Local Goes Big with Paul Basil
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Ashoka Fellow Paul Basil, Founder and CEO of Villgro (formerly Rural Innovations Network - RIN), is helping scale up local innovations and making sure that the best solutions reach as many people as possible.
Chat with Paul about his experiences, challenges and vision. Share your own insights and outlooks.
Comments
Hi Paul,
What are some of the key steps to starting a sustainable social enterprise? I would love to hear how you started yours and what major challenges you had to overcome.
Generally as things grow they become more impersonal. Do you find this true with your scaling up development efforts? And if so, how do you combat this?
Thanks!
Generally as things grow they become more impersonal. Do you find this true with your scaling up development efforts? And if so, how do you combat this? Thanks!
To be honest, we are a bunch of 70 people and therefore, I would not say we have scaled, at-least from a conventional sense of scale. Our scaling comes out of the scale that our incubatee companies attain in the number of poor people that they have been able to impact.
Having said that, over the last few years we have increased our team size from around 10 to 70. Have we become impersonal? No! Passion, Emotions are key to building an institution. We have ensured that fellow team members possess these and thereby have been able to retain the personal components that you are referring to. As a 4 member team, I remember the days, when we used to have dinners at my home. That cannot happen any more when we are 70. Is that becoming impersonal? I dont think so.
this has necessitated institutionalisation of processes and systems. Processes and systems are impersonal, but they are administered by people. When more people join the mission, it becomes critical to build a strong senior and middle management team. This leadership can in a way continue to build the personal touch. Long tenures from this team becomes important.
At the end of the day, the social impact that I wish to create, guides me. While chasing that, some components might be personal and some impersonal. Thats fine!
Paul, sorry I addressed you as John. I do not know how it just happened like that.
Maria
A socialist by nature, engineer and manager by education, development and work in the social sector was always my passion. I have always been attracted to those models in development which targeted sustainablity (read financial and economic). they excited me more. the desire to become a social entrepreneur led me to a search for ideas and finally landed up in the world of grass-roots innovations. The journey started there with Villgro (formerly Rural Innovations Network).
The Vision - I have heard that outstanding entrepreneurs have a clear vision. Am I right if I said, Mohammed Yunus vision evolved based on need of the target communities that he was working with? The more powerful and clear the vision, the higher the rate of success. In my case, the vision has evolved. There has been considerable fog along the journey, but each year we have been able to see the future ahead with more clarity. Looking back, I only wish the fog was not there. Why the fog there? may be as a practitioner, I jumped into doing, without adequately researching and analysing.
Design & Strategy - a vision cannot be realised with a well designed strategy. a blue print is essential to inform and guide operations. in the early years, our strategising skills were inadequate. over time we have been able to hone them.
Persevere and embrace uncertainity - a constant challenge is because of the very nature of our business. the business of enabling innovations and innovators. as an organisation we need to embrace uncertainity. the future brings with it uncertainity and therefore risk. an innovative product takes 2-3 years to reach the market. an optimistic estimate!. the success comes with time. the challenge is to see keep up the motivation during this phase. Aalso, many such innovative products fail. failure is learning but for most it demotivates. Celebrating successes even when it is small has been a practise to overcome this.
Hi Paul,
What business model have you developed to carry out these pillars? What are your products, customers, and strategy? Im curious about the MBA style applications and how you have leverage your knowledge of the local community to scale.
-Paula
Hi Paul,
What business model have you developed to carry out these pillars? What are your products, customers, and strategy? Im curious about the MBA style applications and how you have leverage your knowledge of the local community to scale.
Our customers are at 2 levels. at the first level, they are innovators and entrepreneurs whose innovations needs to be incubated. These include SMEs, Social Entrepreneurs, Academic and Researchers and even Grassroots Innovators. For them we offer incubation services which includes seed funding, mentoring, networking, recognition, talent, training and advisory. Of these funding is designed to be self-sustainable with time (currently it is not). Funding is structured as success-based loans and in the next few months we hope to convert this funding in the form of equity. For training we have subsidised fees.
Our 2nd level customers include the rural poor. For them we market innovative products through a network of village based stores and village level entrepreneurs. Here our revenues come through the margins generated while selling.
The Villgro business model is a hybrid one. The seed funding and marketing services will attract social investments and become financially sustainable in the years to come. However, building the eco-system, discovering such innovators, mentoring still remains a resource intensive activity and will continue to need grants
Thanks Paul!
I was also wondering, are you using mobile technology in your work?
Paula
John. I was ofcourse overtaken with your passage and I thought I should invite you to my Fundraising Page on http:www.school.givemeaning.com
Read my profile and support our vision.
