From The Economist print edition
Entrepreneurs are trying to do good as well as make money
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THE Iskcon Sri Radha Krishna-Chandra Temple feels like a bit of ancient India preserved in the heart of modern Bangalore. The faithful wait in long lines, their faces daubed with paint. The air is filled with chants of “Hare Krishna” and “Hare Rama”. Monks in orange robes offer flowers and food to the gods and produce haunting sounds on conch shells.
In fact, India’s entrepreneurial revolution is as visible here as anywhere. The temple has a conference room equipped with state-of-the-art audio-visual aids. Its board of directors includes several leading software billionaires and their wives, providing it with money as well as connections. The monks are entrepreneurs as well as holy men, one moment talking about reincarnation and the next about sustainable delivery models.
The temple provides 200,000 local schoolchildren with free meals every day. It achieves this miracle of abundance by a combination of mechanisation and careful management. The temple’s 250 employees use giant machines to clean rice and prepare chapattis. They then pack the food into steel containers and load it into a fleet of custom-made vans which keep the food warm as they crawl through Bangalore’s traffic-clogged streets.
Entrepreneurship is reshaping the voluntary sector as much as the private one. Rich people have often turned their hand to philanthropy in their later years, but this old story has acquired some new twists. Today’s entrepreneurs routinely apply business techniques to philanthropy. Some of them are even using a venture-capital model, investing in a range of promising start-ups and making longer-term funding conditional on performance.
Riders for Health was created when a couple of motorbike enthusiasts discovered that the vehicles being used by health-care providers in Africa were not being maintained. The organisation now helps to provide 11m people with health care in inaccessible parts of Africa, often using motorbikes. Teach for America started when a Princeton student, Wendy Kopp, conceived the idea of persuading Ivy League graduates to teach in state schools for a while. The trick was to ask them to compete for the honour of doing something that, a few years earlier, none of them would have been remotely interested in. The programme has now been copied around the world.
Social entrepreneurs often blur the distinction between making money and offering charity. Some use the profits from their main business to cross-subsidise their charitable work. India’s Aravind Hospitals, which perform 250,000 eye operations a year, do 60% of their work for nothing. Other social entrepreneurs establish for-profit social enterprises, also known as “FOPSEs”, that try to make money as well as doing good.
Vinod Kapur, for example, has built a successful company with the purpose of feeding India’s rural poor. He invested $1m—and many years of his life—in breeding a superchicken. The result was the Kuroiler: multicoloured, resistant to disease, capable of surviving on farmyard scraps, strong and wily enough to fight off predators, and producing twice as much meat and five times as many eggs as ordinary chickens. Mr Kapur has built an entire supply chain around the Kuroiler, including specialist farms that breed them and vendors who sell them across rural India.
Shane Immelman has built a successful company by trying to bring the benefits of education to poor schoolchildren in South Africa. Appalled that 4m children did not even have desks, let alone schoolrooms, he invented a “lapdesk” that sits on the child’s lap and provides a stable surface. The desks are covered in advertisements, so Mr Immelman is able to hand them out free, but they have proved so popular that better-off people have started to buy them, and some of them are now being exported to other developing countries.
In the long run, however, the best thing that entrepreneurs can do for the poor may be simply to see them as workers and customers. A rising number of Western companies are pursuing what C.K. Prahalad, a management professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, calls “the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid”. Businesspeople have realised that billions of pennies can add up to a lot of money. Cemex, an innovative Mexican cement firm, employs thousands of poor Mexicans. Casas Bahia, a Brazilian retailer, specialises in serving poor customers. India’s ICICI Bank uses technology and customer service to reach poor rural Indians.
Allowing people to experience the benefits of the market sometimes means helping them to join the market economy. Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist who helped to inspire the World Bank’s Doing Business, has long argued that creating property rights in the developing world is a precondition for encouraging entrepreneurialism there. Regional development banks such as the African Development Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development claim they are trying to build local environments in which entrepreneurs can flourish.
This seems to hold out the prospect of a continuous cascade of prosperity as successful entrepreneurs discover new markets and then use the fruits of their efforts as social entrepreneurs to generate yet more successful enterprises. But the world is never as simple as that: entrepreneurship creates uncertainty and competition as well as innovation and prosperity.
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