Social Enterprises for the Poor

1) We have a video catalog of about 20 businesses, that can be started for < $250 dollars.  Some of them are small businesses and some of them are other jobs, like a construction worker.  Included are: Tea-Stand, Fruit-Stand, Mo-mo stand, Juice Seller, Construction Worker, etc.  These are 1 - 3 minute interviews of the business owner where we ask 1) how much money they make, 2) what they do on a day-to-day basis, 3) where they work, 4) what their job is.

2) The business owners might not be telling the complete truth, but many of them claim to be making 500 Rs / day PROFIT.  1000+ Rs / day revenue.  I'll have to figure out what the real story is.  When we do our own businesses I'll know for sure I guess.

3) A DVD of this catalog will be screened next week to 50+ railway kids.  We will get their general feedback about these businsesses including: Have you seen these businesses before? Were those businesses interesting?  Why? Why not? what other types of information would you like to know about these businesses? etc.

4) We will choose about 3 kids from this group who we will use for SE.  We will then connect them to the local mentors and help them start businesses in the city.  Praajak would like to try 1-2 businesses and 1-2 salaried positions in different industries for each category.

5) we would like to have businesses up and running by June, May will be left to 1-1 training between the mentor and youth and getting all of the required materials for the businesses.  April is our initial screening, interviews, and finding the right mentors.

Thanks,
Paul

Hi Deep and Manna,

Thanks for the field-visit yesterday!  It was really great.  I enjoyed seeing your work with the railway children, and learning about your approach to rehabilitate these children.  I particularly liked learning about your approach to let these children continue earning money, buying their own food, cooking their own food, start saving their income, etc.

I wanted to write a short email to you about some of the things that Manna and his field-staff discussed with me about next steps:

(1) Help the kids learn about and start small-businesses in the city:

Step 1 (We agreed to complete by March 23rd):
Together we are going to come up with 20+ small businesses based on the following criteria:  1) Start up cost is less than 10K Rs. 2) it requires a relatively small amount of skill to operate.  We will record 1 - 3 minute pieces of each of these businesses in Calcutta and Malda and show the kids.  We plan to show the kids sometime soon after March 23rd.

The below we wanted to talk to you about further:
Step 2: Let the kids choose their interested business of choice

Step 3: Connect them with someone who would be able to provide them with any necessary training needed.  We were thinking of finding local entrepreneurs who already have this business - who might provide this training for a small fee.  This training will be recorded.

From there we will help them start their own business.  I have committed to finance a couple of these businesses.

We also talked about some of the difficulties we will have to overcome (a change in attitude towards running and starting their own business.  We talked about Prajaak field staff helping with this aspect, and we also talked about how we could make this a community-centric model where local entrepreurs might be able to play some small role in helping them through starting and running their own business (since they will know more about the business anyways).

(2)
I also spoke with Manna about the work that I do with Digital StudyHall in Calcutta.

Digital StudyHall (DSH) is a project that seeks to improve education for the poor children in slum and rural schools in India. We digitally record live classes by the best grassroots teachers, transmit them on the "Postmanet" (effected by DVDs sent in the postal system), collect them in a large distributed database, and distribute them on DVDs to poor rural and slum schools. Education experts and teachers use the system to explore pedagogical approaches involving local teachers actively "mediating" the video lessons. By harvesting a "viral phenomenon" of community participation, DSH aims to help train teachers and deliver quality instruction to underprivileged children.

This is a 3 year old project and we have accumulated a lot of educational content, spoken in local languages, and taught by the best teachers that we can find.

In Bengali by Mid-March I will have on video the entire class 3, and class 4 government curriculum taught by good teachers from Loreto in Sealdah.  The classes are in Bengali, and a Loreto teacher is paired with government school children for these classes so that the content is relevant for the teachers and students we are trying to outreach to.  I also will have various lessons in Class 1 through Class 4 english and math.

