Empowering rural communities to build profitable rural economic activities

Transcription

1 Empowering rural communities to build profitable rural economic activities

2 About Us Rural Caravan is a design vehicle for mainly rural and broadly social development. We understand people and communities through their aspirations, desires and constraints, and provide opportunities for fulfilling not only their economic needs but also societal and self-actuation needs. We have observed that rural societies have richness in traditional knowledge, a distinct culture of humility and a variety in offerings in talent, products and services. Urban societies on the other hand are tech savvy and have skill sets to market and brand. We imagine a world of interconnectedness between these two cultures through community creation for a higher purpose and healthy living. We create profitable rural enterprises through a culture of cocreation and engaging even the urban dwellers in the process and facilitate human development at the grass roots level through meaningful engagement of rural and urban societies. We create opportunities for the people at their doorsteps which will help reduce migration and poor-quality jobs. We want the urban societies to learn from the rural counterparts on being simple and healthy with strong community ethics (caring about human and animal life). We want to create a barrier free society that can collaborate irrespective of richpoor, urban-rural and caste-gender differences to alleviate each other towards a higher purpose of living as human beings. This is our dream! Designing for Aspirations!

3 Aspirations over Needs! INTRODUCTION Everyone needs a great design. Just because a product is being designed for a social cause doesn t make it a great product. Design is a term that usually gets symbolized in the mind as aesthetically appealing creations even if it is for the poor. Yet rural design is treated markedly different from urban design approach for a variety of reasons. Designing for the rural community typically looks at only the functionality of the product or service excluding the people. The poor are accidentally seen as helpless people that need to be saved who have no agency. This type of design strips humans of their dignity. The typical lens of looking at rural design problems is through the framework of needs. Typically, the physiological needs which form the base of Maslow s hierarchy are itself never saturated in the villages and so great emphasis has been laid over to promote such products which reflect basic necessities of human life. The question that lingers to the mind, is the design process so simple and straightforward? It is time to look beyond Maslow s basic physiological needs. Desires, dreams and aspirations have to be brought into picture to drive human development. Urban counterparts enjoy a high level of customization in products and services across sectors. At the tip of the internet, information is at least available through which decision can be made. Quite contradictory, rural folks have to be content with only generic design features. Even rural livelihood options are designed usually based on the strengths of the organizations working with them rather on the aspirations of the beneficiary. The ideal solution would be to embrace constraints of the developing world and merge it with the typical desires of the first world.

4 FOUNDING TEAM Rohit Pillai, 29 Rohit graduated as a Materials engineer from NIT-Trichy. He further worked in the manufacturing sector for over 2 years before pursuing his interest in research and joining as a Research Assistant in IISc Bangalore. After over 3 years in research, Rohit went on to pursue his M-Tech in Technology and Development from IIT- Bombay. For Rural Caravan, Rohit is the Chief Strategist and Head of Product Design. Manish Nair, 29 Manish has been a Marketing and Sales professional throughout his industry career of over 5+ years supporting manufacturing and consulting organisations. Graduated as a Mechanical engineer from Pune university, Manish also pursued his Masters in Business Administration specialising in Marketing from Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai For Rural Caravan, Manish takes care of Marketing and Urban Collaborations Liju George, 29 Liju is a Process Standardisation expert having worked in the manufacturing sector in India and Germany. He completed his graduation from NIT-Trichy in Metallurgy and further his MS from TU-Berlin. His interest in the social sector motivated him to be an SBI Youth for India fellow For Rural Caravan, Liju focuses on Training and Development. Nikesh Ingle, 30 Nikesh is an electrical engineer with work experience in Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. After completing his M-Tech in Technology and Development from IIT- Bombay, Nikesh also worked as a fellow for Ministry of Rural Development, India. Hailing from a rural background he understands the on-field dynamics and challenges in rural areas. For Rural Caravan, Nikesh focusses on Field Operations.

5 The Story So far! Failure and Learning With motive of creating economic activities in rural areas, Rural Caravan started its first intervention in Palsunde village in Palghar, Maharashtra. Even after spending more than 8 months with the community and forming a team, the intervention failed. The political dynamics in a large diverse community are too big a hurdle for a collective economic development. But we did part ways on good terms. Giving us insights on the characteristics of a community that should be chosen for an economic intervention. One of our connects from Palsunde then introduced us to Amale, a tribal hamlet with natural beauty beyond words, far from development but open to change. Amale was a very small village with close to 70 households and a population of 250 people. With no electricity, no mobile connectivity and poverty, this community was far from development, yet led a peaceful life amidst the lap of nature.

6 TOURISM FOR RURAL URBAN ENGAGEMENT We started understanding the community better with an idea of exploring tourism at the back of our heads. To our surprise and delight, we were glad to identify that the people of Amale took pride in the beauty of the village and wanted to share it with others. Rural Caravan started the work on developing a tourism enterprise in the village through necessary hospitality related capacity building from welcoming the guests till bidding them goodbye. The village group also built minor necessary infrastructure like shed and toilets for the visitors. We conducted several pilot trips with all male, all female, kids and mixed groups. This built their capacity to plan and execute trips of any demography. With continuous capacity building over the months and purposeful urban collaboration, today, the tourism enterprise of Mahalakshmi Self Help Group, Amale hosts the training programs of a Mumbai based organisation as a location partner. An urban organisation collaborating for building a rural enterprise. While building the tourism intervention, we realised that it cannot be an enterprise for continuous income as the long dry summers made the business seasonal. We interacted further with the community to identify other possible entrepreneurial intervention.

