NextBillion.net - Development Through Enterprise - Europe and Eurasia

Rural Graduates Turn a New Leaf

Joseph Bornstein — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:20:28 -0400

Salma Sultana's rural and orthodox background hardly came in her way of becoming a processor in a BPO. Hailing from Muthukuru mandal of Nellore district, K. Sudheer, her peer, shouldered the job responsibilities with a great flourish.

It's a metamorphosis for the likes of Salma and Sudheer from BOP (bottom of the pyramid) to BPO (business process outsourcing), when HDFC Bank picked them up for the challenging assignments, thanks to the customised training imparted by the Employment Generation and Marketing Mission (EGMM), an arm of the Rural Development Department.

With their family status improving, income levels moving northwards and caste barriers vanishing, these young men and women are able to fend for their siblings' education or to create an asset in the households. Graduates from underprivileged families in rural areas, trained by the EGMM, are now hotcakes for multi-national companies to work in their rural BPOs.

Till six months ago, HDFC Bank faced a problem in selecting right candidates for its rural operations. But today, the bank is more than satisfied by the setting up of its first rural BPO in Nellore with the EGMM-trained manpower.

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Muhammad Yunus’ Next Big Thing: Health Care for the BoP

Joseph Bornstein — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:44:50 -0400

The way Noble Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus sees it, the micro-credit revolution is running its course in his home country of Bangladesh. Between his Grameen Bank and other NGOs, which together make Bangladesh the most heavily micro-credit-enabled place on earth, he estimates that about 80% of the poor families that might want to participate are being served already. His goal is for Grameen to help finish the job by 2012.

What's next? Health care. "This is the biggest project. With micro-credit, we only reach the poor," he told me. "With this health care project, we reach everybody-and we bring state-of-the-art health care to even the poorest."

When I visited with Yunus in his office in Dhaka, Bangladesh, today, he had just returned from a stay in Amman, Jordan. In fact, he's been traveling almost non-stop since he got the Peace Prize in 2006, first taking advantage of his new fame to press his ideas on the global stage, and more recently publicizing his new book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, which went on sale in most places early this year. But now he's planning on spending a lot of time in Bangladesh on the health care project.

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New Ventures and Others Works to Build Green Future for China

Joseph Bornstein — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:31:54 -0400

China recently overtook the United States as the world's biggest carbon polluter, but in a nation known for its dirty technology, a surprising business trend is emerging: green entrepreneurs.

As China booms, the country has relied heavily on coal and other fossil fuels to push its economy into a whole different league. Rising energy demand has led to an increase in coal consumption, skyrocketing 75 percent between 2000 and 2005 and reaching 2.6 billion tons in 2006, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The country has become notorious for smog and pollution recently, partly because of the spotlight shining on Beijing as the world gears up for the 2008 Olympics next month.

Increased energy consumption has pulled nearly 400 million Chinese citizens out of dire poverty, according to World Bank estimates, but also has led to widespread health problems and a resulting loss in GDP -- as much as 5.8 percent.

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An Increasingly Affluent Middle India Is Harder to Ignore

Joseph Bornstein — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:32:17 -0400

C.K. Prahalad, professor of strategy at the University of Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of Business, is looking for the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. In his book by that name, he says that huge markets exist among the poor in countries such as India, and that multinationals should tailor their plans and products to these consumers. At the other end of the spectrum, luxury goods manufacturers are pouring into India. The International Herald Tribune will hold its annual global conference on luxury in New Delhi in December. It joins a crowded calendar of luxury events.

Somewhere between these extremes is the real Indian market. It does not lie in the metros or the villages. "The Indian urban growth story until now has been driven largely by metros," says Ashok Rajgopal, a partner in the media and entertainment practice at Ernst & Young, a global assurance, tax, transaction and advisory-services firm. "This is now moving beyond metros into smaller towns."

Several recent studies bolster the case for the rise of Middle India. According to the 2008 edition of the RK Swamy BBDO Guide to Market Planning, 51 districts in India have at least one town with a population of more than 500,000. Together, they have twice the market potential of the four metros (Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata) combined.

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Chennai's School for Entrepreneurs

Joseph Bornstein — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:09:40 -0400

Sustainability of projects is important for social service sector organisations to work efficiently. And, with the management of the sector becoming more complex each day, the Centre for Social Initiative and Management (CSIM), started in 2001, has been providing training for would-be ‘social entrepreneurs'.

The philosophy is simple enough as the co-ordinator of CSIM at Chennai, Latha Suresh, explains: "There are many NGOs doing good work in many areas. But they do not manage to tap the resources available from government and industry. Leadership training and management skills are essential for these NGOs to serve a larger group of people."

Many workers in the social sector are taking this seriously. Buzzwords like ‘soft skills', ‘stakeholder management', etc., are getting heard not just in corporate boardrooms as NGOs are seeking means to expand beyond their current capacities to ensure they have a larger impact.

"It is not a ‘scaling up'. I would call it a ‘scaling out' as NGOs want to replicate their successful models in other pockets. We help them achieve this by training them on the essentials of social management," Ms. Suresh says.