Iam a changemaker and you may as well read my profile on changemakers. We need each other when it comes to Community Works. We serve the same world in different parts.
I shall surely be grateful if you can help us disribute our Donation Tool to many of your friends who can help us achieve our vision.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon. You may as well use my direct email address(marialusambo@yahoo.com)
Stay Blessed.
Maria
thank you for the information Maria
Thanks Paul for your response to my mail to you.
I have still quoted the weblink above so that you may get it correctly incase I missed something when submitting.
Maria.
Hi Paul,
I'm curious how you'd explain the difference between a social enterprise and a non-profit, and how you define "social entrepreneur".
To borrow a term from Mohammed Yunus, I'd call myself a social business entrepreneur (co-founder and CEO of www.buythechange.com). I'm perplexed that some relegate social entrepreneurs to the non-profit sector. In my mind, a social entrepreneur should be measured by the social impact of his or her organization (in our case building community through commerce) regardless of its for-profit or non-profit status.
Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Best,
Zack Steven
www.buythechange.com
http://twitter.com/zacksteven
I'm curious how you'd explain the difference between a social enterprise and a non-profit, and how you define "social entrepreneur".
to me a social entrepreneur is one who:
- addresses a compelling need among a target group who has not been served
- is ambitious to impact and scale it up
- sees profits as a means rather than as an end
To achieve this, a social entrepreneur could use non-profit or for-profit means. But this choice really depends on the capacity to pay of the target groups. More smarter social entrepreneurs unlock cash flows of the target groups, through innovative pricing and payment models and build their enterprise on a for-profit mode. For-profit social entrepreneurs have the advantage of greater capital (from social investors/financial institutions) to scale-up their impact. At the same time, there are social entrepreneurs who have scaled up by social franchising or even leveraging the government channels to scale-up.
My name is David Katz, and I think I have now figured out what I am....a social entrepreneur, as I have recently launched a new online community (also known as a social networking site) called JackTheDonkey.com.
http://www.JackTheDonkey.com is the community where your time online supports the charity of your choice as we donate 55% of all ad revenue generated by users' time on Jack to their choice of 21 charities from across the US and Canada.
The more you visit and interact with others, the more money JackTheDonkey.com donates to the charity of your choice....it's free and easy and works out to 1.1 cents every impression....EVERY IMPRESSION.
There are currently 21 charities from across Canada and the US (with the UK coming onboard shortly) that you can choose to support with your time online
No, we are not using mobile technology in our work
Paul,
In the event that you were thinking about exploring or using mobile technology, Ken Banks the creator of Frontline SMS (a free computer to cell phone program) has an online group called Social Changemaking with Mobile Phones that you can check out at: http://www.changemakers.com/en-us/node/50742
Ashoka's Changemakers recently used the program successfully in our Africa-based outreach for two competitions (but it can be used for many other purposes of course). We'll be working on a kit that we will share with our community soon - let me know if this is something that the interest you.
this might be useful as we connect with farmers to adopt new products and to change their cultivating practises and the products that they use. can you connect me with Ken Banks please?
Paul, this is very good. Today there is emphasis on adapting and scaling up of models that have demonstrated success in mitigating the effects of climate change at the grassroots. This is the focus of our new NGO in Uganda and I see its the driving priniciple of your innovation. Could we get in touch for a more detailed discussion on the way forward? Sam
We can surely stay in touch. Currently, we are focussed in south India and hope to replicate to other parts of India shortly and then to other developing countries.
Dear Paul
I am writing to you from Kerala In India. I am a working mother of two. And I have this vision to bring people together on World water Day to raise awareness about water and the issues the UNO is doing to improve and secure the water that we have on this planet. you know that kerala has heavy rains and not much is being done to reserve the water through rain water harvesting. I think people have to be made aware of water as a resource that is being destroyed through misuse and carelessness. People have to treat it with respect and when they know about the shortage and the impending danger of us totally loosing out on the now easily available drinking water .......then rain water harvesting or any other way of saving and storing the rain water which we get during monsoons will be taken seriously. I wish also to combine this with the Oneness Musician who are bringing people together in love and harmony through music. I dont have a sponsor for this event. And it is first of its kind to be done in Kerala.
Please let me know if you can help in any way with this or if there are people who would like to be part of this concert.
I work as a research analyst with Ventures Middle East in the Kochi in Kerala.
The concert is being planned in Marine Drive in Ernakulam in Kerala. Please let me know how I can build this up and actually make it happen.
Warm regards
sanitha
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