect that needs to be understood is the interplay between the different sectors. As in the Gramjyoti example, connectivity can be the backbone for other sectors such as healthcare and education. In such a scenario, scaling strategies for these sectors can be evolved in parallel. However, in a BoP community which has no power supply, the energy sector scaling strategy should evolve before connectivity. The energy sector, especially the renewable energy sector, has a lot of potential in itself at the BoP and harnessing the benefits of carbon-trading industry, which is also a market-based solution to a global problem, to subsidize BoP energy offerings, can be a good scaling strategy for this sector.

Transformative sector strategies offer an exciting prospect of rapidly scaling up BoP businesses and I am eager to see these strategies trigger the market to meet the needs of the BoP, not just in connectivity and healthcare, but also in energy, education and agriculture.

The informal sector is never included while evaluating economic parameters of India - such as GDP growth - perhaps because not many of these street vendors pay taxes, though they end up bribing the cops to obtain their ‘licence to sell’ on the streets. What I found especially interesting was the customer base of these street vendors. Though their customers include people from all sections of the society – from the very rich to the urban poor – a vast majority are from the lower middle class and poorer sections. I personally feel that there is a lot to be learnt from these vendors - the businessmen in Mumbai’s informal sector. Agreed that many of them sell counterfeit and smuggled goods but they do understand the base of the pyramid market much better than any multinational company’s sales and marketing departments; they know what sells and what doesn’t among the poor. More importantly, they understand the needs of the poor. Entrepreneurs or corporations targeting the BoP markets will do well to tap into the knowledge base of Mumbai’s (and India’s) informal sector. The knowledge that these guys have, can be valuable in conducting market research, developing products and carrying out marketing campaigns at the BoP. It would be even better if they are engaged as critical links in the value chain, such as franchisees. This could be a win-win situation for both sides and to the country as a whole since such an arrangement would help in formalizing the informal sector.

It’s that time of the year again, when hundreds of social entrepreneurs, development professionals, corporate executives, consultants, policy makers, researchers and students come together at Oxford University’s Said Business School, to discuss some of the world’s most critical social problems and try to find solutions to them through Social Entrepreneurship. The Skoll World Forum 2008 takes place this week and I am disappointed that, for several reasons, I won’t be there. However, I will be keenly following the event, through ‘edgy’ blog posts and updates from our pseudo-undercover journalist, Global X ;-).

This year, the Forum will focus on the theme of ‘Social Entrepreneurship: culture, context and social change’ and aims to examine the role of cultural and contextual issues in the social change process. Sounds exciting, isn’t it? The impressive line-up of discussions and accomplished individuals – check out the Forum’s agenda – is as exciting as the theme itself. Here are a few sessions that I would have personally loved to attend at the Forum this year:

1.      The opening plenary session, which will be addressed by Jeff Skoll, Stephan Chambers, Nobel laureate Jody Williams and a few other distinguished individuals.

2.      The session named ‘Empathy and Ethics: Drivers of our Shifting Culture’, which includes Ashoka CEO Bill Drayton as one of the speakers.

3.      The session named ‘The Internet, Mobile Technology and Cross-cultural Communication’, which has speakers such as our very own ‘edgy’ Victor and Kiva’s Premal Shah.

4.      The Evergreen session on ‘Hybrid and For-profit models’ would have been especially interesting to me, since I believe that these models are the way forward for social enterprises.

5.      The Evergreen sessions on ‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, What’s the Impact of this All’ and ‘Effective Models for Partnership’ seem to be interesting too. The second session has SustainAbility’s John Elkington (I am eagerly awaiting his book, ‘The Power of Unreasonable People’, to be released in India) as one of the speakers.

It would have been interesting to attend one of the ‘Consulting Clinics’ too. And of course, the Closing Plenary session, which will be addressed by Al Gore and Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz, is not to be missed.

It would have been exciting to personally meet several people whom I know only through e-mail interactions. But then, given the optimist that I am, I am sure I will be able to make it to the Forum next year. All of you attending the Forum this year do write to me about your experiences!  

A few weeks ago, Nitin Rao, a friend and a fellow Bangalorean, contacted me to inform about the launch of ‘Engineers for Social Impact’ (E4SI), a unique fellowship program which intends to connect talented Engineering students from some of the best Engineering schools in India with for-profit social enterprises. I should have posted about E4SI a couple of weeks earlier since the application deadline for this program was 2^nd March 2008. Nevertheless, E4SI is an exciting program and I am sure many of you would be interested in reading about it.

Every year, more than 400,000 Engineers graduate from about 3500 Engineering schools in India. However, many of them tend to take up jobs in traditional sectors such as IT and Manufacturing and very few of them are aware of the exciting opportunities that are emerging in the social enterprise sector. E4SI, launched by a group of enthusiastic youngsters led by Nitin, is aimed at addressing the problem of talent crunch among for-profit social enterprises in India. The program is also aimed at providing hands-on social enterprise work experience for current engineering students and it creates awareness of emerging opportunities in the development sector.

