Incorporating Sustainability into Management Education

Some thoughts, in no specific order:

Make socio-environmental concerns and ethical fibre a non-negotiable part of admissions filter. If the primary reason why a student is joining an MBA course is to land up with a lucrative job, mere two years of teaching cannot change that mindset.

Review program syllabi and course structure to align them to sustainability goals. For instance, a large number of courses in the management school syllabi focus on enhancing and managing “financial wealth”. This focus needs to be balanced by (1) highlighting the positive or negative impact the financial wealth creation had on society and environment, and (2) with equal number of courses (if not more) which focus on enhancing “social capital” and ”environmental capital”.

One of the reasons, perhaps, why students fail to appreciate the socio-environmental issues as impacting businesses, is because there are very few academic social science inputs in the course-work. While “Economics” (which provides a grounding in enhancing financial wealth creation) is taught, there is no “social science” dept., which provides a grounding in subjects like Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, etc. This is particularly important in India, where increasingly most students come with a science/ engineering degrees, and increasingly solving business problems requires grounding in social science disciplines.

Learning happens not just in classrooms, but also through living experience in the campus. What students see around them, in terms of how the institute is managed, can be a powerful learning message. Therefore, if the institutes themselves use green technology (solar power, rainwater harvesting, etc.) and recycle paper, books, etc., that itself will be teaching sustainability by example.

Similarly, the institutes can themselves become example of “inclusive development” by promoting positive discrimination in their internal practices.

Management schools can run allied community and environment-based programs, and make engagement by students a part of learning (perhaps evaluation, too) for the students.

Introduce compulsory internship with a social/development sector organization part of the program structure. This would expose them to other options for careers which are more inclusive in approach and focus.

WomenChangeMaker Fellowship 2012

WomenChangeMakers Fellowship focuses on identifying, supporting and connecting social entrepreneurs who head established, successful organizations that work for women’s empowerment, address systemic gender inequalities and positively transform society. WomenChangeMakers provides its fellows with access to professional resources and partners (E.g. consultancies and training by Booz & Co., Mercuri Urval, Ogilvy and others); with financial support (e.g. a yearly stipend over the three-year support cycle) and with connections (e.g. fellowship, mentorship, partnerships and attendance to key professional meetings), with the goal to enable social entrepreneurs to scale up and to replicate their projects and, ultimately, to increase their impact. For more information, please visit www.womenchangemakers.org.

The first two WomenChangeMakers’ Fellows were selected in Brazil in 2011.

We are now seeking nominations from India and would like you to recommend suitable candidates you think will meet our criteria. These are (all inclusive):

Women’s empowerment and progress: candidates head a innovative and confirmed project for the empowerment women, creating an enabling environment and/or lifting the barriers to women’s emancipation; they are active in one of the following areas: access to education and training; access to health care or improvement of health services for women; promotion of women’s social and political leadership; protection of women’s dignity and integrity and prevention of sexual and other forms of targeted violence; access to economic independence and empowerment.

Inflection point: candidates are at an inflection point, that is, their programs have been proven and tested as successful and efficient. They are at a level where they have a need to scale or replicate and grow. The selected fellows have been awarded recognition by cornerstone institutions in the field of social entrepreneurship, including Ashoka, the Schwab Foundation, the Skoll Foundation, Avina etc.

Systemic change: project ideas address the root causes of targeted problems, rather than its symptoms. They have a strong, systemic impact demonstrated by the number of women’s lives changed, in a durable way; as well as an impact on legislation at regional, national or international levels. At the same time, they should prove to have had an impact in the collective mind and social doings of the communities they act upon.

Entrepreneurship: WCM looks for individuals with a proven track record of entrepreneurship, a vision and the determination to reach it by any means.

Leadership: WCM identifies role models for their communities. Social entrepreneurs empower people in their networks to become changemakers.

Personal values are measured based on the deep and consistent commitment to equal rights and opportunities between men and women.

Ethical fibre and integrity are investigated through thorough due diligence and evaluation of entrepreneurs' track record.

Independence from government and secularity.

Please send your nominations to the devashri.mukherjee [at] gmail.com by November 30th, 2011.

Also, do pass the nomination letter around to appropriate networks and persons. I thank you very much in advance for your support and remain at your service for further information.

