Late last year I was researching at Mumbai’s extensive Dharavi slum – investigating residents’ management of irregular and unpredictable incomes as part of a global study co-ordinated by Niti Bhan of the Helsinki School of Economics. Some of my field observations and musings were posted on our research blog but as it has now been closed I thought I’d feature one of them here – relating to the merits of local micro-savings schemes.
Prema Salgaonkar (above) has been working with Mahila Milan for over 20 years and now heads a group of local facilitators of a daily savings scheme for Dharavi residents. Mahila Milan means “women together” and provides a vehicle for the empowerment of women via leadership roles and advocacy alongside its pivotal daily savings collection. Prema visits around 450 households each day, of which a third will deposit anything between Rs 5 to 200, with almost all households banking something each week. Such an initiative is ideally suited to the irregular nature of earnings at the base of the pyramid which we have been widely discussing during our research.
The deposits from a number of collectives are formally banked but rather than paying interest Mahila Milan provides community and emergency support in a transparent manner. For many, without this daily visit which both incentivises and protects savings, surplus cash would not even be conceived of – let alone put aside. Savings are readily accessible and members of the scheme can apply for credit if required – though this takes a distant back seat to focus on savings. When loans are requested the local Mahila Milan leaders will assess the need and ability to repay, possibly consulting with neighbours as to the borrower’s situation. Repayment terms are negotiated on a case-by-case basis around the borrower’s earning patterns, with consideration given to the maintenance of some savings alongside repayments. Loans –usually for up to Rs 500 at 2% interest – have helped with school fees, medical bills, home improvements and entrepreneurial start-ups from tailoring services to coconut vending.
Beginning in Mumbai in the eighties, initially Mahila Milan had many more illiterate members and developed a system whereby coloured squares of paper would be exchanged for deposits and kept by the saving member in a plastic bag: red for one rupee, yellow for two, green for five and so on. This way members could always check how much money they had access to and plan accordingly. Now this system has been largely disbanded and replaced with passbooks which members were proud to show us and explain the context of various peaks in savings and withdrawal. Currently Mahila Milan constitutes a networked federation of nationwide woman’s collectives encompassing 60, 000 women.
The system is not just about collecting money but also about daily contact which deepens the understanding of various issues facing Dharavi residents. Contributing to a consensus of community priorities, this information is often passed on to other support groups in the area such as the local community council (panchayat) plus used to inform a number of Mahila Milan initiatives. One of our informants (above) who used the scheme conveyed that even on the days when she has nothing to deposit that its was reassuring to be visited by a trusted outsider with sound financial knowledge and that she sometimes used the opportunity to discuss issues such as how rising food prices were affecting those beyond her own neighbourhood. She notes that watching her savings grow has allowed her to start imagining and planning a better future for her family – with her mother and sister also active members in the scheme.
We were told of numerous success stories like the woman who saved towards buying a second-hand sewing machine which allowed her daughter to leave a gruelling job at a local garment factory to start her own now-flourishing dressmaking business. Another woman with six children and an alcoholic husband saved Rs 5-10 a day till she had Rs 5000 with which she bought a machine to process heavy duty plastic for recycling and now boasts a much higher standard of living for herself and her family. Others access their savings on a short term basis to counter income fluctuations – still signalling a heightened life standard. And significantly most continue with their savings schemes while servicing their loans.
Micro-credit has been commanding a fair amount of attention surrounding poverty alleviation of late – including voices of caution as have featured in our research discussion. Mahila Milan seeks to strengthen financial assets primarily through savings-led services with micro-loans being offered as a secondary and complimentary service. Last year’s brief article Putting the Microsavings in Microfinance from the New York Times makes the highly relevant point that “only some poor people will benefit from the chance to borrow, but almost all will benefit from the chance to save.”