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Reaching Out to the Missing Middle

Joseph Bornstein — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:16:03 -0400

Deshantori, a heart-wrenching documentary which follows a group of young Bangladeshis through a harrowing journey in search of employment opportunities outside the country, has sparked soul searching questions for Bangladeshis wherever it has been shown. For me, the most poignant moment of the documentary was when one of the survivors of the journey sadly relates that nobody would lend him money to start a business, but they lent him money to pay for a dangerous and illegal passage overseas. Why are we unwilling to support our young people? Why is entrepreneurship such a bad word in our culture?

In our country, the term for an entrepreneur is a 'businessman,' which carries with it a set of negative connotations. The assumption is that one goes into business if one cannot be a banker, doctor, engineer, lawyer, professor or a corporate worker. In movies, businessmen are portrayed as crude, immoral people. In day-to-day life, a businessman is only considered successful if he can achieve conspicuous display of wealth. The toxicity of the business sector has recently been magnified with the recent anti-corruption crack down which has put a high profile portion of the business community behind bars.

Despite our negative views of 'business', the private sector has a crucial role to play in growing the economy and providing employment opportunities. The private sector is the engine of innovation in all sectors of the economy. Entrepreneurship in Bangladesh currently thrives in two sectors of the economy -- among the poorest of the poor (14 million households) and among the well-off (about 2.5 million households). The reason for this is that both of these sectors have access to institutional financing.

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Confederation of Indian Industry focuses on Skill Development

Joseph Bornstein — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:09:18 -0400

Prof. Prahalad is certain about the potential for India to be the home for at least 30 of the Fortune 100 firms; to increase the country's share in global trade; become a source of global innovations with new businesses, technologies and business models; and become the world's benchmark on how to cope with diversity.

Advocating entrepreneurial transformation, the document insists that folding the future in rather than extrapolating the past is fundamental.
Taking small and clear steps - some of them may be experimental - with a sense of urgency and purpose is essential, it states.

As regards the vision itself for India, the six elements that Prof. Prahalad proposes are: shift from abject poverty to income inequality; shift from income levels to life style measurement; changing the price-performance envelope; shift from low tech solution to universal access to high technology solutions; provisioning of products and jobs for ecological vitality; and focus on good governance.

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Widow Entrepreneurs of Gujarat Working to Earn a Decent Living

Joseph Bornstein — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:26:57 -0400

Around 2,000 women meeting on the city's outskirts had something in common: poverty, business plans, widowhood. And an unfounded fear of earning big. When Hina Shah, director of the International Centre for Entrepreneurship and Career Development, or ICECD, asked how many wanted to earn more than Rs25,000 a month, none raised a hand. "My first priority is to make a decent living," says Ameenaben. "We are poor people.

How can we hope to make so much money?" That's exactly what ICECD hopes to make them do. The centre has been organizing training programmes in entrepreneurship for poor women and youngsters from rural areas since 1986, in India and 62 other developing nations. Over the past three years, it has trained more than 7,000 widows in Gujarat. On Friday, it organized what it calls the first ever meet of "widow entrepreneurs".

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Affordable SME Consulting Business Defies Convention

Joseph Bornstein — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:50:18 -0400

If one believes in the story of a relentless, meteoric rise, Bangalore-based Affordable Business Solutions or ABS as it is well-known, is just the right case in point. The quintessential trail blazer, true to its name, has achieved steady success in just a matter of four years since its inception, and strictly on its own terms. Co-founders, Srikant Rao and Ravindra Kini, recount their story, which abounds in interesting facets of the company's continued tryst with the SME.

Breaking the Mould: The SME Way
Setting up a joint business in 2004 was a conscious decision for the two friends, who decided to pool in their expertise in the industry and leverage it for their own venture. Recalls Rao in jest, "We plunged head-long into ABS to resolve a mid-life crisis. I am a sales and marketing person, while Kini has a finance and HR background; so our combined experience was quite vast and diverse."

After ruling out obvious business options like ITES and IT solutions for large enterprises, Rao and Kini started ABS. In a marked departure from the convention prevalent then, ABS was going to center itself on overall functional solutions for the SME market.

The duo had to counter ‘well-meaning' advice from various quarters that intended to deter them from the SME market, since technology would never be well-received there. The other obvious hurdle was the fact that the mid-size manufacturing industry in India was virtually over. The next evident question was, "Who actually would be ABS's clientele?" Recalls Rao, "We did not know any better, so we decided we would walk-in and meet prospective customers directly and have impromptu sessions with them to understand their needs, and then work out where we could add value."

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Further International Recognition for Microfinance Program

Joseph Bornstein — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:40:18 -0400

MICROCREDIT is undoubtedly the number one image builder for Bangladesh. It has earned the most coveted Nobel (peace) prize for the initiator Dr Muhmmad Yunus and his Grameem Bank. It has earned many other international applauds for the operators, including the recent "Banking at the Bottom of the Pyramid" prize jointly awarded by the Financial Times of London and the International Investment Institute (IFC) to ASA. Mayor of London Boris Johnson formally announced the prize on June 3 selecting the Bangladesh institution from among 129 institutions of 54 countries.

Although a new conception in world economy and development programme, micro credit is gradually gaining a greater importance there. It is considered as a better way to reduce economic discrimination for world peace and security. This new Bangladesh brand is being included in development programmes of various countries in alleviating poverty across the world.

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