10 Reasons Why Social Entrepreneurship Is Failing In India
I have a friend and mentor (let’s call him Mr. ABC) who runs a social enterprise with close to three digit employees and India-wide presence. They have touched millions of life and transacted crores of rupees for over double digit years now! In my recent conversation with him, he was throwing some light on thinking of “dhandha” (business) in the context of social entrepreneurship. He is so humble a man that even after so many prestigious awards, he says that he has not moved a needle! Yet the fact remains that he has set up a monster of an organisation with close to three digit employees. May be he spends lot of time finding ways to feed the monster while advocating the problem and not amplifying solutions. Who cares for solutions when activism/cribbing can propel the agenda or rather, where the only agenda is that the monster needs to grow!
This context inspired me to write this blog. Here’s a 10-point list (completely the way I look at it) on why social entrepreneurship has failed/continues to fail in India, and how I am also part of this failure –
1. We work on scaling organisation, not the idea
#RoleModelTalks – Valuable Lessons From Smita Vats About Organic Scaling Of Organisations
2. We focus on quick-fix interventions; we don’t see larger picture.
Sharing a personal story here. We had started to work in Chikkarasinakere rural school (100 km from Bangalore) in 2014 and a female student, out of nowhere, pinged me on WhatsApp. I was so so happy when she shared that she was my student and how she loved our classes. We had worked with her for couple of years till she was 16. We failed to work with that batch from age 16 to 19 (student joins a professional course by then), since we couldn’t answer questions on why we are not focusing on intervention with strong impact results and instead seeing the bigger picture. We had to convince ourselves to let go our intention to work from age 13 to 19 and tell ourselves that we develop interventions to cater 13 to 16. Even saying that we do role model classes and build aspiration, took no takers. We failed.
The student who I mentioned had reached out to me to tell me that she is 18 today and now has a 9 month old boy! I failed.
I have been deeply troubled by this and we are going to leave no stones unturned so that every student has a role model and his/her aspiration are met!
3. We design for quantity, not quality
Studying Taaza Thindi To Understand The Secret Behind Scaling With Quality
4. Finding funders who can beat the heat and come on the field is almost impossible
Quoting Nipun Mehta – “Bill Drayton’s vision behind coining the word “Social Entrepreneurship” was to leverage entrepreneurship to solve complex social problems; instead, all businesses called themselves social and diluted its essence. Similarly, Muhammad Yunus pioneered micro-finance with the idea of eradicating poverty, but now MFI institutions openly profit from poverty. We’ve even done this with friendship. Facebook and the world of social media forged trillions of new connections amongst us, but it has simply cheapened the idea of friendship.”
Above passage sharply contradicts with the views of my mentor, Mr. ABC (who is a very very well known ‘Social Entrepreneur’) about the way of seeing social entrepreneurship. What’s happening is funders are focusing on business and trying to bring Corporate in Social entrepreneurship! I have spent 4 years in corporate, where I’ve also served as an executive assistant to a global leader, and I strongly feel that social entrepreneurship could have had different code ethics than corporate.
For a social entrepreneur, person comes first, then the profit.
5. Implementation of the program is last thing we care about
People at the grass-root level are paid the least.
6. Social issues has become a playground for less Givers and more Lobbyists/Matchers/Fakers/Takers
(Adam Grant’s terminology)
People who can really make an impact are pursuing alternate careers. If you meet these folks and quiz them about why they quit social entrepreneurship, money flow would be the main complaint. It’s possible to have money flow in a way that serves our highest ideals and commitments rather than accumulate it so that we can gain power, authority and special privileges over others. Money can bear the mark of he or she who passed it on and in many ways can be voice, expression and commitment. (You can choose to be part of KnowYourStar money flow here.)
7. We forget Ubuntu and dis-value collective intelligence
Brindavan Tent School transformation with multiple stakeholders
How Vilas Nayak and Ravindra Deshmukh joined hands with us to kickstart role model storytelling classes
8. Incubators are running with the primary lens of scaling and sustainability
But the ground reality is that for most social projects rooted in deep ability to see long term change, there’s no way to know whether we will exist tomorrow or whether the problem will exist tomorrow. Context driven incubators are scarce entities!
9. All of us are aiming to grab the biggest bite from the same philanthropist and often forgetting our own tune
“We can look at money like water. It flows all over the planet and everywhere it goes it’s useful, it makes things happen and it’s passed along. We could say that water doesn’t belong to any of us or it belongs to all of us. When water is flowing and moving it cleanses, it purifies, it makes things green, it creates growth, it nurtures. But when water starts to slow down, is held back and starts to be still, it can be toxic and stagnant to those who hold it. All of this can be true of money.”
10. We are spiralling on a negative curve, forgetting that what we sow is what we reap
We are sowing greed as part of being social entrepreneurs in ourselves and in our organisation. Is it possible to flip and operate with right virtues and value systems?
In a nutshell, the ecosystem we have built around is failing us and the entire society has slowly started to price for it. More and more social entrepreneurship cells are mushrooming, but will they add real value in creating a society which can operate at its highest values and virtues? How do we find the perfect tension for our guitar string to strum beautifully in our social fabric? Do we follow the spectrum that my mentor Mr. ABC’s model portrays or the Aravind model of spectrum? On second glance, Mr. ABC’s model looks like a decentralised model of social entrepreneurship, whereas the Aravind model of social entrepreneurship won’t scale as an organisation, instead would do its magic by creating a distributed model. In this era of internet, by encouraging distributed work model, can we encourage social entrepreneurs to succeed? I will love to hear your views!
P.S. Are you curious what my answer is for how social entrepreneurship can win? By building the right ecosystem! Happy to share a passage for more context –
“In the deeper recesses of our mind, where the dominant pattern is to operate from a very narrow notion of self, we have to transition from ‘me’ to ‘we’ to ‘us’, with the understanding that the small self is best served when it can let go to the bigger ecology. We can’t manufacture such a world or a culture. It has to emerge. We simply till the soil, sow the seeds, water the plants, and then trust the interconnections of the ecosystem to build its trees as the time ripens.”
Would you like to discuss further about this? If you are an entrepreneur/young organisation/about to start-up, and want to meet institutions who many see as a role model, do reach out to me at jaideep@knowyourstar.com. I’ll be happy to connect you to the right folks and you can return the favour by-
Paying 0 INR
+
Doing & sharing an act of being a role model to somebody
or
Donating here to ensure that every child has a role model and he/she can aspire to reach the stars!
Enjoyed reading about this? Then you might like to read #RoleModelTalks – Valuable Lessons From Smita Vats About Organic Scaling Of Organisations
If there’s a story that needs to be told, we are ready to tell it. Write to us at contact@knowyourstar.com with your story lead, or contact us on Facebook or Twitter.
This is relevant to every IT or business too. Unfortunately everyone wants to talk talk.. and keep milking till the titanic sinks. That is one of the reason, why managers lead engineers :).