Jacqueline Novogratz recently returned from a visit to South Asia. Following is an excerpt of her journal from India. To read the complete journal, click here.
April 5, 2006 - Delhi, India
First thing in the morning, we meet with Satyan Mishra, founder and CEO of Drishtee Dot Com, an innovative technology company with a current network of 1,000 rural telekiosk franchises and an aspiration to reach 10,000 in the next two years and 30,000 in the next five. The idea of Drishtee is to create a telekiosk system across rural India as an entry point to distribute not only information and services but also products. The company itself is six years old so we are at similar points in our organizational development - both poised and focused for scale. Acumen Fund recently made a significant equity investment in Drishtee and now owns 25% of the company. This is one of our first visits as joint owners. The purpose is to consider how best to work together on some of Drishtee’s key challenges: financing for kiosk owners (where we have more expertise) and connectivity/power issues (for which the purpose of today is more understanding than problem-solving).
Early morning we pile into the four-wheel drive vehicle and start moving like an army ant through the roads of New Delhi, though more slowly and chaotically than ants would ever go - the traffic is unruly, aggressive and tired all at once, a mix of cars and bicycles, motorcycles and trucks, three-wheelers and buses punctuated by random donkey carts and even elephants as we move out of the city. Our driver keeps his thumb on the horn, just to add our own voice to the noise and combustion.
Satyan is a real-deal entrepreneur. His current roll-out scheme is inspired by knowing who people are. Drishtee goes into a community, where it has residents sell Drishtee services for a specified period of time. The top salesperson is offered the opportunity to purchase a franchise given that he or she not only has proven marketing skills and understanding of the product, but also hunger - and he or she comes with an initial customer base. The Drishtee entrepreneurs then move through three categories that allow them to add product categories, from basic photography to health insurance services, over time. Indeed, incremental commitment to what Drishtee is doing creates a powerful network of franchisees, but it also enables people to bring on services when they are ready to do so. He also has learned that the best way to insinuate a service like a telekiosk is to start small, asking low commitment from the community and then adding products over time.
We visit one of the Drishtee franchisees, a 24-year-old computer technician named Anuj. He operates a kiosk on the second floor of an office building on the main road in a medium-sized town so that there are as many bullocks pulling carts as there are cars and trucks rumbling down outside. Anuj shows us his system and takes our photo, charging about fifty cents to give us a printed copy and another fifty cents to send the photo via email. He is proud, organized, a good worker. Not a lot of people come to use his services while we are there but he says that’s because it is the middle of the day. He typically has 25 or more people use the computer services and is focused on increasing sales in the coming months. His life has changed since starting a Drishtee franchise - in terms of sales, the community he feels part of, his own ambition. His goal is to start his own computer center once he’s earned enough profits from this venture with Drishtee.
We next go to a tiny, poor village where the Drishtee operator keeps his computer in a very small room right past the courtyard where he keeps his cows and rooster. The cows don’t seem to mind his presence, and the villagers don’t seem to mind walking through them to get to the computer. I imagine the rural villagers opening the world in the little room with the computer and the ambitious entrepreneur looking out.
I’ve been thinking a lot about C.K. Prahalad and his theories on the Bottom of the Pyramid. He made a powerful contribution to the world in providing a new framework for thinking about the poor. At the same time, simply selling goods to the poor will not change poverty on a large scale. We must link not only consumption to the poor but also savings, investments, and income, for there are no other real ways to get at problems of poverty on a large-scale basis.
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