Related articles:
Dharavi Research Image Selection (Flickr)
Mobile Enterprise + Mobile Phone
Back here in New Zealand I’ve just been taking my kitchen cupboards apart trying to find a small fitting that seems to have dislodged itself from my pressure cooker – rendering it redundant. Has left me pining for the roving repair-men of India whom I know could sort out my conundrum in a flash.
Come to think of it I’d also like it if these guys graced my neighbourhood with their presence sometime soon as I have an imminent guest so would like an extra pillow and my vaccum cleaner’s been playing up so I just need a cheap broom to get me through to when I manage to have it fixed.
And the gas bottle needs changing soon so would be good if I could SMS this pair to drop by and sort things out. Plus with all the great tomatoes in season I need my knives sharpened so would be timely if the other dude rolled up round now as well.
India’s micro-entrepreneurs contribute to a culture of distribution which is liberated from fixed locations playing a vital role in conveniently providing items of regular consumption at relatively affordable prices. Not limited to informal enterprise, such delivery networks are also utilised by corporates from utility providers to Coca Cola – encompassing both motorised and non-motorised options to service challenging locations from densely populated urban neighbourhoods to rural villages.
Mumbai entrepreneur Deepa Krishnan (who oriented me for my recent Dharavi ethnographic research) comments:
“… Indian consumers are probably the most demanding in the world. We want – no, we insist – on superior service, tailored to our needs, at little or no cost. This of course, is a daunting prospect for anyone supplying anything to the Indian market. But sellers who can understand this mindset and who can tailor their products and services to it, are the ones who will succeed and thrive.”
My buddies over at Box Design + Research in Delhi partnered with John Thackara a while back to compile a rich-media archive of bicycle dependent commerce: Velowala – for the Biennial of International Design at Saint Etienne. [Illustration by Tenzing Dakpa] Alongside a diverse collection of examples they comment:
“The interesting thing about being on a bicycle is that it immediately frees you as an entrepreneur from the shackles of immovable real estate. Velocommerce is all about the mobility of property, and it challenges notions of ownership and private capital.
It is special because it exists at the intersection of entrepreneurship, mobility, sustainability, grassroots innovation, cultures, local economies and decentralized,
last-mile service delivery.”
In the not-for-profit realm Worldbike highlight how bikes can transform lives – connecting the poor to markets, schools and clinics via their Mobility for Good mantra. Of particular interest is their project at the Kibera slum in Nairobi to develop bike-based technologies and business models that empower local entrepreneurs to earn a living while simultaneously helping address the local garbage problem. Partnering with UN Habitat and local support groups they are devising a system to collect and transport waste from individual dwellings to central deposit sites, where it can be sorted for recycling and disposal. Elsewhere ColaLife proposes that Coca Cola open their distribution channels to transport compact ‘aidpods’ containing items like water purification tablets and oral rehydration salts. Through piggy-backing on Coke’s extensive mobile networks in less affluent countries, ColaLife would aim to contribute to a reduction in infant mortality, improve maternal health and combat prevalent disease. [Images via Worldbike + ColaLife]
But of course there are ways of impacting issues of poverty via commercial endeavors too. Indian industrial heavyweights Godrej look set to use mobile enterprise networks to reach their customers at the base of the pyramid with their affordable, compact refrigerator. Others entering this space of for-profit solutions aimed at meeting needs of the economically challenged are Tata with their Swach water filter and the French multi-national Schneider with its domestic lighting systems under the In-Diya brand. Given that these companies will need to consider the entire product ecosystem in ensuring access to goods, fittings and service of their offerings – one would imagine they will all be including mobile enterprise in their supply chains to reach customers in both dense and dispersed locations. [Image credit: Outlook – India's New Retailers]
You can check out more images on my Mobile Enterprise set on Flickr. Meanwhile back at home… I’m looking for a new craft project that gets me off the computer – maybe a visit from this guy could help?
