The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (37 page)

We learned the power of having strong teams on the ground. Varun Sahni, our India country director, a brilliant young man in his thirties with a degree from Columbia who had spent his early career at Unilever, opened our office in Hyderabad, hired a team, and surrounded himself with some of the country's best minds in business-advisors who were also keenly focused on the work of serving the poor. Varun has the talent and skill to be successful in a traditional private equity firm, but his personal quest is to help create a new industry that promotes equitable development. Early on he identified Satyan Mishra, a visionary entrepreneur who was focused first and foremost on supporting the poor by building a large-scale information distribution system.

I remember meeting Satyan when we had coffee at a New Delhi hotel along with Tim Brown, the CEO of a major design company called IDEO. Tim, an understated Brit who was living in Palo Alto, California, and working with big consumer companies, saw in Satyan the same infectious combination of qualities that Varun and I did: passion, commitment, and big ideas. When Satyan left the table to take an urgent call, Tim whispered to me that we'd just met the real deal.

The 30-something, balding man with a black mustache and honest face who wore conservative glasses over his serious eyes and carried pens in his front pocket was not one to dream small. His vision was to establish a network of tele-kiosks, one in each of India's 650,000 villages. A tele-kiosk, he explained, was a small store where a local entrepreneur would set himself up with a computer, a phone, and a camera. He would sell a range of services, from computer training classes to international calls to taking family photographs and sending them to relatives over the Internet.

"Much of the rural areas are cut off from real information," he said, "but for India to prosper, we need to bring the 300 million poorest individuals into the global economy. Connecting them to information and skills is one way to do it."

At the time, his for-profit company, Drishtee, already had built 500 kiosks, and Satyan was looking for additional funding in a combination of equity and loans. Here was a man who understood not only the preferences of the poor, but also how to build distribution systems that would reach them in an affordable-and sustainable-way.

Satyan knew what he was talking about when he spoke of rural villages; he had grown up in one himself in Bihar, one of India's poorest states. His focus on understanding his customer base, moreover, was so fierce that he typically spent a month or so each year living in his home village so he could listen directly to the people to gain a better understanding of their needs. As a potential partner, he urged me to visit that village with him.

At that point, we'd invested $1 million in equity in the company and loaned it $600,000 to help it expand. About a year later, I visited with one of our founding board members, Cate Muther. By then, the number of kiosks had more than doubled, but we noticed that most of the local franchisees were men and wondered where the women were. Satyan explained that women were actually his most successful franchisees, but they had no access to financing because so many of them had never been registered for birth certificates when they were born (as opposed to their brothers, who were expected to get real jobs and places in society and therefore needed official documents).

We asked why women performed better than men.

"Women come to work early and they stay late," he said. "They are very serious about what they do and I think they work harder to succeed. Apart from that, most of a dollar earned by a woman goes right to the family. It's not the same for men. So everyone benefits when we support more women to do this work."

Cate and I brainstormed on how to raise the financing to extend to women. I called Maria Eitel, who ran the Nike Foundation, because that organization focuses specifically on women's economic situations, just as Cate's own foundation, Three Guineas Fund, does. Nike Foundation approved a $250,000 grant and Cate began spending many hours with the Acumen team and Drishtee to establish a larger lending capability to women that she herself would help finance.

Drishtee began to grow exponentially. By 2007, the enterprise was established in nearly 2,000 villages. Satyan invited me to visit his home village in Bihar. After an all-night delayed flight from New York to London, hours spent in Heathrow waiting, and another all-night flight to Delhi, I met two Acumen Fund team members, Ann MacDougall, our new general counsel, and Biju Mohandas, a former military doctor who knew India's rural areas. From Delhi, we took the 2-hour plane ride to Patna, the state's capital, and then started driving, this time on dirt roads riddled with potholes and covered with belching trucks and oxen carts, rickshaws, bicycles, and skinny men carrying enormous sacks.

Just outside Patna, the stench of garbage piled along the streets carried for miles. The refuse of civilization-paper, rotten fruit and plastic bags and cans-became part of the landscape, turning green fields into abstract paintings of blues and whites and browns more like a dirty moonscape than pastoral earth. We drove for 5 or 6 long, hot, and bumpy hours, and finally arrived at our tiny hotel, where we fell into our beds and then woke at dawn to drive another 2 hours to reach Satyan's village near Madhubani.

India is a contradiction of extreme wealth and extreme poverty living side by side. In Bombay, one of India's biggest billionaires was constructing a 27-floor mansion with parking for 168 cars, three helipads on the roof, and a staff of 600-all at a cost of a billion dollars. At the same time, 300 million people lived on less than a dollar a day. Bridging that gap and giving to India's poor, who represent a third of the world's people living in poverty, must become a priority for the nation's future. For Acumen Fund, it meant working harder with social entrepreneurs like Satyan to create the models that could help pave the way.

We had entered another world. Oxcarts and rickshaws moved slowly cutting through endless dirt roads bordering emerald fields. Women walked to the wells and holy men sat in front of temples, preparing for a religious festival. Only the very rich had electric generators, and even those who went to school told us the teachers never showed up.

When Ann asked one of the village women if she could use the bathroom, the woman led her to her backyard. The woman was by no means destitute. She lived in a brick house with separate bedrooms and her own walled yard. Ann told me she looked around to see where the out house was and it took her a moment to realize that there wasn't one. She looked back at the woman, who was happily waving her arm in a sweeping gesture to let Ann know that the entire yard was hers as a revered guest. She could squat in whichever part best suited her.

