But where do the women do their business?

Every morning, like a silent, stolid army, the fisherman families and slum residents living on the beach come down to the breakers to take their morning toilet run.  A trove of squatters spots the landscape, some relieving themselves quickly and rushing off to work, some taking their time, staring out at the horizon like it’s a good bathroom reader.  As I run along I dodge as many turd piles as trash pieces.  It’s one way to get a rough gauge for the amount of diarrhea in the community.

I noticed this morning that while seemingly all the men and most of the children (male and female) participate unashamedly in this ritual, the women are entirely absent.  Where do they do their business in the morning?  How do they get rid of it? And more importantly, if there’s a way for them to use the toilet without using the ocean turning the beach into what is surely every public health professional’s nightmare, why couldn’t the men and children do the same?

The much-acclaimed World Toilet Organization is tackling some of these issues.  It sees the “toilet taboo” as one of the biggest barriers to improving sanitation, and seeks to popularize the work of building and maintaining toilets for the 2.5bn people it estimates lack them, through such kitchy marketing campaigns as World Toilet Day and The Big Squat.  There’s also the World Toilet College for toilet design and maintenance capacity development, and the annual World Toilet Summit & Expo.  It seems to be working – they’ve gotten a ton of press and a number of avid followers – but these things take time.

Without much knowledge of the subject, my guess is that the biggest issue is the social one – convincing people that they need toilets, that open defecation is unsanitary and will lead to disease.  Is there some opportunity here in the disparity between women’s and men’s pooping routines?  I guess it depends on where the women really go, and whether their methods are any more sanitary than the beach.  Until then my neighboring slums will continue to use the ocean as their toilet-cum-garbage can, and I will continue to dodge the turds.

The magical formula to becoming an entrepreneur

I finally broke through months of procrastination and started posting to the India Development Blog, my organization's unofficial blog on India, development, microfinance, and whatever else pops into our researchers' heads - which happens to get about 200 hits/day.  Re-posted below, and original post can be found here.




I have a gripe with all this buzz on entrepreneurship.

Don't get me wrong - I love it.  As a closet wannabe social entrepreneur, I follow the blogs, read the articles and attend the conferences when I can find an excuse.  The latest was today’s IFMR entrepreneurship summit, Strides (shameless plug), which featured panels on starting up and sustaining enterprises, plus a rousing presentation by Manish Tripathi of the Mumbai Dabbawalas.  What I’ve noticed in these forums is that, in a commendable effort to be inspiring, the stories of successful entrepreneurs tend to glaze over the challenges and obstacles associated with starting a venture.  The profiles present such a glowing picture: all you have to do is be walking along minding your own business, have  a defining moment where you discover some great gap in society, put your mind to filling the gap, develop an innovative solution, and voila: you’re showered with capital, partnerships, technical support and awards.  Sure, there’s the requisite list of ways to avoid the pitfalls: believe in yourself, think outside the box, take risks, persevere through the rough spots, and the ubiquitous 'every failure is a stepping stone to success.'  But beyond these vague conceptual insights, it is very difficult to discern what exactly makes Steve Jobs or Ratan Tata succeed while thousands of others try and fail.

These stories get everyone pumped up, but my hunch is that they gloss over some components of what it really takes to be successful as a start-up.  How much of it involves natural networking capability and charisma, or extraordinarily hard work, or simply being in the right place at the right time?  Are the examples replicable, or unique to the person and situation?  This line of thinking leads to the question business schools have been trying to answer for decades: can entrepreneurship be taught?

One potential consequence of these inspiring but potentially oversimplified examples is the kind of message they send to aspiring entrepreneurs. Bill Gates didn’t graduate from high school – does that encourage people to drop out in the hopes of following in his footsteps?  The Mumbai Dabbawalas built an empire despite being largely illiterate, and their founder wasn’t educated past class 2 – great, but does that mean they didn’t have some other innate ability that enabled them to succeed?  On the one hand these images say 'it's possible to do it even without education,' but on the other they say 'don’t bother with school, you don’t need it.'  It almost seems like a modern 'get rich quick' scheme.  Sure, it works for the precious, lucky, talented few, but what about the rest of us mere mortals?

It would be great to see an emphasis on the hard parts of climbing the ladder alongside the motivational stories.  If everyone experiences rough patches, what specifically have these entrepreneurs done to overcome them?  What makes these stories different from all the stories of failure?  How much of it is really just up to chance?  This reality check might help set expectations and remind the next generation of entrepreneurs that while there are outliers, for most of us entrepreneurship is hard.  It takes more than a bright idea and a little diligence to become a successful entrepreneur.