A good day for human rights in America

I teared up a lil bit reading this article today.

In 2008, I watched the numbers come in for Obama at 7am from a consulate gathering in India.  After swelling with pride for my country for the first time in my voting-age life and taking a few euphoric calls from Kenya, I called home to express my excitement.

The tone of my mother's voice when she picked up the phone took the wind completely out of my sails: she said she couldn't be truly happy about the victory because California's Prop 8 had passed the same day.  Coming from a woman brought up in the '50s in a Catholic household in Westchester, not her California-raised hippie liberal daughter, this sentiment reminded me how little the Obama victory actually symbolized a nation moving forward, and how much work there was to be done.

Two and a half years later, mom should be damn proud of her home state.  NY has done what CA couldn't do: nurtured a champion of the cause (Andrew Cuomo), organized a coalition of disconnected lobbying organizations, garnered support and muscle across party lines and overpowered the formidable force of the Catholic Church.  All this sure seems like it would be harder in an east coast state that contains Wall Street than a west coast state that contains the Castro*... so basically what I'm trying to say is, nice work, New York.  California, get your shit together.

Also, a shout-out to my father's employer of 35 years, Xerox, which made a significant contribution to winning the first Republican vote by endorsing the bill.  My school's LGBT club does a lot of work to promote and collaborate with companies that support equality for all their employees, and it's nice to see corporations standing up for what they believe in. (Hint hint, Exxon Mobil.)


*Obviously I know it's a bit more complex than this.  But it's still embarrassing to be a Californian when it comes to this issue.

And now, to Nicaragua

Oh, hey there blog.  It's been a while.  A year and a half, to be precise.  Sorry about that - business school turned out to be a little busier than expected.  But now that I'm back in developing country land, it seems only reasonable to start you up again for the moment.

The 5-second update is that I've been in my first year of the MBA program at Duke's Fuqua School of Business for the past 9 months.  I'm concentrating in Social Entrepreneurship and Finance, participating in way too many extracurriculars, and taking advantage of every possible opportunity to go abroad.  That has manifested itself in a two-week consulting trip to Brazil over spring break, and now my internship at an impact investing firm in Nicaragua called Agora Partnerships.

I'll save the long detailed update on Agora and my work for later, and for now will suffice with periodic random musings about life in Managua.  Up first: the fascinating life stories of taxi drivers.

It seems that there are two types of cab drivers in Managua: super sketchy and super overqualified.  The other interns and I have been warned over and over about the dangers of taking unknown cabs from the street in Managua (which we do anyway), so it's safe to say that there are a lot of bad cabs out there.  At the same time, the economic situation here has worsened so steadily over the past few years that unemployment has taken its toll, particularly on the higher educated sector of the workforce.

Unemployment in Nicaragua

http://www.indexmundi.com/nicaragua/unemployment_rate.html

The result: people with PhDs driving taxis to make a living.  In the past week I've met an agricultural engineer, a doctor, and a dance instructor who spent three years in San Francisco.  Fascinating, vibrant people with amazing life stories, but rough times.

I'll pontificate more later on what this overqualification issue means for entrepreneurship and innovation in the Central American economy, since that's what I'm working on every day.

New fiesty blog post

What do sleeping bags, neon green laptops, nipples and tricycles have in common?  Hint: they're not going to collectively eliminate poverty.


http://www.indiadevelopmentblog.com/2010/02/another-innovation-really.html


Kind of reminds me of the brilliant lists of accessory items and luxury goods that are going to solve the world's human rights problems over at Wronging Rights.

The informed giving minefield

Today my brother decided he wanted to start doing some charitable giving, and made the mistake of asking me for advice. 


He opened up something of a minefield. A couple potential work projects have gotten me interested in thinking about informed/strategic giving and trying to work out the best ways to help philanthropists give better. This deviates significantly from my "the market will solve everything" social entrepreneurship approach to development, but maybe that's a good thing.


My off-the-cuff, unresearched response is below - I'd be interested in other perspectives on how to advise people on giving now, as the social sector struggles to get up to speed on creating a process for giving effectively.


Dude, big question.  The development sector is still very much working out how to help people sift through the mass of organizations asking for money to find the ones that will give the most bang for their buck.  There are two main categories of issues here - accountability (whether or not an org is corrupt) and effectiveness (how well the money you donated gets spent).


