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.

Kenya’s corruption and what it means for India

I recently got my hands on a book that is being referred to as “Kenya’s Watergate” (by Chris Blattman, at least), banned in the nation according to some accounts: It’s Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong, former Africa correspondent for the FT.  The book names and shames members of the current administration and brings to light some interesting (though not totally new) insights about the state of corruption in Kenya.  Since said administration’s election shenanigans got me evacuated from the country last year, needless to say, I was fascinated. 

I also recently chatted with an Indian acquaintance who used to work in western and central Africa about the differences between corruption in daily life in India vs. Africa (disclaimer – I hate generalizing issues about “Africa” as if the whole continent is one homogeneous country.  That said, the similarities in corruption attitude among different African countries are often shockingly close).  His impression was that Indian corruption is a little less blatant, a little more under the table - something unusual for a culture known for its bluntness.  He also asserted that Indians tend to be more “content” with the level of corruption in their lives – because, for example, the fees for paying off a cop are usually lower than the official fines for petty offenses (as argued here).  In Africa, on the other hand, corruption is much more over the table.  And when people get fed up with it, they riot.

Of course, the rioting rarely produces solutions.  I certainly wouldn’t advocate it as the appropriate strategy for India.  But in both countries, I wonder what can be done to make people madder about the everday corruption they face.  Mad enough that they will do something about it, and do that thing consistently.  In both countries you see the momentum behind anti-corruption flare up now and again, just to subside as quickly as it erupted.  Take the aftermath of 26/11: I remember seeing Indian citizens, particularly the youth, stepping up to combat the corruption and security issues that had led to the tragedy, through mediums from Facebook to traditional media to business plan competitions!  Today, as we approach the first anniversary of the Mumbai attacks, I wonder where that outrage and drive to action disappeared to.  And I wonder how to bring it back.

Chief hippie?

I can’t decide my take on this “chief guru of life change” executive naming trend.  Some of the most exciting emerging social ventures seem to enjoy coming up with creative yet somewhat ridiculous-sounding titles for the people who run their companies. This was brought to light by a somewhat recent McKinsey interview of Adam Werbach, who seems to know a lot about this stuff.  He highlighted two cool sustainability-focused for-profits, method and Seventh Generation.  Seventh Generation’s founder calls himself the “chief inspired protagonist” (seriously?), and method’s is the “chief greenskeeper” (seriously.).  These guys are arguably two of the major players in the triple bottom line/social venture/sustainability space, and this is what they call themselves?  I know they’re run out of San Francisco and Vermont and all, but really.  I’m trying to figure out what the next guy down gets called – vice inspired protagonist?  Semi-inspired protagonist?  Chief inspired realist?  The hierarchy could get really confusing.

In an industry like social enterprise that is trying to be more professional, more respected and a bigger player, I would expect this kind of stunt to be laughed off stage.  What kind of private sector CEO would call herself a chief inspiration nurturer?  What kind of investor would give his money to the chief flowerchild?  It makes me angry because it seems that some of the best emerging social ventures are making light of the space and encouraging mockery at best, reinforcement of a flaky and poorly managed sector image at worst.

But then, despite myself, there’s something I unwittingly like about this fad.  (Don’t tell my future investors.)  There’s something Google-esque about it.  It implies a work environment where incredibly bright minds come up with groundbreaking ideas over fooseball and beanbag chairs.  (Perhaps this has its own challenges, but it seems to have worked for tech.)  And maybe that’s what attracts the bright minds to the social sector – the idea of business without business as usual.