3 social enterprises (and some shopping and worship)!

Earlier this week, our group met with three different organizations; each one uses an innovative and sustainable strategy to affect social change within a community in India. I strongly encourage you to check out the organizations if you have any interest in social entrepreneurship. Here’s a synopsis of their missions:

Under the Mango Tree (UTMT)

Vijaya Pastala founded UTMT in 2009. After working for years at the World Bank in DC, Vijaya moved back to India after the earthquake to help restore the country. Because buildings were largely ruined, she held meetings under the mango trees since they provided shade in the summer heat, thus marking the birth of UTMT’s namesake. In a nutshell, UTMT uses bees to reduce poverty in rural parts of India. Pollination is critical for a healthy and robust harvest and bees are responsible for pollinating. And to think we just thought they were there to help make us honey for our tea! By increasing the number of (the hardest working) bees available to farmers, their crop yields increase and they are able to sell more goods. This results in increased income to put towards educating their children or procuring adequate healthcare. As health, education and income increase, poverty decreases. Et, voila!

UTMT is called a hybrid organization, consisting both of a non-profit sector and a for-profit sector. This hybrid approach is becoming much more common given the recent reduction of grant money available; companies need to come up with ways to self-sustain. The non-profit sector of UTMT conducts training for rural farmers so they learn how to keep the bees and harvest honey. Similar to many non-profits, it has research, advocacy and policy components. The for-profit sector assesses market access, market supply and chain management for a honey business. In selling the honey produced by the bees to the food, hospitality, and gifting industries in India, UTMT is able to make a profit on their product. Remember me mentioning the fabulous store I recently visited called Fabindia? Well, UTMT honey is sold there! UTMT’s model is sustainable and being replicated throughout the country. This simple idea has improved the livelihood of families and communities living in some of India’s poorest districts. A brilliant example of how identifying and addressing a simple need can produce outstanding results.

Founder of "Under the Mango Tree," Vijaya Pastala, presents to us about their innovative approach of using bees to reduce poverty in rural India.

Be! Fund

The Be! Fund is a fairly new organization that was born last July. They use media to inspire young entrepreneurs in India. Here’s how. They run media spots on local television and radio programs about “local heroes.” These heroes are young entrepreneurs whose ideas have helped to strengthen their community in some way. The media spots are intended to inspire young people to contact Be! Fund and apply for a small amount of money to kick-start an innovative idea. Be! Fund also provides training and support to these budding social entrepreneurs. A few examples of their current “local heroes” include: a woman who uses leaves from trees in rural India to make compostable plates, which she sells to make a profit while employing several women in her village; a man who invested his money into buying a truck to transport rural farmers to markets so they can sell their goods; and a man who recycles plastic bottles in his village to earn a profit. While these investments may seem insignificant, they have been revolutionary in providing work and income to many of India’s rural poor. I especially appreciate that Be! Fund focuses on young people who may or may not be educated, but who are visionaries in their communities. They are able to identify a weakness and offer a sustainable solution to address it in an innovative and profitable way.

ATMA

ATMA is a NGO that aims to strengthen other NGOs in the education sector in India. In Bombay, there are 66,000 NGOs, and in India, there is roughly one NGO for every 400 people. (1:400). That’s an astronomical amount of NGOs! Because there are so many people living in India, the government is not able to adequately support everyone, which is why NGOs play such a critical role in this country. ATMA essentially provides free consultation to start-ups and other NGOs working on educational issues to strengthen their overall operation, something they couldn’t otherwise afford.

After our morning meetings, we set out to do some shopping in an area of town called Bandra, which is home to a mix of street vendors and storefronts – a little something for everyone. As soon as we approached the street vendors, I immediately felt like I was back in a Moroccan souk with everyone eager to get my attention to buy their goods. There were Indian outfits, bangles, shoes, scarves, jewelry and trinkets galore. Knowing that we’ll be doing much more shopping, I didn’t buy too much, but I had a blast watching and helping my fellow classmates barter to get some awesome stuff. As we were walking the streets, the wind started to pick up and we quickly noticed that the street vendors were wrapping up their goods in tarps. Realizing that a massive rainstorm was about to hit, we sought cover in a local store. Monsoons are no joke. Such strong rain that you almost pity the ground for having to bear the brunt force. As we watched the storm come through, some impoverished street children noticed us in the store window. There was a small boy, maybe six years old, carrying his younger brother who couldn’t have been older than two. They were begging us for money and it was just gut-wrenchingly sad. I’ve traveled to developing countries before and this is not my first time being approached by young children begging, yet it just never gets any easier or less devastating. I just remind myself that we are here trying to better understand the world and hopefully help to address these injustices. Slipping them some money on the way out of the store, it was time to move along to our next stop.