With Best Regards,

Devashri


Devashri Mukherjee
Consultant India
WomenChangeMakers
Mob. +91-9 8 1 9 7 0 7 9 6 0
Skype: devashrimukherjee

Grassroutes: Developing Villages through Rural Tourism

When OutlookBusiness covered Grassroutes - a rural tourism venture founded by an XIM, Bhubneshwar graduate, Inir Pinheiro - it desicribed it as:

"The venture, named Grassroutes, hopes to transform nondescript villages, near the metros, into viable tourist destinations; viable for him and beneficial to the villagers with increased livelihood opportunities."

from small beginnings... what makes a social entrepreneur?

Ever since, I got interested in the field of Social Entrepreneurship (which is quite recent in life), I was fascinated by the small beginnings from where some of the life/world-changing social ventures started.

Describing the beginning of SEWA, Ela Bhatt once wrote:

"In 1971, migrant women working as cart-pullers in the city’s cloth market came to me in TLA, where I had started my work life working for textile mill workers of Ahmedabad. The women who lived on the footpath, were seeking help for better living conditions. Next month came the head loader women of the same cloth market, feeling agitated about very low rates of payment (30 paise per trip carrying the bale of cloth from a wholesaler to a retailer). They felt exploited by the traders. Then followed the used garment dealer women in search of credit facility... That was 1971. Some of these urban, poor, self- employed women workers came to the meeting that I called in a public garden where we formed our trade union (1972). We called it the Self Employed Women’s Association, SEWA."

Similarly, David Bornstein described how Grameen Bank was born out of Mohammad Yunus’s chance meeting with Sufiya Khatun who would work hard to make bamboo-stools throughout the day, and yet earn just about 2 cents:

"… When Yunus asked why her profit was so low, she explained that the only person who would lend her money to buy bamboo was the trader who bought her final product - and the price he set barely covered her costs.

(Yunus) wanted to see if there were other villagers in similar circumstances… and compiled a list of forty-two people whose capital requirements, in order to buy materials and work freely, added up to about $26.00.

Through the years he would recount that story hundreds of times… "I felt extremely ashamed of myself being part of a society that could not provide twenty-six dollars to forty-two able, skilled human beings who were trying to make a living."

Likewise...

Delhi-based GOONJ, which collects about 40,000 k.g. of garments every month, and reaches them to the needy across 20 states, started in 1998 when its founder Anshu Gupta was struck by the bundle of garments lying unused in his almarah: “Here we are, a young family of two adults, new home-makers for just three years, not wealthy by any means and we have 67 pieces of good, usable garments we don't want any more. Yet, but for the disaster we wouldn't be giving them away."

AID (Association for India’s Development), which has 36 chapters in USA and operates more than 100 projects in 18 Indian states, started with a modest proposal by its founder K Ravi to his friends to contribute $10 to start a school in some Indian village.

The idea of providing affordable solar electricity to rural poor came to Harish Hande, the Ashden Award winner founder of Selco India, when he visited the Dominican Republic as a part of his Master’s thesis. Today, Selco has more than 30,000 installations and 25 service centers.

The Rickshaw Bank was conceived when veterinarian Dr Pradip Kumar Sarmah asked his rickshaw puller how much money he makes, and found that even after 16 years, he did not own the rickshaw, earned a paltry Rs. 25/day, and had to pay half his earning as rent.

Child Rights and You (CRY) started when 25-years old Rippan Kapur and 6 of his friends, sitting around his mother’s dining table, contributed Rs.50/- each to create a fund that could “do something for the underprivileged Indian child”. Today, it has grown into one of the largest child rights movement in the country.

…the list goes on.

What also puzzled me was that people who started these ventures were ordinary individuals. They had limited means and modest backgrounds. What stimulated them to create/do something significant was also just a commonplace occurrence, similar to myriad situations which we all encounter in our lives.

And yet, there was “something” they had, which allowed them to transform an everyday experience or act into sustainable ventures which could create major social impact.

So, what was that “something”?

As I learned more about such social entrepreneurs (be meeting them and reading), even their field of work may have been different (e.g., tribal and rural development, primary education, women empowerment, micro-credit lending, etc.), five qualities seemed to be common across them:

a. Belief in possibility of change and human potential
Underlying their efforts was the optimism that despite adversities and lack of resources/support, it is possible to create large transformations in a social system. This optimism is supported by a belief in the human potential – their own and of those others who are focus of their efforts - to make such changes happen. Ela Bhatt, for instance, was driven by the firm belief that even the poor illiterate women have a vision of personal change, and the capacity to make it happen.

Similarly, Harish Hande’s vision of reaching solar power to poor communities was based on the conviction that poor can afford, pay for and maintain technology.

