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Scaling Social
Innovation in
SOUTH
ASIA
Scaling Up Innovations
With Government
By Rahul Nayar, Asif Saleh,
& Anna Minj p. 5
A Tale of Two Intermediaries
By Khaleel Tetlay, Zoya Shabir
Siddiqui, & Geoff Mulgan p. 7
Creating a Funding
Environment for Scaling Up
Social Impact
Roundtable with Jeffrey L.
Bradach, Zia Khan, Isabel
Guerrero, & Harish Hande p. 9
S U P P L E M E N T TO S S I R S P O N S O R E D BY B R AC
Maria A. May leads the BRAC Social Innovation Lab and oversees product development for the microfinance program.
Faustina Pereira is a human rights advocate and legal and
development specialist who is on leave from BRAC and is heading
the department of global initiatives at the International Development Law Organization.
Arbind Singh is founder of Nidan and national coordinator of
the National Association of Street Vendors of India.
Often, policymakers, donors, and even the affected populations cannot see the relevance
of rights to other dimensions of poverty. If
thats the case, creating a shared appreciation of this relationship is a critical starting
point. Consider the urban street vendors in
India who eke out a living by selling vegetables, garments, and other goods in public
places. In its early days, Nidan found that
many policymakers and donors saw street
vendors as a problem rather than as vital
service providers, and therefore the organization put a great deal of energy into changing that perception. One of its initiatives
was the creation of a Street Food Festival
in Patna, Bihars capital city, offering an opportunity for all residents to come together
Develop a deep understanding of the community and the issues that affect it before
championing a solution. Nidan began
its work through a simple survey of street
vendors in Patna. One major finding was
the presence of a complex ecosystem of extortion by corrupt municipal corporation
SCALING SOCIAL INNOVATION IN SOUTH ASIA / SPRING 2016
S U P P L E M E N T TO S S I R S P O N S O R E D BY B R AC
officials, policemen, and private contractors. Learning about this helped Nidan appreciate the depth of the problem and develop local and national activities aimed at
developing and implementing better policies and legal protection for street vendors.
In Bangladesh, BRAC discovered
through surveys that nearly 70 percent of
all instances of violence against women
stemmed from property-related disputes,
and that womens systematic deprivation
of land contributed significantly to poverty
and gender inequality. But the organization
initially opted not to work on property rights
because the cases tended to be complex and
could easily exhaust its legal resources. Instead, BRAC focused on land measurement.
Local people were trained and certified to
provide accurate land measurement at a low
cost to settle (and often pre-empt) land disputes. Although BRACs activities did not directly change the justice system, they were
a first move in the right direction. BRAC raises awareness about property rights, legal aid
clinics, and measurement services through
its barefoot lawyers, who lead communitybased education for rural women. It also
works with local governments to increase
their understanding of the property rights
issues facing the poor and to encourage
effective delivery of services.
3. FOCUS ON WHAT NEEDS TO BE SCALED
DOWN, NOT UP
If a community doesnt trust your intentions and believe that you will be alongside
it for as long as the struggle takes, it will be
difficult to gain traction. Nidan and BRAC
both found that it was easier to mobilize
people when they provided other services
as well. Clearly, this presents a chicken-andegg dilemma for groups that want to focus
on rights, because it suggests that in order
to do so effectively, they may need to devote
some attention to the symptoms of inequality before they can fight the disease.
Certain services make it easier for people
to advocate for their rights. For example,
most land cases in Bangladesh relate to inheritance, which means that they reflect conflicts
within a family. But taking family members
to court creates significant stress. BRAC has
found that if family members have important
basic services, such as health care, they have
more courage and ability to take action when
they believe they have been treated unfairly
on issues like land ownership.
5. GET DECISION MAKERS TO PAY
ATTENTION
Often when organizations are scaling, the focus is on additionproviding new inputs and
additional activities. When it comes to rights,
however, the focus needs to be on reductiontaking away the barriers
to justice, or scaling down: Ask
Six Characteristics of Wicked Problems
What factors cause oppression
or denial of rights, and how can That Make Scaling Up Difficult
those factors be removed?