Picking out new shirts for my classmate, Vidisha.

Sade found some fabulous clothes!

Monsoons!

Children asking for money on the street. 

Our group visited Mahalakshmi Temple, which was built in honor of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity. In India, some people worship her daily. As we approached the temple, we purchased flowers to offer the goddess and we removed our shoes in the street since you must be barefoot to enter. Walking into the temple, I felt a sense of calmness that I haven’t been able to channel since I arrived. Powerful energy. We offered our flowers and received some in return that had been blessed. We each also received a touch of red powder on our foreheads. Exiting the temple, we fell back into the hustle of the city, but I was quite pleased to have been able to find some peace among the chaos. Our evening ended with dinner in southern Bombay at a traditional Indian restaurant. We returned home late and immediately fell asleep to prepare for what the next several days would have in store. More on that soon!

Back after 2 days

After two days of being sick, I finally made it back with the group today. It may have been a bit ambitious, but a worthwhile experience. I have pages of thoughts to write, but I can barely keep my eyes open (it is only 8pm). Look out for more blogging and photos tomorrow from my day in the slums, and by that I mean my day in an open sewer that a few thousand people just happened to live in.

Chembur

Today is Raksha Bandhan – Brother and Sister’s Day. It’s a day when a sister ties a red bracelet, or rakhi, around her brother’s wrist in exchange for candy and money. It must be a big deal because shops are closing early and we had to move some site visits to Friday. Luckily, Americares invited us to accompany their mobile clinic unit to another slum area called Chembur. Dr. Patel and his intake assistant were setting up to see between 100-150 patients that day. It was a pleasure watching them work. The two of them were pros. Patients who immediately started lining up outside the office were seen systematically, one-by-one. Our group of five (everyone else was sick back at the hotel) quickly left the clinic and went off exploring the community.

Chembur is a world different from Chandilivi. It made me realize that even among slums, there is a hierarchy. While Chandilivi was a quiet and kempt living community, the hour we spent in Chembur was engulfed in kids and chaos. Trash was everywhere. The smell from open sewage lines down narrow residential corridors permeated the air. Then again, we get used to it. Nobody held their nose or complained about the conditions. After all, people live here. And they seemed happy. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t help them achieve better livelihoods. It’s just that nobody appeared to be wallowing in despair. Humans are resilient and adaptable to environments. The kids we saw were energetic and playful like they would be anywhere else. Some spoke English and became our mini-tour guides. This is what I think when I want to be optimistic. When that slips away, I worry about my voyeuristic motives. What do these people gain from me being here? Who do I think I am to come to where they live, take pictures, and get on a bus back to my fancy hotel? What was the point of this?

The Passion to Serve, The Ability to Deliver

Wednesday we started our morning at AmeriCares India, an organization which provides free medical services across the country to the most needy. Their work encompasses three pillars: free primary care services, medication distribution, and natural disaster relief. Today we were accompanying their mobile medical van to one of it's weekly stops to a housing area near the Chandivili Pipeline area of Mumbai. The van provides basic care to residents and distributes medicines to the community. While there, our group helped to create maps of the community counting each home and noting down landmarks. These maps would help the medical staff at AmeriCares to better understand and serve their community, as they would be able to pinpoint hotspots of disease and locate patients more easily. Once arriving on site at in the slum neighborhood it was clear to me why maps were needed. This community was a collection of small alleyways with many twists and turns almost resembling a maze. As our group set out to complete our maps I was surprised at how nice some of the streets were. The houses all were made of concrete and each had a door or front gate sometimes with a patterned piece of fabric draped over. Some homes were painted beautiful bright colors and some had pretty tiles helping to stand out from the rest. Peering in to some homes we could a see large screen televisions and satellites resting on the roofs. While definitely a slum compared to our standards, this place was not as bad as I had imagined. Walking the streets most residents greeted us and some wondered what we were doing and tried to help. The community also had many small local shops and businesses such as produce stands, chicken shops, convenience stores and even beauty parlors.

