"Scaling" - Social Entrepreneur's Dream and Conundrum

In a 2008 article in the Forbes magazine, Dr. Fazel Hasan Abed, the founder of world’s largest not-for-profit social venture BRAC (earlier Bangladesh Rural Advancement Program), had noted, "If you want to do significant work, you have to be large. Otherwise we'd be tinkering around on the periphery."  

This imperative to scale up and become large is a dominant narrative in the field of social entrepreneurship. In Indian context, the need to have large scale solutions is even more relevant since as a large and diverse country, the social problems too are of humongous scale, e.g.,

·         about 280mn people live below the official poverty line;

·         about 92% workforce is in informal sector lacking adequate wages, regular employment and social security;

·         out of the 700million employable workforce, only 5.4% have received any kind of formal or informal vocational training;

·         according to Census 2011, about 84million children in the 5-17yr age-group don’t go to school;

·         about 48million Indian children are stunted due to malnutrition;

·         for about 830 million rural population there are only about 5,300 rural hospitals and 25,000 Primary Health Centers;

·         despite the efforts by the government, at least 31million households do not have access to electricity, and so on.

In such a scenario, the need to scale a proven solution seems obvious. For instance, if more poor have access to affordable clean drinking water, it will significantly bring down instances of illness, increase saving from healthcare costs, and help increasing their income; or, if more farmers have access to timely market information, they will be able to make more remunerative choices for crops.

However, the relationship between scaling up and social impact is not always as simple and straightforward as it seems. This is more so given the multiplicity of factors which define the terrain of social entrepreneurship in India. For instance:

1.       Size and diversity: The size and diversity of the country makes it virtually impossible for a single venture or solution to scale up across the country. Nachiket Mor (then with ICICI Foundation) had once said that “for a country like India, even a pilot should at least have a sample size of 1.5 million.” Social ventures don’t possess the resources and outreach which would be required to achieve scale of this magnitude.

Moreover, often the same solution may not match the context and constraints of the unevenly distributed diversity of India. Different regions of the country speak different languages, follow different belief and lifestyles, are subjected to different state laws, are at different levels of development, and have different aspirations and needs, etc. Addressing the same social need in such diverse settings requires considerable customization to local context, which may not be always possible - either due to resources, or due to the very nature of solution.

2.       Coexisting social problems: In many market segments and communities, often any problems coexist for the same set of people. For instance, the same community of poor often have concurrent problems of unemployment, lack of access to formal credit, large incidences of ill-health and malnutrition, poor access to basic amenities such as water and electricity, etc. Similarly, the same set of small and marginal farmers may lack access to water, credit for inputs, knowledge of better agricultural techniques, more remunerative markets, etc. Solving only one of these problems, even on a large scale, without considering others will have limited social impact on the community.

3.       Interrelated Issues: What adds to the complexity is that several of these problems not only coexist, but are also interrelated. Often the perceived problem is just a symptom of many underlying interconnected problems, and the success of the solution depends on the resolution of these underlying issues. For instance, in the above example, access to clean drinking water may bring down health-related expenditure of the poor, but it may still not have any substantial impact on their income and well-being if they lack marketable skills or access to labour market, or if the labour market itself is exploitative.

4.       Context-specificity: Not all innovative solutions to social problems are scalable – or even need to be scaled. Many social problems are so localized and context-specific to a specific community that the effective innovations to solve them rely largely on local resources, local knowledge and the specific constraints and enablers in which they exist.

Such localized and small, but effective, innovations also raise an important issue about the very concept of scaling – namely, who defines the scale? whose need is it?  The concept of scale is a relative one, and mostly assessed and decided by people who are not the recipients of the social benefit of the innovation, viz. the policy makers, academics writing a case on the venture, foundations who recognize and award the social ventures, funders and investors, or the social entrepreneurs themselves. It is useful to think of the meaning of the scale from the perspective of the beneficiary/ customer, say a villager whose entire existence is confined within a radius of about 100kms.

Clearly, in the social entrepreneurial context, scaling has many nuances and manifestations. Scaling is about scaling the social impact - which may or may not be achieved by scaling up the venture.

Scaling of the impact may mean different things to different social ventures. Depending on the nature of problems they address and the communities they serve, social ventures use different strategies to scale their impact. For a venture which offers an affordable and socially useful product such as water filters or solar lanterns, successful scaling would entail reaching the product to more people in new markets and regions. If, on the other hand, the mission of the venture is to provide services such as maternal healthcare to rural women, scaling would also involve greater inclusiveness and care. For social ventures aiming at systemic social change, larger impact can be achieved only when policy makers and citizens buy-in into "the idea”. Some ventures partner with other organizations to replicate their innovative solutions to other regions, while others scale their impact by servicing multiple needs of the same community… and so on.

Such diversity of option to “scale the impact” also provides an array of choices to the social entrepreneurs, and the strategies they can use to strengthen their mission for social change…

…what are the different strategies? Well, that is another story to come…