It was this optimism and certainty that allowed them to envision futures that can be created by leveraging on this human potential for self-empowerment.

b. Inspired Pragmatism
While the underpinnings of their motivation was an internal need to create ‘social value’, to ‘do something for the marginalised’ or to ‘contribute back to the society’, etc., they did not adopt any charitable model to address the social issues. Their effort was to develop a model of “business” which was sustainable, and therefore, scalable. As Prof Yunus once explained his approach to eradicate poverty:

‘…I wanted to give money to people… so that they would be free from the moneylenders to sell their product at the price which the markets gave them …. (I charged interest because) I thought if you do things in a businesslike way, then the project can become as big as you want it to because you are… not dependent on anybody.… This is not charity. This is business: business with a social objective, which is to help people get out of poverty.’

c. Capacity to Reframe Problems as Opportunities
Perhaps, what distinguished them from most of us was their opportunity-orientation. Their actions do not start from the decision about how best they can deploy the resources that they have; rather, they start from the issues need to be addressed, and then work backward to identify the resources that are needed to solve those problems, and innovate opportunities for generating those resources.

Consider, for instance, the Delhi-based Salaam Baalak Trust (SBT), which provides education, meals, boarding facilities, information on basic hygiene, counseling and medical help, and rehabilitation to around 3500 street- and platform- children each year. To partly finance its activities, SBT innovated the “guided street walks”, which are conducted by the street children. Not only this helps in humanizing the interface between the street kids and the social elites, it also provides a source of income to them and SBT.

d. Heightened Sense of Accountability to Those Served
The ventures they created were, of course, based on a deeply felt sense of obligation and accountability to the constituencies they served. There was an ethical impetus which guides their actions. But there is another, more important rationale for this sense of accountability.

Unlike the business entrepreneurs, markets do not work well for social entrepreneurs in providing a feedback on their actions. When one is in the “business” of creating social/environmental value, it is difficult to evaluate – and monitor - the intangibles such as social improvements, public good (or harm), or benefits for the marginalized, etc.

To offset this inefficiency in the environment in which they operate, they developed mechanisms to assess the needs of the communities which they aim to serve – and the extent to which their efforts and actions make an impact in meeting those needs. Wherever possible, they design market-like feedback mechanisms that reinforce their accountability to their constituencies. SEWA, for instance, developed a unique methodology to monitor its impact by asking 10 questions related to its twin goals of providing ‘full employment’ (including income and social security) and ‘self-reliance’ to its members.

e. Ability to Work Across Boundaries
They built not just the organizations, but also a collaborative network across different stakeholders in the issue (e.g., local population, state machinery, technology partners, micro-financial institutions, donors, etc.). Selco India, for instance, tied up with micro-finance agencies to provide credit to their customers/ beneficiaries; Goonj works through more than 100 grass-root organizations across the states to deliver need-based garments; and, CRY works with more hundreds of NGOs to reach the resources to those who need them, etc.

What perhaps made their ideas and actions sustainable was their ability to collaborate, to create networks, to share ideas, resources and credit with others to increase the sense of ownership in that network.

After all, as Harry Truman had said long time back:
“It is amazing what you can achieve if you don’t care who gets the credit”

*****

SAATH: Creating Inclusive Cities

Healthcare, slum education, micro-finance, youth and women’s employment… Ahmedabad-based SAATH has myriad programmes to improve the lot of the urban poor. In some way, its initiatives can be likened to a complex web that touches every corner of their lives. “This web is not to trap, but a mechanism to uplift the urban poor,”...

SAATH utilizes market-based strategies to create inclusive societies by empowering India's urban and rural poor.

SAATH's integrated approach brings all services that a poor community could need together in one centre, simplifying life for Bottom-of-Pyramid Indians....



Also read this article...

One Person's Trash is Another Person's Treasure

Waste Ventures transforms the way municipal garbage is handled in developing countries into a more environmentally and socially friendly process based on market mechanisms. Uncollected garbage is mostly collected by wastepickers who make a pittance from recyclables and face many health issues. Waste Ventures provides technical assistance to social organizations that work with waste pickers to transform them into waste picker corporations. It provides them with a triple bottom line blueprint (fee-for-service collection, recycling, composting, monetizing carbon credits, and creating biogas) and then assist the transition of the organization’s capital to the waste pickers themselves.