1. Wicked problems have no definitive formulationyou just
For Nidan, a pivotal realizaknow it when you see it.
tion was that bottom-up mobi2. Its very difficult to measure or claim success because they
lization at the city or state level
overlap with other wicked problems.
would never be sufficient for
3. You cant solve wicked problems, so the goal is improvement.
transformative change. Indias
4. There is no template to follow when tackling a wicked probstreet vendors needed reprelem;
the strategy is usually made up as one goes.
sentation at the national level.
In 2003, Nidan helped its street
5. There is always more than one explanation for a wicked
problem; individual perspective plays a big role
vendor organizations federate under the umbrella of the
6. Every wicked problem is a symptom of another wicked probNational Association of Street
lem. No clear boundaries.
Vendors of India (NASVI) and
Source: Jon Kolko, Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, Austin Center for Design,
helped them gain access to na2012
tional decision makers.
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various divisions and officeseach watching and counterbalancing the others. For
example, bureaucracies often place expenditure approval powers within financial divisions that are at arms length from operational teams. Civil servants are encouraged
(by formal rules and informal nudges) to
follow administrative precedent: well-tried
branches in the decision tree, tested for
safety by their predecessors. What is novel
in decision making may be considered rash,
even corrupt, and needs verifying; it is insti-
priorities that result, civil servants can internalize and institutionalize a risk-averse
behavioral culture. This is not conducive to
scaling innovation.
Innovatorswhether theyre working for
a government or a large institution, or trying
to access support from the outsidethus face
a sequence of progressively hardening barriers to scaling their work. As Everett Rogers
wrote in his 1962 book, The Diffusion of Innovations, innovators depend on a starting
group of innovative adopters. Risk-averse
S U P P L E M E N T TO S S I R S P O N S O R E D BY B R AC
RSPN and Nesta teach lessons about achieving social impact in the
Global South and North.
BY KHALEEL TETLAY, ZOYA SHABIR SIDDIQUI, & GEOFF MULGAN
NESTA
S U P P L E M E N T TO S S I R S P O N S O R E D BY B R AC
ROUNDTABLE
here has been a great deal of discussion about the role of donors in building
organizations capable of scaling up their impact. Instead of writing another
open letter to donors, BRAC invited a group of thought leaders to engage in a
lively and open discussion. They shared their valuable insights on how to build
ecosystems for scaling up social impact and on where the challenges lie in doing so in the
Global South and around the world.
Roundtable participants were Zia Khan, vice president, The Rockefeller Foundation;
Isabel Guerrero, senior lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management; and Harish Hande,
co-founder and managing director, SELCO. The roundtable was moderated by Jeffrey L.
Bradach, co-founder and managing partner, The Bridgespan Group.
Jeffrey L. Bradach: Let me start by asking
each of you how you and your organization
think about scale.
Harish Hande: I belong to SELCO, an organization that provides energy to underserved Indians. For me, scale is about rep-
ISABEL GUERRERO
HARISH HANDE
JEFFREY L . BRADACH
Khan: In our experience theres a very difficult tension between strategy and impleSCALING SOCIAL INNOVATION IN SOUTH ASIA / SPRING 2016
S U P P L E M E N T TO S S I R S P O N S O R E D BY B R AC
Kingdom, which has developed the third sector for social entrepreneurs. What they have
done in building an ecosystem is quiteinteresting. As Zia mentioned, not only can you
leverage a large player, but you can also think
of finding opportunity where the government might actually be interested in developing this ecosystem for the entire sector. So
youre not picking those who come with PowerPoint, but you are actually developing the
conditions for social entrepreneurs to thrive
by lowering the barriers to scale.
The second example is BRAC, the largest
NGO in the world and the only one that has
been able to reach the kind of scale that we
are talking about. From the very beginning,
BRACs founder Fazle Hasan Abed thought,
Scale, scale, scale. That was the only way
the government would pay attention. So in
a way he was creating an ecosystem within
Bangladesh. The government was quite wise
to allow an institution like BRAC to grow.
