I believe that a person’s world view is their perspective and it is this which infringes on how they approach people and places. Through this fellowship, I have met such a wide range of persons, not only within the fellowship, but also outside the fellowship via Acumen’s contacts in New York, and now in Delhi.

Often there are conversations about Delhi, debates about loving or hating the city or the age old comparison between Delhi and Mumbai. Where would one want to live? What can be done about Delhi’s pollution, overall dirtiness, beggars, cows in the street, etc? Where does one get a good glass of wine?

I sometimes tell people that Delhi is the best place I have ever lived overseas for amenities and activities. (I also believe it is a dynamic city in its own right.) Often I get a look or comment of disbelief. Yet when I begin to rattle off the other places I have lived (Jalalabad, Afghanistan; Akhaltsikhe, Georgia; Kokand, Uzbekistan; Ziway, Ethiopia, etc.) then they begin to nod their head.

What I find most interesting is the first gut reaction that people have to my statement. Delhi can’t possibly be the “best place”, as in their frame of reference it may be compared to NYC, London, or even their home town. Never the places I mention, which to be fair, most people haven’t heard of any way.

Perspective plays such a large role in how a person approaches living in and relating to people from another country. One hears various assessments of a country based on this perspective, opinions that range from being extremely open and accepting to downright ignorant and immature, in other cases.

This world view also seeps in to the work that we do. Are we still playing the age old game of Us vs. Them, Colonial vs. Native, or West vs. East? Observing another culture, whether in the workplace or outside, is one thing, but commenting in a non-constructive way begs the question…Isn’t it all just subjective? What is being said about this country and people can also be said about one’s own country and in the same tone and manner.

Is it possible to take one’s critical eye and turn it in on oneself and one’s own country or can it only be done when a person moves to another place and then all bets are off? At that point, everything can be reviewed, assessed and critiqued.

For those that have a narrow perspective, I hope that when they return to their countries they use new eyes and new perspectives to view their own homes in such a light and work towards the same improvements that they may wish upon their current hosts.

Perspective can make the world one way or the other, good or bad. For myself I strive to continue to widen mine, as through that I learn new ways of approaching life itself and that, to me, is priceless.

Given that I come from traditional development: Peace Corps, INGO, universities etc, it’s a question that I have thought of often and definitely more recently. Most specifically at the “Emerging Markets” Conference hosted by the Monitor Group a couple of weeks ago. There I met Markus, a German, setting up a social enterprise incubator in the Philippines.

He was a former IT business owner who had decided to switch gears to the social sector through a Masters program. He commented how mindsets were so dissimilar between a development school versus a business school, yet both brought value to the table if a middle ground could be found.

We had just listened to a panel on agriculture development that, to be frank, was a bit outdated and didn’t actually cover the innovation that is happening in the field. In discussing this with him, we both stated that so much has already been learned in the traditional development sector on many of these same topics, yet it seems to be disregarded.

Somewhere along the way there is a renaming, a re-categorizing and a realigning as if the sector was dealing with brand new issues. With so many people, with diverse backgrounds and skills entering this sector, trying to solve challenges, it is important to remember what has been determined already in traditional development.

For example, those designing products for Small Holder Farmers, can review the lessons learned by development organizations in marketing & selling treadle pumps. I encourage all new entrants to access internet resources, such as Rural Finance Learning Center, Eldis or CGAP, sites that track development policy, practice and research.

To make this social enterprise sector work the lessons learned from both traditional development and business need to be combined.

Is social enterprise a re-branding of the development sector? What do you think?

In the past 7 months, I have had the opportunity to visit several industrial parks in the two most industrialized and entrepreneurial states in India, namely Gujarat and Maharashtra. I would like to share some of my observations with you.

Most of the industrial parks house small manufacturing units that employ anywhere from 15 to a 100 people. All sorts of plastic and mechanical components are manufactured here which eventually are sold in domestic and international markets.

There are three types of employees, adult men, adult women and teenagers. The men tend to do the work that requires more brawn, like lifting heavy parts or working near furnaces and the women and young teenagers are mostly involved in finishing operations like cleaning and packaging.

The machines used to manufacture these components are often semi-automatic, much like an automobile line. Workers are needed to load and unload product at frequent intervals. The employees are semi-skilled and for their efforts they receive approximately Rs.100 to Rs. 150 a day for men and Rs. 80 to Rs.100 for women. That’s approximately $2 to $3 per day. There are 2 shifts, each lasting 12 hours with two ten minute breaks for tea and 30 minutes for lunch. There are four off-days a month.  Some of the workers are migrants from the more impoverished states of India and often sleep in the same factories where they work.

Most of the units are covered with a layer of black grime, a combination of dust, oil and some unknown substance. Chemicals are strewn all over the place and the air in these factories feels heavy with fumes from machines.

This is not a scene from a Dickens novel, but is in fact the real status of a majority of small scale manufacturing sector in India.

I asked some of the workers how they manage to work for such long hours in these conditions. Their response is often a shy smile, a nod of the head with their fingers pointing towards their stomach. Yes, we all have to eat, an unfortunate necessity for existence.  Many of the migrant workers are happy to have a job where they can earn enough to support their families that are left in their home states.  They save assiduously and send home anywhere from Rs. 1000 ($20) to Rs. 1500 ($30) per month, critical funds that are needed to provide food and other essentials for their families.

The factory owners claim that they need to control costs in order to compete with cheap imports from China and that they cannot afford to clean up their factories or offer higher wages.

Sure, the workers could organize and demand better wages and conditions, but most of them are temporary workers and often do not have the wherewithal to launch a coordinated effort. Labor laws and workplace safety laws exist, but enforcement is a huge challenge mainly due to corruption and a shortage of labor inspectors in a country that has millions of such units.

Intellectuals are of the view that this is a part of industrial development and that every country goes through the sweatshop stage. They argue that businesses need to grow and gain profits that will enable them to pay more and maintain cleaner factories. Furthermore, a job today is much more valuable than none. I have been told that I must not apply my “first world” concepts at this point in time of India’s development.

What should we (i.e the development community) do about all this? Should we stick to our mandate of selling valuable products and services to the BoP and just ignore this? Can we try to influence governments? Can we insist that the products our social enterprises produce have to be manufactured in clean factories where labor laws are followed?

What are your thoughts?

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.