Sun King Solar Lanterns in Rural India

Mayank Sekhsaria is a young man who returned from the US with a dream: "honest, high-qualilty solar lights could change lives" in rural India. Today, GreenLight Planet's small and relatively inexpensive solar lamps, Sun King, are used by over 100,000 villagers.
More info at: http://www.greenlightplanet.com/

The Rags-to-Riches Story of Sarathbabu

When 27-year old Sarathbabu graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedaba, he created quite a stir by refusing a job that offered him a huge salary. He preferred to start his own enterprise -- Foodking Catering Service -- in Ahmedabad....

some excerpts from his story...

"I was born and brought up in a slum in Madipakkam in Chennai. I have two elder sisters and two younger brothers and my mother was the sole breadwinner of the family. It was really tough for her to bring up five kids on her meagre salary.

As she had studied till the tenth standard, she got a job under the mid-day meal scheme of the Tamil Nadu government in a school at a salary of Rs 30 a month. She made just one rupee a day for six people.

So, she sold idlis in the mornings. She would then work for the mid-day meal at the school during daytime. In the evenings, she taught at the adult education programme of the Indian government.

...

By the end of the second year, there were many lucrative job offers coming our way, but in my mind I was determined to start something on my own. But back home, I didn't have a house. It was a difficult decision to say 'no' to offers that gave you Rs 800,000 a year. But I was clear in my mind even while I knew the hard realities back home.

Yes, my mother had been an entrepreneur, and subconsciously, she must have inspired me. My inspirations were also (Dhirubhai) Ambani and Narayana Murthy. I knew I was not aiming at something unachievable. I got the courage from them to start my own enterprise.

Nobody at my institute discouraged me. In fact, at least 30-40 students at the IIM wanted to be entrepreneurs. And we used to discuss about ideas all the time. My last option was to take up a job.

...

Reservation should be a mix of all criteria. If you take a caste that comes under reservation, 80 per cent of the people will be poor and 20 per cent rich, the creamy layer. For the general category, it will be the other way around.

...Take my case, I didn't have any system that would make me aware of the IITs and the IIMs. But I will be able to guide my children properly because I am well educated. I got the benefits of reservation but I will never avail of it for my children. I cannot even think of demanding reservation for the next generation."

***
Read the full story here

From fields to a BPO in 6 months

15 May 2010 - Tikli, Haryana (WFS) – Just six months ago, Puja, 18, and Bimla Devi, 35, spent their day cooking meals, tending to cattle and working in the field -- the everyday routine of village women across Haryana. Never in their wildest dreams had they imagined that they could one day be sitting in an office working away furiously in front of a computer.

Today, this is the remarkable reality of hundreds of women in Tikli and Aklimpur villages. Their agrarian way of life has not changed – they still cut fodder for their cattle and clear the cow dung -- but they are now equally adept at using a computer. They work in a business process outsourcing (BPO) centre which has set up shop in the heart of their village. A first-of-its-kind women-only rural BPO in India, this centre was started by 'Harva', which stands for harnessing value of rural India.

Read More...

Room to Read

Another story of small beginnings and social innovation
(specially, if one thinks of the millions of books that people sell off or throw away, just because they don't need them any more... because they have read them over and over again, becauase kids have grown up, because exams are over...)

The Room to Read story begins in 1998 with Founder & CEO John Wood. In 1998, John was an overworked Microsoft executive looking for the quiet solitude of a trekking vacation. While backpacking in the Himalayas, John met a middle-aged Nepalese man who invited him to visit a school in a neighboring village. Hoping for a chance to see the real Nepal, rather than his tourist's trek, John agreed. Little did he know this short detour would change his life forever.

The man John met was a Nepalese "Education Resource Officer." However, John soon discovered that despite his huge heart and tremendous work-ethic (traveling mountain passes on foot to visit his schools), this man had very little resources to offer the schools in his charge. At the school John came face to face with the harsh reality confronting millions of Nepalese children - there were almost no books. John was stunned to discover that the few books they had - a Danielle Steele romance, the Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia, and a few other backpacker castoffs - were so precious that they were kept under lock and key... to protect them from the children!

As John left the village that day, the school headmaster made a simple request: "Perhaps, Sir, you will some day come back with books." His request would not go unheard. After returning from his trek, John emailed friends to ask for their help in collecting children's books, and was overwhelmed with the response - over 3,000 books arrived within the next two months. The following year, John returned to Nepal, rented a yak, and returned to the village to deliver the books.

