Grassroots Enterprise Incubator
The innovative Grassroots Enterprise Incubator (GEI) mainstreams the development of locally appropriate technology and business innovation to underserved communities. Targeting solutions for agriculture, energy, health, and water access, GEI is designed to create capacity within grassroots organizations to both innovate and incubate employment and economic opportunity through the application and distribution of high-value technologies and sustainable business models targeted to rural smallholder producers. Leveraging the economic benefit that sustainably designed and collaboratively deployed solutions offer, this program will specifically give grassroots women the tools, training, and access they require to generate economic empowerment and greater control over their livelihood goals.
Sobre Você
Sobre Você
Nome
Caleb
Sobrenome
Shreve
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Sobre Sua Organização
Nome da Organização
Global Fairness Initiative
Página da organização na internet
Telefone da organização
Endereço da organização
País da organização
Estados Unidos , DC, Washington
Países onde este projeto vem gerando impacto social
Índia, GJ
Sua organização é
OSCIP/ONG
Há quanto tempo sua organização está em operação?
Mais de 5 anos
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INOVAÇÃO
Nome Projeto/Inovação
Grassroots Enterprise Incubator
Qual a mudança que você quer trazer para o mundo?
The innovative Grassroots Enterprise Incubator (GEI) mainstreams the development of locally appropriate technology and business innovation to underserved communities. Targeting solutions for agriculture, energy, health, and water access, GEI is designed to create capacity within grassroots organizations to both innovate and incubate employment and economic opportunity through the application and distribution of high-value technologies and sustainable business models targeted to rural smallholder producers. Leveraging the economic benefit that sustainably designed and collaboratively deployed solutions offer, this program will specifically give grassroots women the tools, training, and access they require to generate economic empowerment and greater control over their livelihood goals.
Quais são as principais atividades do seu projeto?
The Global Fairness Initiative, working with the Self Employed Women's Association in India, builds an internal incubator (Grassroots Enterprise Incubator) to help spin-off employment- and income-generating business models. Previously, GFI and SEWA have created successful enterprises, such as the Rural Urban Development Initiative, but lacked the institutional and structural components to replicate the process. GEI helps to institutionalize the experience of developing technology and innovative solutions with a quick exit strategy laid across the extensive network and capacity of SEWA's presence in South Asia. The model helps build institutions to identify opportunities and link markets with providers of the solutions. In doing so, GEI engages in opportunities and partnerships to create economic empowerment for women, increase the livelihood of marginalized farmers and entrepreneurs, introduce green technology and market access to the value chain, and support models for replication and growth.
The idea was cultivated within SEWA’s rich network and GFI’s vast resources. SEWA connects to its 1.5 million women members through the established District Associations that manage services, resources, opportunities, and projects for the members living in those districts. GEI creates its incubation presence: a Technology Development Center that aligns and collaborates with the District Association to cultivate research and development, analyze market assessments, conducts baseline indicators, and formalizes equity stake. From this interaction, business opportunities, poverty-alleviating solutions, and income generation for women is realized.
The traditional model often follows like this: District Associations engage with the Block and Cluster Levels under each District by offering training, business resources, and community learning for the women farmers and family enterprises. GEI supports and strengthens this model with Centers of Excellence, based in the Block/Cluster level and managed by the Technology Development Center, to help lift the resources available as well as introduce the technology models, business development, and financial products needed to help incubate grassroots market-based solutions. This is the space where GEI partners with investments, institutions, engineers, designers, and technical experts to either source or create technology and innovation for deployment. With leading innovative partners, GEI helps strengthen the supply chain and distribution model while ensuring micro-technology and innovative resources reaches the rural poor.
Finally, the Centers of Excellence are connected to the community directly through interactions with self-help groups and village leaders. It is in this space, that GEI adds additional employment, technical skills, and business value by introducing GEI advocates, trained and hired by relevant partners, to help add affordable technology and innovative solutions to women. This model will be paired with appropriate systems for documentation, measuring success, and program improvement to maximize the impact on women.