I was very excited about this project as I felt the work that AmeriCares is doing in India is truly a perfect model of community oriented primary care, which has been focus of my studies over the past two years. It was very exciting seeing this concept come to life in the slums of Mumbai. I was also very impressed with the technology that AmeriCares was using. They have all electronic medical records and use a fingerprint identifying technology to link patients with their record. For an organization working in such sparse conditions this was amazing to see as it was way more innovative than anything I've seen in the States. This immediately reminded me of some of the cutting edge solutions and models that Community Health Centers in the U.S. are using to deliver better quality patient care to the most underserved populations. It's a reminder to all that despite that fact that best practices many times come from large medical institutions, it's mostly these grassroots organizations who are testing out models in the field that we should be looking to for solutions. 

On Thursday, we got to visit another community that AmeriCares works in. More of a camp, this neighborhood was quite different from the first place we visited. Houses here were more make shift with no real doors or solid structures in place. Small alley ways were lined with large drain pipes which women used to wash clothing and dishes as well as for cleaning and brushing teeth. Chickens, goats and dogs roamed freely around and many wide open areas were covered in trash and litter. Immediately upon exiting the bus, a group of children began to follow us around. A few spoke English quite well and acted as our unofficial tour guides, showing us the schools, the clinics and the play ground area. They were all so sweet and very fascinated with our group, we smiled and took many pictures with them which they loved! I wish I could have given them something, and this was a fact that all of us struggled with afterward. We had brought candy along but as we were leaving the crowd got too large and intense for us to hand it out safely. We had felt guilty for basically going on a 'slum tour' and then riding off in our air conditioned bus. But the problems were so overwhelming we didn't know where to even start. We all agreed that the best thing we could do was to talk about it, to educate people and raise awareness of what we had seen and support organizations such as AmeriCares which are working from the ground up to make a real difference for these people.

A mango tree of ideas, disparities and burgeoning solutions

India truly is a laboratory for non-governmental initiatives that all seem to be filling a necessary gap in services where government resources fall short.  Today was our first day of classes in the field and we were introduced to three organizations who are all attempting to attack the multifaceted issues of poverty in their own distinct way. Each organization had differing funding structures and missions, but also seem to be competing for the same non-profit dollars.

I was particularly impressed by Under the Mango Tree, UTMT, who trains rural farmers to put bee boxes on their farms to increase pollination and sell the honey produced.  It’s such a simple idea to increase revenue generation and improve product yields all at the same time.  It is a hybrid organization with a social entrepreneurial and non-profit framework.  Vijaya Pastala the founder explained how she named the organization Under the Mango Tree because her initial meetings were under mango trees where ideas were generated. 

UTMT engages local partners who have already established farmers’ cooperatives to disseminate awareness of and utilizing the indigenous Indian bee, Apis cerana indica to produce honey and increase crop pollination—both income generation initiatives.  Indigenous bees are best because they are less susceptible to diseases and adverse weather conditions than non-native species.  This is particularly brilliant in a time where farmers are often pressured to produce crops at a faster rate—the Apis cerana indica takes about one year to start producing sufficient honey.  In fact, because they use indigenous bees, the farmers do not have to use antibiotics to sustain the hives as is the case with non-indigenous bees.  Therefore the honey produced by the farmers working with UTMT is antibiotic free.  The non-profit arm of the organization trains farmers throughout their first year of participation to ensure success.  This small, young organization (since 2009) has experienced 70 percent retention among farmers who are seeing a positive return on investment.   I was encouraged by the multilayered approach to training, dissemination and community support utilized by Under the Mango Tree and look forward to charting their sustainable success. 

The second organization offered a creative means to developing and empowering innovative solutions. Be Fund produces financial support to rural community members who apply with a creative solution to an identified problem.  Unlike Under the Mango Tree, Be Fund is supported by private philanthropic dollars and provides up to $10,000 to qualified community members—who has 3 years to repay the loan. The program offers support services to empower the entrepreneur to succeed.  Their projects included a woman who started a community health center in a shantytown, a gentleman who developed a plastic recycling program in his rural village and a man who bought a truck to transport village produce to local markets.  Be Fund also provides a training program for young people to develop their creative entrepreneurial skills.  

While the last two organizations approached development from the ground, the final organization approached social issue surrounding education by attempting to improve the efficiency of the non-profit education sector.  ATMA offers business management support to partnering organizations. They attempt to increase resource training among the non-profits in Mumbai.