On that trip, John made a decision. He would leave the corporate world in order to devote himself to starting a new non-profit. In his memoir, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, John explains, "Did it really matter how many copies of Windows we sold in Taiwan this month when there were millions of children without access to books?" In late 1999, John quit his executive position with Microsoft and started Room to Read.

With Room to Read, John sought to marry the corporate business practices he learned at Microsoft with an inspiring vision - to provide the lifelong gift of education to millions of children in the developing world. He contended that with 750 million illiterate adults worldwide and 100 million children without access to school, a non-profit "with the scalability of Starbucks and the compassion of Mother Theresa" was required.

To date, Room to Read operates in Nepal, Combodia, India, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and South Africa, has impacted lives of close to 1.5mn kids, has created over 4,100 schools and libraries, awards 3,400 scholarships to girls, has published 150 children's books in local languages...

Perspective on "Making a Difference"

This is an old post elsewhere, and a favourite story:

Yawar sent me the transcript of his speech to a group of children. It was a nice, coming from the heart speech, and one part which caught my attention was the narration of this story:

...Finally I want to close my speech by telling you another true story. This one is about a little boy and the famous writer Lauren Eisely. Lauren writes that he was on holiday by the sea side when one night there was a big storm. Very early next morning as he was walking on the beach he saw that among the debris of the storm were literally hundreds of starfish which had been thrown up on the sand the previous night.

As he walked along, Lauren saw someone in the distance doing what looked to him, like a dance. The person was bending down and standing up and moving along as he did this. As Lauren neared him, he saw that it was a little boy who was picking up starfish from the beach and was throwing them back into the sea.

Lauren was like me. A man of the world with a lot of education and life experience.

He went up to the boy and asked, “What are you doing?”

The boy said, “I’m throwing these starfish back into the sea so that they don’t die. They can’t move on the sand and if the sun comes out, they will dry out and die. So I am throwing them back so that they will live.”

Lauren says, he laughed at this statement. He then proceeded to put things in ‘perspective’ for the boy...

So Lauren said to him, “Look, do you realize that on this beach alone there are literally thousands of starfish? And then of course there are hundreds of beaches in the world, on which are thrown up millions of starfish in every storm. You are one kid, throwing one starfish into the sea! For God’s sake, what difference does it make?”

The boy looked at Lauren; he looked at the starfish in his hand, he turned and threw it far into the waves and said to Lauren, “It made a difference to that one!”

Lauren writes, “I walked away and kept walking for a long time. Then I returned to the boy who was still there, picking up and throwing the starfish into the sea. I silently picked up a starfish and threw it into the sea. And we did this together for a long time.”

...from small beginning

Like with many established big ventures, it is sometimes difficult to imagine that they had actually started as a small single step.

Here are two stories of small beginnings:

"In 1971, migrant women working as cart-pullers in the city’s cloth market came to me in TLA, where I had started my work life working for textile mill workers of Ahmedabad. The women who lived on the footpath, were seeking help for better living conditions. Next month came the head loader women of the same cloth market, feeling agitated about very low rates of payment (30 paise per trip carrying the bale of cloth from a wholesaler to a retailer). They felt exploited by the traders. Then followed the used garment dealer women in search of credit facility... That was 1971. Some of these urban, poor, self- employed women workers came to the meeting that I called in a public garden where we formed our trade union (1972). We called it the Self Employed Women’s Association, SEWA."

That was the beginning of SEWA

"Yunus had never met Sufiya Khatun on his many walks through her village. Sufiya, a widow, was trying to support herself by constructing and selling bamboo stools. She earned two cents a day. When Yunus asked why her profit was so low, she explained that the only person who would lend her money to buy bamboo was the trader who bought her final product--and the price he set barely covered her costs.

Yunus's instinct was to dig into his pocket. But first he wanted to see if there were other villagers in similar circumstances. He and a few students canvassed the village and compiled a list of forty-two people whose capital requirements, in order to buy materials and work freely, added up to about $26.00.

Through the years he would recount that story hundreds of times. A decade later, testifying before the U.S. Congress Select Committee on Hunger in a hearing devoted to micro-enterprise credit, he recalled what had gone through his mind: "I felt extremely ashamed of myself being part of a society that could not provide twenty-six dollars to forty-two able, skilled human beings who were trying to make a living."

...that is how the Grameen story started

Are we....?

Ingrid Srinath, CEO of CRY was at here last week, and signed an MOU with XLRI to partner with us for their projects in this region.


In her address to the students, one slide made a lot of sense:


Are we...?