In each Incubator project - GEI will follow four crucial steps:
1) Situational Analysis:
a) Conduct a needs assessment that maps community needs and market
b) Assess purchasing power and entrepreneurial capacity
c) Potential areas of engagement: agriculture, energy, water and sanitation, and health
2) Technology or Business-Solution Selection:
a) Develop local capacity for identifying and designing appropriate solution for generating economic opportunity
b) Based on results (need, market opportunity, and social benefit) select the solution
3) Technology or Solution Development
a) Test prototypes, analyze results, and improve design
b) Provide leadership training, sales coaching, and other strategies to ensure successful start-ups
4) Distribution and Sale
a) Develop market-based, culturally appropriate branding and sales tools for new technologies, products, services, or solution
b) Provide consumer trainings and demonstration programs to increase solution uptake
O que é inovador sobre a seu projeto? De que forma ele é uma nova contribuição para esse campo de atuação?
The past two decades have seen a proliferation of new innovations targeting middle to lower income communities, and particularly those in the developing world. In most cases these innovations tend to be tailored to, or at least target working poor communities, but to date the design and delivery of these products is primarily done through top down initiatives of private companies or development organizations. In the best cases delivery mechanisms are built with local ownership in mind, but very rarely is the actual design, financing and marketing of a product mainstreamed into the poor and grassroots communities the innovation is aimed to serve. GEI seeks to flip the model on its head by incubating and launching new enterprises and generating employment conceived and developed within grassroots communities.
Traditional enterprise incubator models have tended to be divided into two independent categories: Business Incubation and Technology Incubation. Both business and technology incubators have the goal of creating enterprises by centralizing tools, knowledge, investment and services in one place to catalyze the creation of profitable opportunities. The Grassroots Enterprise Incubator brings the strength of these two models together by enabling both the technology development as well as the business incubation services under one roof. Additionally, GEI draws on the “equity stake” design of successful incubators to ensure sustainability by maintaining a percentage share of the enterprises generated by the incubator, or by selling certain products directly.
Em que estágio está seu projeto?
Em execução entre 1 e 5 anos
Conte-nos sobre a comunidade em que atua. Por exemplo, as condições econômicas, as estruturas políticas, normas e valores, as tendências demográficas, história e experiência com as tentativas de mobilização.
The Global Fairness Initiative has been working in India since 2002 – engaging in opportunities and partnerships to create economic opportunity for women, increase the livelihood of marginalized farmers, introduce green technology and market access to the value chain, and support models for replication and growth. Our innovative and successful multi-stakeholder approach has helped build a long-lasting relationship with one of our closest partners, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Gujarat, India, and its 1.5 million poor self-employed women members across nine states of India.
Registered in 1972 SEWA is a trade union and organization of poor, self-employed women workers who earn a living through their own labor or small businesses. SEWA’s primary goals are to organize women to ensure that every family obtains full employment. SEWA’s belief is that all women should be autonomous both economically and in terms of their decision-making ability. While based in Gujarat India, SEWA has experience organizing poor producers through India, Asia, and around the globe.
Owned and operated by the women of SEWA, GEI focuses on the development of technology and services for grassroots producers and poor communities that make up the majority of SEWA’s members: women farmers, entrepreneurs, and self-employed workers. Like traditional incubator models, GEI will focus on demand-driven innovations that are locally appropriate and affordable to the communities which make up SEWA’s “consumers.” Unlike traditional incubators, GEI both design or source technologies and will spin off technology driven enterprise opportunities with the triple bottom line requirements of financial sustainability, positive livelihood impact and women-led design and delivery.
Compartilhe a história do(a) fundador(a) e o que o(a) inspirou a iniciar este projeto
Caleb Shreve is the Executive Director of the Global Fairness Initiative (GFI). Before joining GFI, Caleb was the founder of the Tidewater Group, a Washington, DC based organization serving NGOs and foundations on the forefront of international development. During his 7 years at Tidewater Caleb worked with clients around the globe on initiatives to help vulnerable communities gain access to essential services, knowledge and financing. Prior to Tidewater, Caleb served on the White House staff of former President Clinton and on the leadership team of New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. He has also held senior positions with the Corporation for National Service, the International Broadcasting Bureau and the Democratic Presidential Campaigns of Senator John Kerry and Barack Obama. A native of Washington, DC, Caleb received degrees in Political Science and English Literature from the College of Wooster.
Inspired by the success of traditional incubator models, Caleb wanted to find a way to replace the reliance on outside development investments to introduce and deploy poverty-alleviating technologies. Using his first-hand experience working with SEWA, Caleb has seen the capacity within grassroots organizations to innovate appropriate, sustainable, and market-based solutions. He believes by providing local and grassroots technology solutions for value-added supply chain models brings better returns on investment yields, direct market access to the rural poor, and stronger rural economies and economic empowerment for women.
