Editor’s note: This post first appeared on VisionSpring’s Business in a Bag blog. Acumen Fund is an investor in VisionSpring, having made them a $500,000 loan in 2006. Thanks to Miriam Stone for giving us permission to cross-post this on the Acumen Fund blog.
BRAC, the largest non-profit organization in the developing world, is a dream partner for a small organization. But landing the partnership is only the first part. What happens next is where it gets interesting…VisionSpring’s Franchise Partner Manager Lalit Kumar reports from the field.
By Lalit Kumar
We often joke here at VisionSpring that working with BRAC is like landing a contract with Walmart. It’s the kind of opportunity that every small NGO dreams of – BRAC is known for its massive scale and incredible efficiency. This partnership will allow us to reach a huge new market of people in need in a time frame that would have previously been impossible. Now we just have to deliver!
We’ve been working with BRAC for two years now. For the last six months, we’ve been selling about 500 glasses per month by empowering BRAC’s network of Shashto Shebikas (community health volunteers) to sell our eyeglasses. Now, with our new plan to scale up, we will provide affordable glasses to almost ten million people in Bangladesh over the next three years.
Our biggest challenge by far is managing the inventory that BRAC needs. At the moment, we’re delivering about 30,000 pairs of glasses every four months, but soon we will need to deliver 30,000 every month. We are mainly focused on getting the glasses into Bangladesh, a complicated process involving multiple inspection agencies. A 2006 Doing Business (http://www.doingbusiness.org) report from the World Bank notes that when a Bangladeshi company imports goods, it has to prepare 16 types of documents and obtain 38 signatures, and that the whole process takes 57 days. I can tell from our experience that it hasn’t improve much in the last few years.
For example, we received a Letter of Credit from a bank in Bangladesh that was valid only from April through June. Simply getting it updated meant that we had to get signatures from BRAC’s bank in Bangladesh, VisionSpring’s bank in New York, VisionSpring’s offices in India and New York, and our vendor and inspection agency in China.
We at VisionSpring are working hard to understand the whole process and constantly improve our delivery time. The first order took us more than 9 months to clear customs and make it in to Bangladesh, and the next order took about 6 months. Our goal is to get the process down to 3 months, which we are able to achieve in other developing countries where we work. We are certainly going through a period of adaptation, but it has been a very exciting time and I look forward to making more leaps of improvement.
After business school at the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), I was surprised to find that the challenges we face are the same as private sector businesses, only we are addressing them in some of the most challenging markets in the world. There is a reason that most private-sector companies haven’t tried to reach rural markets in Bangladesh; the start-up and logistics costs are simply too high. However, if our partnership with BRAC is successful, we will be able to provide affordable glasses and business opportunity to millions of people in Bangladesh. For us, it is well worth the struggle.