Jake Hayman on the town of Bagar, Rajasthan – "Professor Sachs, meet the Piramals"
Jake Hayman founded the strategy and philanthropy consulting firm The Social Investment Consultancy in 2007 and holds the role of Chief Executive Officer of its European operations. Jake is also the founder of Future First, an award winning social business working to revolutionise career advisory services in UK state schools.
In this post, Jake explores the unique approach to community development that seems to have served the small town of Bagar so well.
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I’m sat on a bus driving away from Bagar. It’s a weird place and the drink is terrible. The cows are prone to charging and the peacocks seem to hold the right of way. Beyond that, I’ve never seen a community in the developing world that has developed so disproportionately to the communities surrounding it.
Sat in rural Rajasthan, Bagar is a real life realization of the aspiration of the Millennium Promise project being led by Jeffrey Sachs to build beacon cities and villages in the developing world that fulfill the Millennium Development Goals and showcase these successes to communities around them.
Like Professor Sach’s ‘Millennium Villages’, Bagar has its own benefactors. The story begins with a member of the Piramal family who left the town to go make a fortune in the big smoke, and succeeded. He became one of the most successful entrepreneurs in India. Over the decades he and subsequent generations of Piramal have taken it upon themselves to reinvest in their community.
Long-term, rounded investment in a single community is a common approach to development. Not only Millennium Promise but other major NGOs such as World Vision use this tack.
What’s interesting in Bagar is the scale, the success and the methodology of the philanthropy and the fact that it is coming from hands on local philanthropists, who may not have Phd’s in Development Economics, but truly know their communities.
Huge amounts have been invested in Bagar, and seemingly done so very, very wisely. The schools are neither empty nor overcrowded, everyone is both well-dressed and well-nourished and the health clinic was reassuringly empty. The approach, however, has emphasized enterprise as much as aid in a way that NGOs rarely succeed in doing.
In September last year, I visited the Millennium Village of Gumulira in Malawi and saw a community with healthcare and education services ahead of those around it. It was the only thing that came to mind when trying to place Bagar in the ‘development’ community’s landscape. However the pace of change at Bagar and the level of success in bringing up a whole community as opposed to simply providing core services was breathtaking in comparison to Gumulira.
This need be no criticism of Millennium Promise. Bagar is a long way from Gumulira – it’s got a better climate for crops, Rajasthan is wealthier than Malawi and the Piramals have had much longer to work at it than Jeffrey Sachs. However, there is a fundamental difference between the Piramal approach and the Millennium Promise approach that is no doubt worth exploring.
What’s interesting is that the focus of a large part of the Piramal’s work is not just in health or education, it’s also in enterprise. It gets even more interesting when you find out that some of their solutions to health and education are in fact based around a market based approach rather than an aid-based approach and it becomes truly fascinating when you look at the books and see that they might even start making money out of these enterprises.
So what do these enterprises look like? In a small building off the main road you find 30 women employed in a rare rural business outsource processing organization called Source for Change. It was started as a project within the Piramal Foundation’s Grassroots Development Centre. It’s now registering as an independent business co-owned by employees, the Foundation and outside investors that will seek to provide 100,000 jobs to rural communities, predominantly to women. It looks like they are going to make money - and indeed, the women working there already are.
Two minutes up the road past the Piramal School and the Piramal multi-purpose health centre, there’s Sarvajal. A franchise-modeled water treatment business targeting rural areas that have access to water, but do not have access to cheap, clean water. Sarvajal are setting up local entrepreneurs to treat water, recycle wasted water and fill re-usable 20 litre bottles that are sold to communities for 10 cents a time (with a $2 down-payment on the bottle so you will bring it back).
Currently at 60,000 customers, they are just getting going and should be profitable within a couple of years. Again, they started as a Foundation initiative and have now been spun off into a partially-owned independent corporation.
These innovative business models - incubated in ‘charity’ but being scaled as businesses - sit alongside traditional aid projects to create a formidable level of opportunity in Bagar.
Maybe the Piramal Foundation are already lobbying Millennium Promise to look at enterprise based solutions to poverty within their model. Maybe Millennium Promise is already showcasing some of their best practice to the Piramals. If they are, then let this post serve only as a public request to see the minutes of what would be a fascinating meeting. If not, that meeting should happen as soon as possible. I’ll serve the chai.