One of the reasons BRAC grew was that it
was part of an informal ecosystem. It wasnt
just BRAC, it was also Grameen, ASA, and
many other NGOs that enabled Bangladesh
to go from what was called a basket case
in the 1970s to now, where it has achieved
some of the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals] that India or Pakistan did not.
Khan: Its a mix of all the above. First, I do
believe that the government is a critical
ingredient of achieving large scale. Unfortunately, their role is often invisible. When
people point to Silicon Valley as a model
of entrepreneur-led scale, they ignore the
massive investments by the federal government that enabled scale, such as building
the Internet infrastructure and funding the
research at Stanford University that sparks
entrepreneurial ideas before theyre even
ready for angel investments. So I do believe
that the government plays an important
role in scale, and it needs to be recognized.
When I think of the Global South, its a really interesting mix. In our rural electrification work in India, we have been able to
identify some of the critical things the government can do. Part of the challenge is that
they may not know what is needed to help
a market grow. Thats where an intermediary like ourselves, which has a system perspective, can play a useful role by ensuring
that the government doesnt just respond
to the loudest voice, but instead responds to
all perspectivescommunities, small-scale
Hande: Government should listen to practitioners about the barriers they confront and
create policies that actually remove them.
But too often they just create subsidies to
try to get around the barriers. For example,
when the solar home lighting system subsidy was implemented in India, the market
did its part, but then it suddenly collapsed.
The subsidy was there, but the industry
stopped financing it because they were not
getting reimbursed by the government. In
fact, that subsidy destroyed the market.
Unfortunately, I think government is often
a big barrier in many ways.
Guerrero: I can see why Harish is very cautious about the role of government. When
you have a non-enlightened government,
things can go really, really bad, even if they
started with good intentions. We need to
stop thinking about government as being a
donor to the poor. Instead, the government
needs to create a climate that encourages
entrepreneurship. If we do this it will allow potential social entrepreneurs to thrive
who know the locality or community well.
One example of a successful entrepreneurship program is SEWAs rural enterprise
network of women. They have millions of
women involved in producing spices, and
they have been developing a distribution
channel where the same rural women go to
villages to sell their products.
What are some of the most notable things
happening around scaling in the Global
South that might be relevant in the Global
North or in the world more broadly?
Guerrero: There are amazing things happening in the Global South that can be used
in other parts of the world. The moment for
reverse innovation is here. Take, for example, what is happening with Bridge International Academy. It has a school-in-a-box
program in Kenya that is now being taken to
other African countries. In addition, many
social entrepreneurs in South Asia have
created very, very large-volume, low-profit,
Khan: Im not seeing it enough, unfortunately. Its a skill set that I havent seen widely
among the social entrepreneurs who talk
about scaling their ideas. When I encounter
entrepreneurs in the for-profit sector, they
are constantly thinking about and driving
they risk losing funders who are prioritizing support for something new rather than
something that works. I think its the same
for government programs. Funders, governments, social entrepreneurs, and all entities
trying to scale up need to be aware of the need
for leadership and brand building among different funders and political actors. What we
need to figure out is: How do you create multiple opportunities for leadership? How do
we start to create a sense of pride in scaling
up good ideas versus being the one who spotted the great innovation at the early stage and
jumped on it?
Guerrero: Im thinking of the World Bank,
and I wonder whether foundations have the
same constraint in terms of risk aversion.
The fact is, the reward system will not work
if people are worried about failure. Therefore you will always need leadership in the
willingness to take a risk when it comes to
new initiatives, or to bet on a team that has
the potential to do amazing things.
How do we change these dynamics? How do
we encourage more risk-taking, more attention to building an ecosystem for social
change, and more focus on scaling up?
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S U P P L E M E N T TO S S I R S P O N S O R E D BY B R AC
More poor households benefit when the private and social sectors
work together to build better environments for inclusive business.