If this is what the better-off villagers did, Ann asked, how do the poorest ones take care of their hygiene? A doctor friend of Satyan's replied that open defecation was one of the biggest public health issues the area faced, reminding us that some health investments are best undertaken through effective awareness campaigns, not through medicines or direct services.

Against this backdrop, we sat in a circle under tall green trees outside Satyan's childhood home, cows lolling in the distance. Satyan pulled out his computer to show us the work he was doing to establish a business processing outsourcing (BPO) unit here. Already, he'd secured wireless, and sure enough, in this tiny village so far away from everything, we were able to check my e-mail and read the New York Times. Inside a small house, six young men sat inputting data for a bank in Delhi, all earning more than they had ever dreamed they could. A 17-year-old, too young to work at the BPO, introduced himself and showed us the Web site he had built.

Satyan took us to meet one of the kiosk entrepreneurs, a young man with a small face and pointed chin who greeted us with great warmth despite our arriving an hour and a half later than expected. The roads had flooded, and most were impassable. This wasn't a hindrance to his business, he informed us, because most people walked to his kiosk, where he sold photographs and computer services. He was bringing in more computers due to the high demand and had a phone to enable people to call whomever they wanted to. He also wanted to take us to a nearby town to see some of the art he sold through Drishtee Haat, the company's online crafts store.

As the sun was setting, we drove to meet some of the artists. Soon it was pitch-dark and impossible to see houses, let alone paintings, but we managed to fumble our way to one of the artists' homes. She came out with a scroll of paintings and two candles. The darkness alone made doing business impossible, and I felt a surge of frustration that something as simple as a single lightbulb could make all the difference yet be so inaccessible.

All of us, Satyan included, had an urge to try to fix every problem in the community. The children needed schools, and their mothers needed even more general education about health, hygiene, and nutrition. The farmers needed some form of health insurance so they could weather the inevitable catastrophes that befall a poor family and keep them in poverty forever. Satyan and I both are big dreamers. We can't help ourselves. But the conversation eventually turned to remembering what he was trying to do and what it would take to do it.

If Satyan was to succeed in creating a network of connections by having the tele-kiosks in even 10,000 villages, let alone 30,000 or each of the 650,000 villages across India, then his enterprise had to remain focused on one thing and do it better than anyone else. It required discipline and the humility to recognize that no single person can do everything. But if he did it, he had a chance to reach millions of people and change their lives fundamentally by helping them to help themselves, a goal worth focusing on and fighting for.

In 2008, Drishtee began expanding more quickly than Starbucks did in its early years, opening about four kiosks a day. By fall, the company was operating in more than 4,000 villages, creating more than 5,300 jobs and serving 7.5 million. What thrills me just as much is that the company is building a powerful distribution system through which it ultimately will be able to sell a multitude of products that can improve a low-income person's ability to change his or her own life. Acumen Fund's patient capital enabled Satyan to take great risks, experiment, and innovate in the early years. And we know that despite his enterprise's rapid growth, he is just getting started.

And so are we.

CHAPTER 14

BUILDING BRICK BY BRICK

Go to the people: live with them, learn from them love them start with what they know build with what they have.

But of the best leaders, when the job is done, the task accomplished, the people will say: "We have done it ourselves."

-LAO TZU

n India it wasn't a surprise to find entrepreneurs with enormous talent and drive focused on bringing basic services like health care, housing, and water to the poor. With more than a billion people, some of the best universities in the world, a powerful diaspora community, and a highly innovative health care industry, India seems to breed social entrepreneurs. I was far less certain of what we would find in Pakistan, an Islamic country characterized by the media as chaotic and overrun by terrorists and fundamentalists. I didn't expect to fall in love with the country. But life has a funny way of surprising you.

After a long week spent working in India with Acumen Fund, I was on my way to Karachi, Pakistan. As I sat in the Bombay airport thinking, writing, and waiting for my delayed flight, a Bohri woman abruptly walked over and sat down beside me, so close that part of her big thigh was almost on top of mine. The Bohris are an entrepreneurial group within the Muslim community who do a lot of business in Pakistan and India as well as East Africa. The women wear large capes with veils covering their hair, reminding me of Catholic nuns, though the Bohris seem to favor pastels or bright designs, often with lace around the edges. Their skirts are gathered and full. The older Bohri women often wear black shoes, reminding me even more of the nuns I knew as a young girl.

Why was this woman sitting so close to me when the airport was virtually empty? All around me were seats just waiting to be filled. The Bohri woman's face was eager and broad, the kind that makes you smile. She wore wire-rimmed glasses that could not hide twinkling eyes the color of honey. She was completely toothless. Though I wished for solitude, I had a hard time ignoring that face.

She talked a blue streak, leaving no room for idle chitchat. Her first sentence made me nearly laugh aloud. With no introduction, she asked, "Tell me, what do you do? Are you married? Do you have children?"

Though I didn't even know her name, I answered, "No, never married. No children."

"Ah." She clapped her hands together and smiled even more broadly. "I never married, either. But I could see that you are deeply happy sitting there all alone, but not lonely. I could see that you are one of the happiest people, the ones who serve the world."

I looked at her and said thank you.