IMPACTO SOCIAL
Temas relacionados à inscrição
Por favor, descreva como o projeto tem sido bem sucedido e como esse sucesso é medido.
The Grassroots Enterprise Incubator (GEI) was institutionalized following such successful endeavors between GFI and SEWA to launch businesses that are run and served by women farmers and producers. For example, GFI and SEWA created Farmer Development Centers, established the Rural Urban Development Initiative (RUDI) business, and engaged Unilever to help successfully brand, market, and sell agricultural and daily household products to rural communities. The RUDI business now has an annual turnover of over $300,000. Another example is the creation of the Green Livelihood Campaign, based on women farmer's feedback around energy prices and the negative effects of diesel, kerosene, and firewood. The Campaign engaged the International Finance Corporation to support a reduction in indoor air pollution by deploying 200,000 cleaner cookstoves and solar lanterns to SEWA members across 5 states in India. And most recently, GFI and SEWA's partnership to work with 50,000 salt farmers to introduce renewable technologies to lower diesel consumption by 50%, increase the efficiency of pumpsets, and sell carbon credits to the European market. Each of these examples identified a problem facing women farmers and their income potential - and created a sustainable development approach, business organization, and replicable solution.
Here are some of following metrics used to assess the success of a GEI Project:
- Annual Turnover
- Number of Women Employed
- Change in Income (hourly, wages, etc)
- Change in Savings Amount
- Adoption of new technology into daily lives
- Reduction in CO2 or carbon credits realized
Quantas pessoas foram impactadas por seu projeto?
> 10.000
Quantas pessoas poderão ser impactadas por seu projeto nos próximos três anos?
> 10.000
Como seu projeto se expandirá ao longo dos próximos três anos?
Over the next three years, GEI will continue to identify new opportunities, business models, and technology solutions to incubate as enterprises for the development of rural economies and employment. GEI plans to further draw on engineering, business management, marketing and investment partnerships to create greater impact and stronger results than seen in previous projects. One area of focus for GEI moving forward is to identify specific market-based business models around water, sanitation, and health for women farmers, producers, and employees - specifically in relation to employment and income. The GEI Model will be led by market driven solutions that lower input costs, raise output value, increase access to markets and employment, and improve the quality of life for women.
SUSTENTABILIDADE
Quais são as barreiras que podem dificultar o sucesso de seu projeto e como pretende superá-las?
GEI recognizes the impact locally-appropriate solutions can have on a woman's income generation. The program is strongly rooted in demand-driven goals and objectives - with grassroots communities leading the design, implementation, and deployment. However, GEI is cognizant of the following barriers to success:
- Adopting new technologies or solutions into farmer's daily lives
- Securing investment to grow business beyond start-up phase
- Deciding whether to modify, source, or create new processes and models
- Creating appropriate financial models to minimize risk among grassroots communities
To help overcome these barriers, GEI engages with a third-party monitoring and evaluation party to help address and manage potential difficulties. Also, leveraging SEWA's trusted relationship with its members and utilizing the organization's established distribution and marketing model will help GEI gain greater trust, traction, and depth into launching grassroots enterprises. Finally, like in the past, GEI's strength will come from engaging in relevant partners and experts to map out successful strategies, build solid business plans, and create effective social marketing and grassroots deployment models.
Por favor, explique de que forma o estabelecimento de parcerias é importante para o sucesso de sua inovação
Catalyzed by the growth of innovation and development for “the other 90%” market of lower income and poor communities, the Global Fairness Initiative (GFI) and the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) have joined together to create the program – aimed at putting technology and employment-generating design, manufacturing, marketing and sales capabilities directly into the hands of grassroots, women-led enterprises. The key delivery mechanism will be the Grassroots Enterprise Incubator (GEI) built on the classic incubator model that has fostered innovation and enterprise throughout the developed world and increasingly in developing economies.
GEI is designed to use the long-established partnership and collaboration between GFI and SEWA as a catalyst for economic opportunity and employment access. These two organizations have been working together since 2002.
Orçamento anual atual do projeto em US$:
$100.000‐250.000
Detalhe as suas escolhas acima
Currently GEI is managed by the Global Fairness Initiative in partnership and collaboration with the Self-Employed Women's Association. Support of previously launched enterprises has come from the sales of products or technologies, loans from banks and international financing organizations, and in-kind investments from businesses. GFI has also received grants from foundations and individual donations to help continue to launch business enterprises within SEWA's network of 1.5 million women members.