BY HARVEY KOH & JAIDEEP PRABHU
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Consider the growth of the solar home systems (SHS) industry in Bangladesh. Solar
home systems have great potential to bring
clean electricity to rural, off-grid communities. Yet in such communities in Bangladesh
before 2003, only an estimated 7,000 households out of a total of 27 million were using
solar home systems.2
That year, however, the state-owned
Infrastructure Development Company
Limited (IDCOL) began a program to help
scale up SHS solutions to reach off-grid rural populations, as part of the governments
vision of ensuring Access to Electricity for
All by 2021. Backed by the World Bank, the
Global Environment Facility, the US Agency
for International Development, the UK Department for International Development
(DFID), and others, IDCOL addressed criti-
outset. Before you jump into developing and implementing your particular
inclusive market solution, think about
all the stakeholders you will need to
involve in order for the market to work.
Identify ways in which you can bring
essential stakeholders on board to
create the environment thats needed
to create and scale up the market.
Forming these partnerships early on
will be crucial to ensure the long-term
sustainability of your efforts.
Be proactive about supporting and
managing the ecosystem of essential
stakeholders and partners. Keeping all
the partners engaged and happy with
the performance of the ecosystem and
the market will require regular and
proactive communication, interaction
and stakeholder management.
Understanding the importance of these
ecosystems, and learning how to build them,
will go a long way toward global efforts to
scale up inclusive markets. Our focus in this
short article has been on South Asia, but we
believe that the lessons we offer here apply equally in other parts of the developing
world, such as Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan
Africa, and Latin America. We also believe
that these lessons can be applied in principle
by businesses and governments seeking to
serve low-income communities in more developed contexts, such as Eastern and Southern Europe, and even potentially in parts of
Western Europe and North America. c
Notes
1 Harvey Koh, Nidhi Hegde, and Ashish Karamchandani,
Beyond the Pioneer: Getting Inclusive Industries to
ScaleExecutive Summary, Deloitte India, 2014.
2 Bangladesh, Lighting up Rural Communities, The
World Bank, 2013.
3 J. R. Siegel and Atiq Rahman, The Diffusion of Off-grid
Solar Photovoltaic Technology in Rural Bangladesh,
Tufts University, 2011.
4 Solar Home System Program, Infrastructure Development Company Ltd., http://idcol.org/home/solar
5 Arguably, these industry facilitators could and should
have gone further to help MFIs mitigate the financial and
political risks that plunged the industry into crisis after
2007. For more, see Koh et al., Beyond the Pioneer,
chapter 5.
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S U P P L E M E N T TO S S I R S P O N S O R E D BY B R AC
In its early days, during the 1980s, BRAC realized that organizing communities was a powerful means of empowering the poor because
it helped those who were most deprived find
their voices and their peers, advocate for
themselves, and participate more fully in
local decision making. Subsequently, BRAC
began to help poor adult women form community groups, using them as a conduit for
Anjali Sarker is a deputy manager with the Social Innovation
Lab at BRAC.
Shameran Abed is director of BRACs microfinance program,
which serves more than 5 million clients in Asia and sub-Saharan
Africa.
Christian Seelos is the Leo Tindemans Chair of Business Model
Innovation at the University of Leuven and a visiting scholar at
Stanford University PACS and the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford.
14
scaling. I thus refer to them as technical problems or needs. Similarly, I group normative
and power/politics barriers into relational
problems or needs. Often a mix of technical
and relational barriers defines problems.
USING THE FRAMEWORK
This analysis of BRACs adolescent empowerment programs in Bangladesh and Uganda suggests some central lessons:
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For more than 100 years, The Rockefeller Foundations mission has been to
promote the well-being of humanity throughout the world. Today, The Rockefeller
Foundation pursues this mission through dual goals: advancing inclusive
economies that expand opportunities for more broadly shared prosperity, and
building resilience by helping people, communities, and institutions prepare for,
withstand, and emerge stronger from acute shocks and chronic stresses. To achieve
these goals, The Rockefeller Foundation works at the intersection of four focus
areasadvance health, revalue ecosystems, secure livelihoods, and transform
citiesto address the root causes of emerging challenges and create systemic
change. Together with partners and grantees, The Rockefeller Foundation strives
to catalyze and scale transformative innovations, create unlikely partnerships that
span sectors, and take risks others cannotor will not.
To learn more, please visit www.rockefellerfoundation.org.
This supplement was produced by Stanford Social Innovation Review for BRAC,
and supported by The Rockefeller Foundation