I also have a huge amount of content in Hindi if that is relevant.

We explored the possibility of me supplying (for free) Digital StudyHall content to your centers at railway stations (Sorry I forgot the name of these centers).  If we decided to try this out, we would also supply a TV / DVD player for this purpose.

I leave for Bangladesh on Feb. 26th, and will return March 22nd.

I look forward to talking to you about everything detailed above in further detail.  I will give you a call sometime before I leave.

Thanks again!
Paul

Here is a short report on progress with Prajaak.  Yesterday I visited Prajaak's work in Manta - a city about 7 hours from Calcutta (I took an overnight train for the last two nights)

Prajaak does some great work with children and youth that live in railway stations.  Just to put things in perspective, in 1997, there were a document 300,000 children and youth who lived the "railway station" life in India.  They usually earn about 50 Rs / Day refilling used water bottles and selling them for Rs 5, cleaning trains and asking for money from passengers, and from begging.

The stories of each of these individual kids vary depending on their situation - some have left their families because their families were dysfunctional (drug / alcohol problems, etc.) , some are orphans, some just plain run away in search of greater freedom.

At 5 railway stations in West Bengal Praajak runs these "rehabilitation centers" (I forgot the Indian name), where they work with the kids to help them help themselves.  They do not interrupt their day-to-day lives - the Prajaak kids continue to work at the railway stations and buy their own food.  Prajaak, does however, provide a kitchen for them to cook at so that they don't live off of street food.  They also provide them with a place to sleep every night.  After the age of 18, when the kids become legally independent, Prajaak lets them loose.  They teach the kids basic literacy, basic english and math, they do various types of sports activities with them as well.  One of things Prajaak has done quiet successfully is teaching the kids about the importance of savings and the process of using a "bank".  They have their own "childrens bank" for the kids, where they have a savings account, and have to go through all of the same paperwork do deposit, make withdrawals, etc.  They also earn interest (Prajaak deposits money from the Childrens Bank into a regular bank account).  After a particular child gets used to using this type of banking system, they transfer their account to a real bank and the kids begin to use that.  On average one child might have a savings between 500 Rs to 1500 Rs.

What they want to do with me:

Social Enterprises:
Since the kids do not know anything about the opportunities which exist in the cities, for the 16 -18 year old kids, they they want to help them start their own small city-based businesses.

Step 1: Together we are going to come up with 20+ small businesses based on the following criteria:  1) Start up cost is less than 10K Rs. 2) it requires a relatively small amount of skill to operate.  We will record 1 - 3 minute pieces of each of these businesses in Calcutta and Manta and show the kids.

Step 2: Let the kids choose their interested business of choice

Step 3: Connect them with a mentor and conduct a training.  This recording will be recorded.

From there we will help them start their own business.

Digital StudyHall

They are really interested in getting class 1 - class 4 bengali content into their railway centers.  They want to see and evaluate our content in mid-March when I return and then continue from there onwards.

They also work in a number of Government homes for railway kids.  They don't always send their kids there because 1) these government homes are already over-crowded, and 2) they have noticed that if the kid has been living on his own for a number of months, they have a very difficult time living in a closed-campus for 5 - 10 years in a row (the government homes do not, under any circumstances, allow the kids to leave).  These centers are usually hindi-medium, and Prajaak says we will also investigate putting our hindi content in these centers.  These centers provide class 1 - class 4 education, but according to Prajaak, the education the kids receive is pretty bad.

Praajak was cool - it was interesting visiting their "field" at a railway station.  Good stuff.

Paul

I just got back from a dinner with Roop from GD, and Manna from Prajaak.

Without any details here is our inteneded plan of action over the next couple of months (to start next friday when I go to visit Prajaak's operations 7 hours from Calcutta.

(1) Document everything that Prajaak has done with the Chai Stalls: Video interview with the successful chai entrepreneur + training session between chai entrepreneur and a new candidate - in this case Prajaak works with about 30 such youth in train stations that potentially are likely candidates.

