By Parisa Ahmadi.
In my last blog post, I ended with three questions (which will follow shortly). After my professor saw the post, he told me, “It’s such a tease! You ask these questions and you don’t follow up!” So I decided to just that. Now that my field experience in India has come to a close, I want to respond to each of those questions—not only by taking what the research has taught me into account, but by considering what my experiences over the past few weeks have taught me about real world applications in local communities.
My first question is: What associations do we have about people we call “underprivileged,” and are they associations with which the people themselves identify? In short, just because we think someone is underprivileged doesn’t mean that they think they are. The documentary film Good Fortune offers examples of development in Kenya. In one instance, a retired American millionaire traveled to what he considered was the most impoverished part of Kenya. Despite significant local protest, he took it upon himself to “give” the people vast fields of rice. In the course of the project, he flooded a vast amount of land, increased the malaria risk in the area due to more mosquitoes, and poisoned people and animals with pesticides used on the rice. A Kenyan man who lived in the surrounding area responded by saying, “I was not a poor man before this American came. Now I am a poor man.” 
So then, keeping in mind the dangers of assuming what people want and need, are there any examples where reaching out to people is received positively? Barefoot College is a social venture I came to learn about in India. The Indian founder, Bunker Roy, said that when he began the project, he learned the “extraordinary skills and knowledge poor people have.” The organization is a synthesis of local people’s initiatives for their community and the organization’s resources.
In the last few weeks of my time in India, I was able to travel outside of Jaipur, Rajasthan, to an area called Tilonia and visit the organization. One of its main objectives is to gather poor, illiterate women from various villages across the world and to train them as engineers. In spite of initial language barriers, the women learn how to create solar panels by using a color-coded instruction manual composed of their own notes. After receiving their certification at Barefoot College, they return to help provide solar electricity to their home communities and lead workshops that teach other women how to create solar electricity.
When I went to the college, I exchanged words with women from Peru, Chile, Sudan, and Fiji. All were going through the certification process, talking about adjusting to life in a new country and missing their families back home. But they also laughed and smiled with each other, appreciating the friendships they were forming and the skills they would take home. Barefoot College had other programs I took note of as well. They had an elaborate student government system in which primary school students represented their peers and community members by assessing teachers, doctors, and programs throughout the college. Furthermore, these students had the power to fire people they felt were not meeting their needs! This was incredible to me: that people so young had such a powerful platform from which to speak and act on behalf of their community.
Furthermore, the College had a communications department that used traditional Rajasthani theatre, puppetry, and music as a form of teaching and dialogue between the community members. Barefoot College is one of the most acclaimed organizations in the world because the community plays a powerful role in directing its initiatives. After all, its members had collaborated with Barefoot College from the beginning and therefore had ownership of the projects.
Before reaching out to a community, it is important to understand how people see themselves and what is important to them. It is equally necessary to try and understand yourself: where you stand, what your biases are, what motivates you, and what you believe in. This creates opportunity for dialogue, and you can begin to learn from one another. This is the first step to creating a positive social venture
The second question I asked was: How does globalization affect what we understand to be natural change in a community? Here’s how anthropologist Anthony Giddens defines globalization:
“The intensification of worldwide social relations that link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”
Globalization seems to permeate nearly every aspect of people’s lifestyles (not to mention how it affects other forms of life on this planet.) Market systems, political structures, and technologies across the world are becoming more inextricably linked, both directly and indirectly. This even impacts people who otherwise may not have been asked to be a part of it. The coral reefs surrounding a small Pacific Island town have been damaged due to nuclear testing; although they used to rely on fishing, they are now dependent on the cheap, unhealthy, processed food items provided to them from outside markets. A Massai herdsman in Kenya is forced to give up his semi-nomadic lifestyle because the government is restricting his herding patterns; he must submit to the borders that nations have drawn around him. An indigenous Kayapo community in the Amazon must leave their home because a big corporation wants to dam their river for its resources.
Often these dynamics began in the colonial era, and many of the same dynamics that excluded people because of a history of colonialism continue to be exacerbated in the global era. For example, many indigenous people who live traditional lifestyles are considered “quaint” and “exotic,” and yet they live in a social structure that largely looks down on them and excludes them. And yet sometimes communities are able to subvert the negative effects of these relationships by strategizing for their own empowerment.
Some communities gain a foothold in the tourist industry. They use the curiosity of tourists as a means of creating revenue while maintaining important cultural practices at the same time. Tourists can pay to come into their community, purchase local products and merchandise, see local forms of theatre, dance, food, and other cultural practices.
I did not experience this so much when traveling to India this summer, but I did experience this when traveling to Kenya last year in March. We went to a Massai village whose members allowed us to come, see the kinds of foods they ate, the homes they slept in, their traditional dances, and their beautiful jewelry and garments.
For my fellow peers and me, it felt uncomfortably voyeuristic, as though we were coming to gawk at the “the natives.” At the same time I appreciated that this was a livelihood and business venture that helped them sustain their community. It allowed us to pass through, hear what they shared about themselves from a diplomatic distance (we were the client, after all), and part ways.
So while on the one hand globalization pressures communities in new ways, on the other hand, communities can strategize to use those systems for their own empowerment.
The third question I asked was: When is it important to scale in a social venture? There are so many different philosophies to consider when it comes to deciding how big an organization or social venture should become. Some people think expanding is risky— others think “Go big or go home!” Here are a couple of examples of each:
- In India, micro financing was a very popular initiative up until a few years ago. Originally the intent was that micro-financing firms would empower small, local entrepreneurs by finding people to invest in their enterprises. The problem was that the micro-financing industry in India continued to expand, and soon it became a bloated space. Firms began to partner with investors who wanted high returns from the small entrepreneurs, and risky investments began to take place. Firms and investors both lost sight of empowering these small, local entrepreneurs, and suddenly these entrepreneurs were becoming financially worse off than when they had begun. So scaling caused the firms to compromise their quality, make risky investments, and lose sight of their original goal to empower individuals.
- On the other hand, at our Thursday seminars we learned about a social venture called “Rural Shores.” It is a business process outsourcing company (BPO) that conducts customer service work for big companies. Basically, every large-scale company in the world needs someone to manage their data, and so a typical trend of the twentieth century is to outsource this management to a third party in another part of the world. Traditionally this is performed in large cities because of the easy access to human resources. What Rural Shores aims to do is give jobs to young people in rural areas. They find an investor that will cover the start-up cost of creating the infrastructure and setting up the technology for the service centers. Then they provide the training and install the management to monitor it. In this way it provides young rural people with jobs, investors with returns, and clients with customer service centers. Each data center is relatively small and generally in several rural communities. Rural Shores has created a very well-received model, and consequently they want to scale their operations. But they don’t want to scale by expanding the size of each individual service center. They want to scale outwardly by setting up the model in more and more communities.
The bottom line? Scaling can be a good thing, but only when the people meant to be empowered don’t slip through the cracks.
In conclusion, my research and experiences in these past two years of college have helped me to offer some perspective on my own questions. I am sure that as I continue to meet new people and places, I will be facing these same questions—and formulating new ones—with different lenses.