For now, I'd probably suggest going one (or both) of a couple ways. For bigger organizations, there are a few groups that evaluate and rate charitable groups to help individual donors give. One that has a good rep (and their methodology looks pretty solid) is Charity Navigator. They don't actually enable you to donate on their site, which other charity aggregators do, but frankly you're better off finding charities you're interested in and donating directly, rather than allowing some of your money to go into the aggregator's operating costs.  This site will help you donate to big organizations ($1M+) that depend a lot on individual donations ($500k+ per year).  One Indian counterpart to this is GiveIndia, which focuses heavily on the accountability and transparency aspects (since those are arguably a bigger deal in the Indian social sector than the US one).


The other way is to donate to smaller organizations, which are less often rated on sites like this and have lower impact, but your money goes further and they often need it more.  I tend to donate to friends' causes during their fundraising drives (assuming accountability based on my personal knowledge of the person), or occasionally to Kiva (I find their gift certificate program to be a particularly appealing donation slash awareness building mechanism for friends who don't give).  The Causes app on Facebook is also interesting (mostly because we all love a good social media gimmick, and I have a friend who works for them), but I don't know how much gets ciphoned off for their operating costs (see above note).


One other piece of advice I feel compelled to drive home as an organizational development consultant is that uninformed givers often go for organizations that list lower overheads, thinking that more of their money will go directly to programs instead of to salaries and office clipboards. This sounds great but really just keeps organizations from developing the proper infrastructure and talent to be able to do their jobs better, so they end up being much less effective in their work.


Can't you imagine how much my brother must have enjoyed getting that response after asking the simple question "hey bleeding heart sister, what kind of stuff should I be looking for when I want to donate?"

CSR in India has a lot of catching up to do

The first ever Asian CSR Congress, hosted by the Centre for Social Responsibility and Leadership in Mumbai, has proven to be a bit of a disappointment.  Maybe I was just coming off my high from the Khemka Forum for Social Entrepreneurship (which also looked to be disappointing until a couple of dynamically interactive late sessions), or maybe I’m noticing a starker difference between the social innovation crowd and the corporate crowd than I used to… but I have a feeling it’s more because in India, corporate social responsibility is still in a very early stage with a lot of catching up to do.

The event started by getting my hopes up with two of its pieces of distributed literature – the first CSR rating of Indian corporates, by Karmayog, which boosts companies’ rankings if CSR embedded in their business operations; and an announcement of the upcoming global tour (including India) by the purported father of CSR 2.0, Dr. Wayne Visser of CSR International.

However, it then proceeded to dash those hopes with a painfully prepubescent viewpoint of CSR expressed by many of the delegates.  Case studies by the corporate foundations that dominated the conference were embarrassingly blatant in valuing brand building over strategic CSR (really, you’re building another set of schools and hospitals to slap your name on?  That’s, like, so last decade).  The peanut gallery of CSR heads of major corporations made a field day of bashing efforts to improve profits through sustainable business strategy – when one speaker tried to discuss the difference between “CSR” and “sustainability” in his company’s efforts, an audience member termed them something like “doing good for good's sake, vs. making money off of doing good.”  As if the second option was some slimy, underhanded workaround, rather than just good business.  For real?

Even my excitement about the 25 case studies on CSR in Indian companies in CSRL’s publication “CSR Excellence,” was destroyed when I heard a rumor (unconfirmed)* that the cases aren't picked from independent research - companies PAY to write their own case studies and have them published.  To the tune of $1000 a pop.

I don’t want to rub salt in the wound by blasting the facilitation of the conference, but…  people cutting each other off, speakers refusing to let delegates finish their questions and telling them they “are free to not listen to what I’m saying,” sessions lasting an hour into the lunch break – is this really what happens when you let the corporates play in the social sandbox, or vice versa?  I thought this fusion of the two sectors was supposed to be the new age, not the way to back track to petty, last-generation arguments?

I’m still holding out hope that this is just a small, biased crowd among a larger movement towards strategic CSR that will keep up with the global tidal wave.  But in my first foray into the Indian CSR community, it’s not the promising scene I had imagined.


*Please note that this has been modified from its original posting - I originally claimed that I had learned this as a fact.  Rather, it is a rumor I heard from a delegate at the conference, and I am still in the process of verifying.

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.