These three organizations offer three distinct approaches to tackling some of the social issues in India.  Throughout the entire presentation, I wondered why the Indian NGO sector is so large and why the government sector falls short of providing such services.  It is the same question I would ask in the US or anywhere with large income and social disparities. 

This became particularly apparent later in the day when we ran into four street children—one an emaciated baby being held by a boy who appeared to be no older than 6 or 7 years old accompanied by two young girls—all clearly suffering from malnutrition and likely on their own.  I still can’t comprehend why in 2012 such disparities continue to persist. And while I am encouraged to see the non-profit sector step-up and fill the gap, there is so much work to do…and miles to go before we sleep.

Mapping Slums

Mumbai is an extremely dense city. Almost 12 million people cram in less than 603 sq km. (Some perspective: Delhi has 11 million living in 1,500 sq km; DC has 618,000 people in 177 sq km). In this extremely dense city, most surveys estimate 50-60 percent of the population live in slums. Slums are makeshift communities, almost always on illegally squatted land, for urban dwellers who cannot afford legal housing. The conditions are squalid and lack most essential public infrastructure. The open sewage system and inescapable trash make the smell unbearable in the heat. Single-room homes that could house up to 10 people are commonly sheltered under blue tarps and corrugated irons. There are slums of different sizes, populations, and degree of squalor scattered throughout Mumbai. Dharavi, which we will visit on Friday, was the largest in Asia (apparently it’s now surpassed by the Karachi slum in Pakistan).

Here’s the catch: since slums are established on trespassed land, the government cannot officially provide services like trash pickup and medical care. That’s where NGOs come in to fill the gap.

Our first NGO visit was in the AmeriCares India office in Andheri. AmeriCares is a US-based nonprofit organization that provides medical relief during emergency disaster situations, global medical assistance, and free care. AmeriCares India in Mumbai currently sets up mobile clinics every 15 days in slum areas. Everyone was impressed with AmeriCares’ advanced use of technology to help it serve patients. The organization has adopted biometric tools to track patient visits and are about to launch a cloud-based electronic medical record system called Easy Clinic. That’s more than I can say about many US practices!

Our task for the day was to map the number of homes in areas of the Chandilivi slum AmeriCares is planning to expand into. Once they have an idea of the landscape, staff will go back to further investigate the makeup of individual households. This allows them to identify at-risk patients such as malnourished kids and pregnant women. Eva, Vidisha, and I were assigned an area near a high school. We were accompanied with AmeriCares Medical Director, Dr. Purvish Parikh, and several other staff. Dr. Parikh is a world-class oncologist who was most recently the chief of oncology at Tata Memorial in Mumbai. You would think someone like him would be satisfied with their accomplishments. Nope. When Dr. Parikh turned 50, he retired from hospital care to pursue a new avenue of influencing community-level change. Dr. Parikh’s humor and easygoing demeanor carried us through our first (nervous) walk through a slum. As it happened, this trek was surprisingly relaxing. It wasn’t the chaos I expected. The neighborhood was quiet and the residents were friendly. We spent the afternoon learning mapping techniques, taking pictures, and trying to imagine what it must be like living here.

Bringing Wealth and Prosperity to India

The start of our second full day in Mumbai was eye-opening even though we never left the hotel. By now you might have read from other posts about our meetings with three trail-blazing India NGOs: Under the Mango Tree, Be! Fund, and ATMA. These meetings were truly inspiring. The women who came to us were so impressive in the way they communicated their organizations' mission, as well as their own passions. Over chai and cookies, our class devoured each hour with questions ranging from specifics about business operations to details about how the women leaders managed to balance work and family. One theme I kept picking up was the power of peer-learning as a way to spread and sustain their efforts. UTMT uses experienced bee farmers to train new farmers, Be! Fund hosts meetings for their young entrepreneurs to share ideas and learn from each other, and ATMA has alumni on staff to help new partners navigate the process. I felt so energized (but hungry) about the meeting marathon!

Afterwards, our team climbed into what could only be described as a Magic-School-Bus-meets-Hippie-Van on our way to Bandra district for shopping. There were plenty of shops but I had the best time people watching during a 10 min downpour. After a couple hours we were picked up (by a different bus) to head to the Mahalaxmi Temple. The Hindi temple is a place where people pray for wealth and prosperity, both spiritual and monetary. It seemed like a good way to bookend our meetings with the Indian NGOs that seek to bring the people of India the same.