Summer Spotlight: Roll Up Your Chinos and Add a Little Madness

Kyle is a summer associate in the Pakistan office for Acumen Fund.  He is also a Master of International Affairs candidate at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.  Prior to graduate school, Kyle worked as a management consultant at The Lucas Group in Boston and as a research assistant at MIT’s Security Studies Program.  He holds a BA in Middle East Studies and Politics from The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

Shahzad Iqbal gazed across Jassar Farm’s sprouting field of maize deep in rural Punjab where a new sprinkler system sputtered around in endless circles.  Without warning, he kicked off his sandals, rolled up his pressed chinos, and bounded through the muddy field toward the device, narrowly missing the rotating blast of water.  The rest of the management team, myself, and a pack of local villagers watched from a safe distance as the CEO of the Farms wrestled the beast into a position he found more agreeable.  After instructing his staff member on how to properly set up the system, he returned grinning, feet encased in rich mud.  “Look how beautifully it works. See the quality of those plants?  Never before in these fields.”

Ensuring proper plant quality to use as cattle feed is part of any Pakistani dairy farmer’s job, but then Shahzad Iqbal is not your average Pakistani farmer.  After graduating with an MBA from Pakistan’s elite Lahore University of Management Science (LUMS) at just 22 years of age, he began a 16-year career international climb through the operations of Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and British American Tobacco.  Before the age of 38, he sat at Union Bank where he successfully managed a team of over 2,500 responsible for 40% of all profit.  He was at the top of his game—highly educated, well paid, and well connected.

Then in 2007, Iqbal unexpectedly quit his job at the bank.  In a crisis of conscience, he realized that the corporate executive lifestyle was not compensating for his growing sense of personal mission to help his largely impoverished homeland of Pakistan.  The idea of Jassar Farms was born soon after, commencing months of intense research and a feverish search for financing until Acumen signed on.

As Batool Hassan eloquently described in a previous post, it is common for rural Pakistanis to own a few cows but the milk productivity of these animals is often up to a fifth lower than their cousins in more developed economies.  The disparity emerges from the highly advanced selective breeding techniques that Western farmers have developed and implemented.  With financing from Acumen Fund, however, Jassar Farms is playing catch-up by importing high-grade cow semen and embryos to breed a more productive dairy herd.  At the same time, it will sell quality semen produced on the farm to local farmers at affordable prices.  Within a few years, the Farm expects to multiply the amount of milk a poor Pakistani farmer can produce by several times.

From an American perspective, Iqbal fits a familiar archetype: Banker becomes disillusioned, quits his or her job, and joins the ministry or becomes a writer  (or starts a little non-profit call Acumen Fund).

But Pakistan is different.  As a Summer Associate without any prior experience in Pakistan, I did not fully understand Iqbal’s story until I found out that my own two-week project on the farm was longer than most urban Pakistanis will spend outside major cities in their entire lives.  By simple observation, it becomes clear that Pakistan’s disparity in wealth positively correlates with the urban and rural divide.

In many ways, Iqbal has become an outlier, spending most of the last three years out in the cow pens and hay fields of Jassar Farms with the goal of improving lives of Pakistan’s poor dairy farmers. “I’m completely mad.  You have to be in order to do this,” Iqbal disclosed with some measure of pride as he sat in the 120-degree heat at the farm.

Acumen Fund’s model of patient capital assumes that there are talented and passionate entrepreneurs who want to roll up their chinos to lift their countries up.  In the case of Pakistan and its divided culture, finding this type of leader is often one of Acumen Fund’s greatest challenges.  As Iqbal began washing his feet in a nearby irrigation canal, however, he proved that with a little bit of “madness” nothing is impossible.