Related articles:
Mobile Enterprise + Mobile Phone
Mumbai’s Pavement Purveyors (CNN)
A quick spot of cross-posting from my recent interview with Anil Gupta which featured on Design Observer this week.
Anil Gupta serves as senior faculty at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) from where he champions the recognition, respect and reward of those who are knowledge-rich yet economically poor.
Alongside consulting global development agencies he formed the Honey Bee Network in the late eighties which nurtures and cross-pollinates grassroots knowledge, creativity and innovation. Via various platforms stemming from the network – scouting, documentation, validation and dissemination of innovations are pursued while seeking to catalyse knowledge into feasible products and sustainable enterprises.
Meena Kadri
How would you describe your mission across your many initiatives?
Anil Gupta
To enhance the inherent creativity of grassroots innovators, inventors and eco-preneurs while exploring a new paradigm for poverty alleviation that celebrates inclusive development. We focus on devising a knowledge network from village to government level while overcoming the constraints posed by language, literacy and locality. We also facilitate the documentation and cross-pollination of traditional knowledge across India.
Meena Kadri
How do you see these endeavors playing a role in reducing poverty?
Anil Gupta
Most models of development are centered on what the poor don’t have rather than what they have. Some position the poor at the bottom of the economic pyramid, but this does not equate to a lack of knowledge, values and social networks. I prefer to see the poor as a provider than a market — with their limited material resources driving knowledge-intensive, informal innovation. Through providing incubation and development support, patent and intellectual-property-rights assistance, marketing advice and microventure funding, we seek to support the creativity that already exists at the grassroots.
Read the complete interview at Design Observer.
Mitti Cool cookware by Mansukhbhai Prajapati, from Gujarat
Gas-powered iron by K Linga Brahman, from Andra Pradesh
Pressure-cooker coffee maker by Mohammed Rozadeen, from Bihar
Related posts:
Mumbai Markings Enhance Service Design
Mumbai’s Pavement Purveyors (CNN)
Earlier this month I spent time in Delhi with my old pal Arti Sandhu, putting up our exhibition Overlap at the Mocha Arthouse. Arti and I have been intersecting across the globe for a decade now – in New Zealand, India, Hong Kong and the US. Sharing a fondness for hand-rendered, vernacular artforms, we conceived the show around our varied perspectives of Indianess – touching on the desi and diasporic, the traditional and typographic alongside explorations of language and locality.
My own work included two series which I designed and had executed by sign-writers in Ahmedabad and exhibited previously at the Glasgow School of Art. The English of India series came from noting that visitors to India are so often surprised by the amount of English one encounters – on the street, peppered through films and even in remote villages. I aimed to capture the localisation of the global spread of English through the flair of local sign-writing.
The second series, Bollywood Soul – A Vernacular Walk of Fame playfully created a set which displays divas and heralds heros of national cinema, employing local portraiture and typographic styles commonly used to decorate rickshaws. I collaborated with a local legend who earns his living painting rickshaw mudflaps from his roadside studio – and committed his brush to rubber shoe-soles for the project.
Arti grew up in an Army family which meant she covered a lot of ground in India from a young age. A love of drawing and customising her barbie to look more Indian led her study fashion at NIFT in Delhi and later in the UK. Since then she has lectured globally and is currently an assistant professor of Fashion Design in Chicago. Her artworks explore identity and migration and provide insightful perspectives on the eccentricities of the modern and mundane in India and abroad.
On annual visits home to India Arti began to notice the idiosyncratic qualities of everyday life which she had previously taken in her stride. She drew on these observations to create the ‘A’ is for Akshar series in which she re-visits her motherland and language while providing a visual commentary on India through the lens of a migrant.
Exploring cultural baggage and excess baggage, Arti’s Mahila Moments series is inspired by Madhubani folk art. Here she delves into the dilemmas of modern day India, fashion and migration with a love for line, pattern and repetition. Reminiscent of Ganjifa playing cards, the series crosses borders of locality and globalisation in an interplay of what Indian womanhood has come to mean at home and further afield.