De que forma você planeja fortalecer financeiramente seu projeto ao longo dos próximos três anos?
GEI plans to reach more than 100,000 small and marginal farmers, self-employed SEWA members, and rural women. With the help of investment, partnerships, and institutional support, GEI will make further in-roads into engaging SEWA's 1.5 million women members and their needs. In the next three years, GEI will be strengthened by:
- Expand the incubation process to other states in India
- Create demand-driven grassroots enterprises in the areas of water, health, and sanitation
- Engage with international players for multi-stakeholder engagements
- Build more Centers of Excellence in each District that GEI currently operates
- Train and hire at least 5000 GEI Advocates
- Further the mission of GEI to not be capital driven, rather be driven by the community of innovators
- Continue to gain 360 degree feedback from rural women and build successful social enterprises with the goal of supporting poor women and their livelihood
- Publish a yearly "best-practices" report for communities to adopt success stories
GEI has a model that has been successfully launched in Gujarat, India and we hope to institutionalize and scale this project with the support of Ebay Foundation and Ashoka Changemakers.
Desafios
Em quais obstáculos ao emprego e trabalho o seu projeto atua?
Por favor, selecionar até três por ordem de relevância para seu projeto (maior relevância recebe um "1" e a menor, "3").
Primeiro
Acesso restrito para novos mercados
SEGUNDO
Ausência de capacitação / formação
TERCEIRO
Ausência de visibilidade e investimento
Por favor, descreva como a sua inovação aborda especificamente os obstáculos listados acima.
The Grassroots Enterprise Incubator helps tackle the barriers to employment, income generation, and economic opportunity by creating businesses developed, owned, and managed by rural communities. These grassroots businesses help employ women through their daily operation, sales, and growth model. Moreover, as the enterprises introduce new technologies and solutions - women members of SEWA are trained and hired to help disseminate the training to different villages to increase user adoptions. Finally, the GEI model brings in outside players and investments to raise the profile of these incubators and expose the women to different skills and components of a business - helping the women become more marketable and successful.
Como você está aumentando o impacto da sua organização ou iniciativa?
Por favor, selecionar até três possíveis caminhos em ordem de relevância para você (maior relevância receberia "1 " e menor "3").
Primário
Aproveitando e se aperfeiçoando em tecnologia
SEGUNDO
Adaptando seu modelo para outros setores / necessidades de desenvolvimento
TERCEIRO
Alcance geográfico: No país de atuação
Por favor, descreva qual ou quais das atividades de seu crescimento estão em curso ou planejadas para o futuro imediato.
Currently, GEI leverages technology and best practices solutions while integrating these tools into the incubator model. These technologies often help increase the efficiency and scale of a woman's daily livelihood. Technologies such as locally-adapted cleaner cookstoves have been utilized to replace existing conditions and to reach a number of new communities. Second, the primary model of GEI is take a demand-driven concept and create a strong supply chain, a rural development methodology, and create a unique businesses that address the community's needs. Each incubated project is created for ease of replication and scale in any community or industry. Finally, GEI plans to move outside of Gujarat and engage the model in different states of India where SEWA and its members are present.
Você colabora ou faz parcerias com algum dos abaixo? (marque todas que se aplicam)
Fornecedores de tecnologia, ONGs / entidades sem fins lucrativos, Empresas.
Se sim, como essas colaborações e parcerias vêm ajudando sua inovação a obter sucesso?
GEI, and through the Global Fairness Initiative and the Self-Employed Women's Association, partner with experts, practitioners, and investors to strengthen the capacity and success of each grassroots enterprise. For example, a technology provider (a solar lantern manufacturer) is helping to reach hundreds of thousands of women through a local deployment model. Or the Government has engaged in the enterprise model to replicate RUDI in Afghanistan. These collaborations give GEI the vital support, resources, access, and sustainability to ensure the concept gets off the ground, is managed appropriately, and replicated with a successful and sustainable scale. Without these partners, GEI cannot effectively improve employment, income, and rural development.
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 | 49 weeks agoCaleb Shreve updated this Competition Entry. |
| 49 weeks agoCaleb Shreve updated this Competition Entry. |
| 49 weeks agoCaleb Shreve updated this Competition Entry. |
| 49 weeks agoCaleb Shreve updated this Competition Entry. |
| 49 weeks agoCaleb Shreve updated this Competition Entry. |
| 50 weeks agoCaleb Shreve updated this Competition Entry. |
| 50 weeks agoCaleb Shreve submitted this idea. |