Articles by Suraj Sudhakar

If you happen to meet someone who recently experienced an interaction with the BOP for the first time, invariably one of the insights they would share is that the poor are really smart. I had this Aha moment in early 2006 when my work at Villgro (formerly known as Rural Innovations Network) took me to the villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh, a state in North India. It was the first time in my life that I was interacting with impoverished farmers. I was touring the villages to better understand the market for an Insect Trap, an innovation incubated at Villgro. The poor inhabitants of these villages, not only amazed me with their understanding on the variety of problems they faced but also with the sheer ingenuity of  some of the solutions they had come up with.

My work at Villgro took me to villages around India and I re-lived this aha moment many times over until I had a much bigger Aha!

What in the world made me assume that the poor are dumb?

Obviously, what I had heard from the villagers was, in most of the cases, just common knowledge for them. In retrospect, I had these big aha’s because at some level I was prejudiced with the assumption that poor people did not know what their problems are,  if they did know about their problems, they were not articulate enough and even if they were articulate, they were not smart enough to solve the problem.

Sometimes our prejudices have a stronger influence on us than we think.  It is shocking to find out that many a times our prejudices dictate our thoughts and actions in spite of what we think we strongly believe in. From my own experience, I know that overcoming these prejudices have gone a long way in making me much more effective at the work I do.

In the fight to end poverty, I strongly believe that overcoming our prejudices about  the poor is as important, if not more, as the different poverty alleviation interventions themselves.

I think I can safely assume that a significant  majority of us have a goal oriented approach to living our lives. We all have different and unique world views but most of us do some version of goal setting before setting out to achieve them. Personal goals, professional goals, individual goals, family goals, institutional goals, national goals, financial goals, philanthropic goals,  spiritual goals, fitness goals, travel goals,… the list goes on. We set goals because we understand the importance of goal setting.

If you are following this blog,  I can make another assumption that, you definitely believe in making this world a better place for all humans! But have you really thought about a goal for the human family? Do we have such a goal? If not, what are we all working towards? I believe that there is at least one such goal. Allow me to introduce you to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I am surprised by the fact that many of us do not  know about the existence or the contents of this profound document (Full disclosure - I learned about the contents only about 8 months back when the Acumen Fellows read and discussed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in detail.) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948 as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.

I hope you agree that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a legitimate goal for all of us. If not we should use this forum to debate it.

If you believe in goals, you also know that one of the pre-requisites of achieving a common goal is that, not only should everyone involved be clearly aware of the goal, but they also know what is expected of them to achieve the goal. This goal is pretty straight forward - to achieve this goal, we not only have to know it and practice it but also try and ensure that every human knows about it and practices it.

Now that you know about it, do you think that everyone you know has heard about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? If not, I would encourage you talk about this important goal more often.

Karthik, one of my fellow fellows just forwarded me an interview with John Wood, the founder & CEO of Room to Read, an award winning international education  organization. John has the inspiring vision of providing educational access to 10 million children in the developing world.

In the interview John talks about  encouraging young social entrepreneurs he meets and ensuring that he does not point out flaws in their business models. John mentions how in the beginning of starting Room to Read, most people told him that his ideas would not work.  Though I have never met John personally, I was reminded of how he inspired me to continue in the social sector through his book.

I very clearly remember buying John’s book, “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World” in 2006 from a bookshop in Kochi, India. I had never heard of John Wood before but a title that suggested that there was another person who had left the IT sector for the social sector was reassuring. At that point in time most people would easily present counter arguments to my ideas on the social sector and try and convince me that I couldn’t have sounded more dumb! The book was an inspiring read and apart from other lessons, what I clung to most was that if such a super smart guy can believe that he has done the right thing, there must be something right about my decision to be in the social sector too.