7 IMPROVED CHULHAS & ENTREPRENEURSHIP The cooking in households of the village was completely dependent on traditional rural cookstoves called chulhas. One of the leading contributors of indoor air pollution in India. We created awareness and conducted health check up to sensitize the women on the problem they are facing. We shared with them different types of existing improved cooks-stoves and Astra-ole, IISc Bangalore design was their choice to proceed. But the characteristic of the product that led into the community was the prevention of the blackening of their houses, and not indoor air pollution and women health. An anecdotal realization about aspirations. Moreover, an urban aspiration to support a rural community was displayed by Dr Pramod Khadilkar from IISc Bangalore an expert in Astra-ole cookstove, who participated in co-creating an improved cookstove manufacturing enterprise in Amale. Dr Pramod travelled to Amale and trained the community in constructing the chulhas by making a few with them. Additionally, the team was also guided in to benchmark earlier and new cook-stove to identify and experience benefits. It helped them market the product better as sellers. The cook-stove enterprise of Mahalakshmi self-help group made Amale village Indoor Air Pollution free in April They are deploying cooksstoves in villages in the region for an average INR 2000 a unit.

8 HONEY & ENTREPRENEURSHIP Wild honey rearing is widely practiced in the region. Few households were also equipped with Honey collection boxes but not being used to its full potential. We exposed the village team to the importance of packaging honey by connecting them to urban markets and showing how the prices vary. But the team was more shocked with the jaggery and sugar-based adulteration in the regular market products and wanted consumers to have access to the pure wild honey they collect from the forest, unprocessed and unadulterated. We provided them with the support to package their honey in 100ml glass bottles with proper branding through stickers. An opportunity opened to test the urban market acceptance to this product in form of an exhibition organised by a social club based out of Nasik. At the exhibition, honey was on high demand. During the trips in the village, honey is also sold to the visitors at stalls set to display rural products. The team has been repeatedly receiving orders from existing users and are now building this enterprise under the leadership of women in the group.

9 URBAN COLLABORATIONS The success of every enterprise at Amale needs to be dedicated to the active urban participation. We have witnessed immense support from urban socially inclined individuals and organisations in nurturing the communities and providing them a sustained income. An IISc Bangalore expert training the team on manufacturing improved cookstoves, a visitor helping in urban partnerships, a group of students taking the team to pitch for CSR project, were few urban aspirations fulfilled while collaborating to build rural enterprises. CSR for REAL One of our initiatives to collaborate CSR initiatives with rural economic activities is through Rural Economic Activity Launchpad (REAL). The rural economic activities in its journey requires seed investment for its operations. The investments are predominantly required for initial inventory, marketing and community mobilisation. Through REAL we provide an opportunity for CSR to integrate themselves in rural enterprise development for a larger impact via economic development of the target community. The description of rural ecosystem as an agriculture dependent, under-developed and poverty struck society has created a myopia around their needs amongst the urban community, leading several development interventions to failure. For this to change it is important that the real rural society is introduced to its urban counterpart on a platform that provides an opportunity to learn, engage and interact, to all its stakeholders. The core of our work will essentially focus on creating communities and collaborations irrespective of rural-urban gap based on human desire for progeny (translates to standing out and being appreciated), power (influence and possession) and purpose (mission oriented). The economic activities like improved cook-stove dissemination also helps to achieve dual impact through economic development of one community and drudgery reduction for another. We also consult organisation with impact assessment of their investment.

10 VILLAGE ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT The rural enterprises on the platform will be able to access support from Rural Caravan and other organisations & individuals on the platform in the areas mentioned herewith. The areas identified are based on interactions with several communities and partnering organisations to understand the challenges faced by the rural economic activities to scale Empowerment Focussed Offerings The Empowerment communities on Focused the platform Tools need to be assessed in order to help them scale and identify more opportunities suiting to the strength of the ecosystem. The tools help us to understand the community better and nurture them further to spin off multiple economic activities suiting to the resources, skills, knowledge and culture of the community. This will help us design interventions that are not forced on the community but adopted as a choice. BENEFICIARY CATEGORIZATION Amale has been our pilot enterprise where we tested our expertise in working with the community to build economic activities. Understanding the time and effort required to do the same, Rural Caravan may not be able to do it with every community on the platform. All communities joining the platform will be eligible to collaborate, learn and access the offerings & tools for a price. However only a chosen few will be nurtured the way Amale is being done. When every community on the platform is supported to scale their economic activity, the chosen few will be nurtured to be an INR 1 Bn rural enterprise.

11 The Big Dream Rural Caravan strives to be the next revolution by being a bridge between rural India and the globe. We want our customers to experience satisfaction beyond just the dopamine effect on social media. Through our platform, we would like to achieve the following goals: Bring rural communities delivering a product or a service onto the platform to nurture them in innovation, customer interaction and wowing. Brand their stories and preserve their processes in traditional knowledge. Understand their aspirations and spread their desire out to the universe to help them connect with suitable customers, mentors and other businesses. Provide a space for expression of talent and skills of rural people that can be appreciated by the rest of the world and help them connect with apt opportunities. Minds on the margins are not marginal minds. Bring the village and panchayat at the mainstream through storytelling. Let their voices be heard so that their needs are put out unadulterated and solutions can be devised through a participatory approach willingly by the community and organizations interested in community development (academia, foundations and CSR). Provide opportunities for purposeful engagement of rural and urban sensitized youths to find a meaning for living by making a difference in the community.