E4SI is a highly selective program which accepted applications only from students of a selected group of top Engineering schools (five IITs – Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur and Kharagpur, three NITs – Surathkal, Warangal and Trichy, BITS Pilani and NSIT Delhi) this year. Five fellows will be selected out of the applicants and they will be placed in partner for-profit social enterprises – Vaatsalya Healthcare, SELCO, Ujjivan, Intellecap and iDiscoveri – for internships. The program boasts of a group of accomplished advisers and the selection process will be conducted by a panel of experts with degrees from London School of Economics, MIT, Yale and Michigan.

Nitin, who himself interned with a for-profit education start-up last summer, is yet to graduate from his Engineering program at NIT Surathkal but has already accomplished a lot in the social enterprise sector (check out his amazing profile). I wish him and his team the very best for this initiative.

I know that I haven’t been fair to the blogger in me over the past couple of months. Work hasn’t been kind to me of late and several other activities, though exciting, have kept me busy. I will soon write about these activities in this space. Keep watching!

Anyway, I was at the Fireflies Festival of Sacred Music here in Bangalore last weekend, along with my friends. The dusk-till-dawn festival, into its fifth year now, showcased a wide range of musical talent from India and abroad. Performances at this year’s festival included a folk dance called Puje Kunitha (Worship Dance), Bengali fakiri songs, Indian fusion music from bands such as Esperanto and Swarathma, popular Qawali numbers, Jazz and many more. The festival, which showcased Indian and Western art to an urban crowd (a few Western music lovers were also present), reminded me of a blog topic that I had thought about sometime ago – Rural Tourism.

Tourism in India has been growing at a steady pace over the past few years and every year, thousands of foreign tourists throng India’s tourist destinations to experience ‘Exotic India’. The elegantly done ‘Incredible India’ campaign by the Indian Government’s Tourism Ministry has been successful in attracting more tourists to India. However, Western tourists to India typically visit popular destinations such as Agra (Taj Mahal), Khajuraho, Mysore, Goa, Udaipur etc and the big cities. All these destinations have become quite expensive these days and many of them are not very well maintained. A better way to experience the culture and heritage of India is to visit its rural heartland. The Tourism Ministry realized this and hence, launched the ‘Explore Rural India’ campaign a couple of years ago, in association with UNDP India. The initiative showcases a few selected villages in different states of India, which offer a wholesome village experience, complete with home-stays and cultural shows. In addition to providing a new dimension to Indian tourism, this initiative intends to bring about inclusive tourism and bring economic benefits to rural India.

Of course, rural tourism initiatives will have to try hard to convince a hygiene-conscious Western (and urban Indian) tourist to visit rural India. And there is also the danger of environmental degradation of rural India from tourism. However, ‘ecotourism’ is increasingly becoming popular and several attractive rural tourism packages are being offered nowadays (I have heard about a low-cost rural tourism initiative near Bangalore, which I intend to try out soon). I hope to see many more such initiatives becoming popular in the near future.

The Vaahan is a wonderful initiative since it creates win-win situations for all the stakeholders involved – Bosch has found a new market for its products; rural artisans get access to the latest tools to enhance their skills and products; banks can disburse more loans in rural areas. This is a novel way of market creation at the base of the pyramid and blends well with the Bosch tag line: ‘Invented for Life’!

What is common to all these men and women? They are all successful Micro Entrepreneurs who built sustainable businesses using micro-credit and are also recipients of the 2007 Micro Entrepreneurs Awards presented by Citibank’s Citi Foundation in collaboration with a Delhi-based NGO named Partners in Change. A ceremony to honour the 2007 awardees was held in Mumbai recently.

Since its inception in 2004, the Citi Micro Entrepreneurs Awards program has recognized and awarded several entrepreneurial talents at the base of the pyramid. This year, 11 worthy winners were chosen from an applicant pool of more than 1000 micro entrepreneurs. Women accounted for nearly 50% of all the applicants, indicating micro-credit’s popularity among them. Among the winners, apart from Kusum Tanwar of Delhi, all the others come from semi-urban and rural areas. A press release from the Citi Foundation says: “The awards were classified in three distinct categories- National Winner, National Runner-up and Social Responsibility. Keeping in mind the social, cultural and economic challenges in different parts of the country, awards in each category were presented to winners from four regions- East, West, North and South. Each National Winner of the 2007 Citigroup Micro Entrepreneur Awards received a cash prize of Rs.200,000/-. The National Runners-Up and winners in the Social Responsibility category received prize money of Rs.100,000/- each. NGOs, which nominated the awardees, received a special citation commending their efforts”.

The Citi Micro Entrepreneurs Awards program is a fantastic initiative that encourages entrepreneurship as a driver of social and economic change at the base of the pyramid. The program also provides us with real-life examples to understand the tremendous amount of impact that micro-credit can have at the base of the pyramid.

Here’s wishing everyone a happy holiday season! Merry Christmas!

I will leave you all with this neatly done little green e-book from Morgan Stanley, which describes a few simple, day-to-day disciplines that can help the world tackle climate change!