I urge you all to read the interview and his book, “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World”

What should be the primary motive of a Social Enterprise - Maximizing social impact or ensuring enterprise sustainability or both? The debate is still on but I do sense this growing tendency amongst many of us (including me) to be more concerned with enterprise sustainability. We believe that if the enterprise is made sustainable, then it’s ability to create social impact automatically goes up. Nothing wrong with that, but shouldn’t we also be thinking of the of the “social” side of the enterprise?

The other day David Kuria, the founder CEO of Ecotact, walked into office and said, “Suraj! We need to do a demographic based study to understand people’s behaviour around accessing a toilet. We need to ensure that everybody can access a Ikotoilet!” (the pay-per-use toilet facilities built by Ecotact are branded as “Ikotoilet”)

My immediate thoughts - “We are already building toilets and maintaining them. We are already providing access to all. Why do we need to do a study? What more could we do? We have so many more toilets to build, so many systems and processes to put in place as we scale up and grow the Ikotoilet presence in other parts of Kenya.  More importantly should we be spending our already stretched out resources on doing a study? That too now?”

David continued - “For hygienic reasons all our Ikotoilet facilities have asian-style toilets but are asian style toilets comfortable for old people, pregnant women or for people with joint pains who find it difficult to squat?”

Very valid question which had honestly never crossed my mind.  While, my thinking continued to be around - do old people, pregnant women and people with joint pain constitute a large enough population to justify re-design of our toilets, David’s thinking was totally committed to improving access to toilets for everbody. I could sense my initial thoughts and questions melting and a sense of awe taking over in my head as I saw David deeply thinking of the “social” side of the enterprise.

(Kindly note that every Ikotoilet facility already has provisions for the disabled)

The Acumen Fund East Africa office recently hosted a breakfast meeting for all its investees. The motive of the breakfast was to provide Acumen’s investee organizations a platform to exchange ideas and explore avenues for collaboration. As an Acumen fellow I got a front row seat to see these brilliant entrepreneurs discuss issues and come up with solutions. The highlight for me was Ingrid Munro’s (Founder and Managing Trustee of Jamii Bora) response to the HR issues raised by some of the other investees, mainly around finding people (at all levels of an organization) willing to work for a social enterprise?

Ingrid suggested a tough but tested solution. She asked all the investees to search for future employees right at the BOP, amongst the poorest of the poor, a demographic that is often overlooked due to job descriptions that come with required skill sets and expected educational qualifications. She gave examples of how some of the poorest of her customers joined Jamii Bora on small jobs and then went on to lead some of the major departments (IT, finance etc) within the organization. Her examples clearly illustrated her contention that employees from the BOP are not only capable of doing small jobs but with the appropriate training & mentoring, they can also grow to take up senior management positions.

Ingrid’s strong belief in the innate ability of people living at the BOP is based on a simple truth – “The poor have to learn to survive and hence they just cannot afford to be dumb.” Ingrid opined that this survivor mentality combined with the hunger for opportunity to improve their lives makes people at the BOP bright prospective employees.

Before you answer the question I want to wish you a very Happy New Year. Now, please think about the question…

Do you have your answer? Is your answer, a “TOILET?”  If not, I am not sure if the statistic of 2.6 billion people lacking access to a toilet would strike you as a serious enough problem for you to take action.

I am tempted to quote more statistics but I believe I can convince you of the gravity of the problem if you can indulge me by participating in a small thought experiment – Think about a normal day in your life from the time you get up to time you go to bed. Now how does this day change if you had no access to toilets for the entire day? Seriously think about it. Maybe it didn’t change much because for some reason you are capable of dealing with the pressures of nature’s calls. But how does the same day look like if everybody else used whatever space they got (even others don’t have access to toilets on this imaginary day) to do their business, I mean go to the toilet? Again I request you to think deeply about it. I am guessing you are not having pleasant thoughts. While you are still thinking I would also like you to contemplate on why Mahatma Gandhi would have ever said that “sanitation is more important than independence.”

I ask you again, “What is the one thing you just cannot live without?”