The Information Gap exists here:
(2) If you look at Praajak's youth, they are only familiar with their surroundings in the train stations - the businesses that are successfully running in those stations. Prajaak says they know very little about other city businesses, and are actually fairly unfamiliar with the local city terrain (their entire lives is in the train stations).  If you look at other candidates (say in a market), the situation might be the same (they might not know more than what businsses are in their particular market.  If you look at any particular market in calcutta there usually is only certain businesses - there is a market for eye wear, a separate market for electronic goods, etc.

After (1) we then want to document about 5 - 10 other potential low-skilled businesses these candidates could get their dirty with in the city.  Most likely we will idenfity the businesses (the owner will become a mentor), we will bring 1 or more of our candidates to that location and repeat (1) for that business.

(3)  We then want to see if we can go to new train stations, and get new sets of people to learn these skills through mediated video and go through the steps of setting up their own businesses, learn about the importance of saving, etc. 

Obviously in one train station there is not enough demand for 100 or even 10 chai-stands - however if Prajaak shows that there is enough demand to create (1) new chai-stand in a train station, then we want to take Prajaaks learnings, document it with video, set up a location in a new train station, and see if we can create (1) more new chai-stand with a new candidate in a new train station.

Additionally we want to get Prajaaks original set of boys city-based businesses and skills, and see if we can replicate that process in other places (be they train stations or not). 

Once we have this list of businesses from (2), we will use this in our plan stated a couple of weeks back with MJCC and RightTrack who work in slum areas in Calcutta - we will tell local slum dwellers we have this (2) of things that we can help you start, and see what happens.

Things are getting excited.  I'll send another update after I visit Prajaak next friday.

I see a lot of similarities between SE and DG  in terms of the "classroom" that would need to be set up, the hiring of local mediators, etc. - more to come in some other email when I have time.

Through Roop (the director at Groupe Development), I met Deep (the director of an NGO called Praajak) and had breakfast with him this morning.

Praajak works in railway stations in West Bengal and has recently started a program to help youth who have nonsalaried employment (cleaning trains, sweeping the station, etc.) begin their own small businesses.

They have successfully helped a few of these youth start their own chai stands in a railway station in Malda (about 7 hour train ride from Calcutta).  They want to work with me to see if they can use video-training sessions to get additional clients interested, train them, help them understand the concept of banking and credit, and potentially learning relevant english speaking skills for future employment.   If this step works out well, there is a plethora of fun things we can try out.  Deep also liked the idea of an Orkut with Kiva website to track these social networks, allow for scale, and help find financing for these youth, although I told him this is a longer-term vision thing.

He was excited about what we are trying to do with SE, and we talked about the following options and ideas:

(1) Go to Malda next Wednesday and record training sessions and interviews between new client youth and existing chai stands

(2) Mediations Rooms at Train Stations: We talked about setting up a room at train stations where new clients come come and learn new skills, learn where they can get a bank account, learn the concept of savings, credit, and loans, etc.

(3) Where: We want to initially try this in train stations where Praajak already has presence, and then potentially try this out at train stations in Calcutta with our SE clients that we will get through our existing partners with GD.

(4) Mediators: We talked about potentially getting  some  successful chai-stand youth to become mediators of the video sessions, or perhaps one of NGO staff of Prajaak, or perhaps some of the other street-youth.  Much like the village mediators of DG villages, I'm thinking of we want to do something in the long-run at train stations, we'll try to find a regular animator to mediate this content.

(5) Other businesses:  Beyond chai-stands and all relevant knowledge needed to start those stands, Prajaak is interested in doing things in the textile market, or other small businesses.

After visiting Malda next week and recording some initial classes, we plan to try all of the above and hopefully finance a few small businesses in the coming months.

Things are starting to piece together, and I think we are close to making our first big moves :)

Paul