Included in the exhibition was a large format poster by New Zealand-based graphic designer and typographer Anton Hart. A few years back he landed up in Bombay on a work sabbatical. Like many before him and many to come, he was smitten. But the touristy tabernacles of Agra and Rajasthan were not what caught his eye. Instead he was enraptured by the truck painters of Bombay and farther afield. His Horn Please typeface and ornaments are a tribute to their flamboyant creativity.
The show Overlap: Intersections of Desi and Diasporic is hosted by the good folk at Box Design & Research and will be up at Delhi’s Mocha Arthouse, DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj through March, 2010.
Related posts:
Viva Vernacular
Indian Street Graphics (Flickr)
One can find ample instances of mobile phones enhancing the lives of those on low and unpredictable incomes at the base of the pyramid across the world. Today I came across a small yet active example of the advantage of mobile connectivity in the context of my current research endeavors at Dharavi in Mumbai.
Jan Mohammed runs a knife-selling and knife-sharpening enterprise, which he operates from his bicycle, to service the Dharavi-Mahim-Sion area. He conducts business by going door to door in these neighbourhoods and often parks up in one of the busy marketplaces during evenings. Since buying a second-hand mobile phone he has been able to attract the business of local restaurants and caterers who provide bulk sharpening work and have become regular clients via the accessibility his phone assures.
The aspect he likes best about his phone is the prepaid payment method. Having a wife and five children back at his village in Uttar Pradesh means that he makes frequent calls home – but when he is low on money and hasn’t topped up his phonecard he can still receive calls ensuring business. In fact he had just last week paid to replace his knife-sharpening grinder so had no money left for phone credit, yet was still able to receive a lucrative call from a wedding caterer to sharpen 75 knives.
Knife-wallas elsewhere in Dharavi who conduct business without mobile phones.
Related articles:
Pavement Purveyors (Flickr)
Tuned-In
What do laundry and lunch delivery have to do with my favoured intersection of communication, culture and creativity? Well, in the case of Mumbai’s Dabbawallas and Dhobi Ghats – quite a lot. Via their respective coding systems, both enterprises are able to track items within their service chain to ensure accurate delivery.
The Dabbawalla service entails collection of freshly prepared meals from the residences of suburban office workers from vast reaches of the city, delivery to their workplaces and the return of empty lunch boxes (dabba or tiffin) to its original home – all for a reasonable monthly fee. Delivering over 200,000 lunch boxes each day to workers who have diverse eating habits (often governed by religion) requires an accurate system – especially as each lunch box commonly passes through the hands of at least six men, in quick exchange, on its path from home to office and back again. Most tiffins are collected by bicycle, sorted into destination groups, then carried together on trains and cycled to the offices of their respective customers. In between they are commonly carried on hand pushed carts and large head-balanced trays – all while jostling with chaotic Mumbai rail and road traffic.
With low literacy being an issue for some of the 5000 dabbawallas, they have devised a coding system using colour, symbols, numbers and a few letters which is painted on the lids of the tiffins to indicate the train lines, hub points and destinations at both ends of the delivery cycle. Each part of the marking can be understood by the relevant dabbawalla as the lunch box exchanges hands through the service chain. In the case that a lunch box gets on the wrong path, the code allows it to be set back on the right track – yielding only one mistake per 6 million deliveries according to economic analysis.
The Dabbawalla’s have been operating for over a century and the business continues to grow at a rate of 5-10% per year. When I asked about the effects of the economic downturn I was told with a smile that “the stomach knows no recession.” Their innovative localised system has been studied by business schools worldwide and covered by international media including the New York Times. As a brand strategist I also note an additional factor that contributes to their iconic status in the city: the dabbawalla’s signature Gandhi cap. This further serves as a recognition device between workers at busy exchange points and failure to wear one attracts a fine from their registered co-operative association.
The Mahalaxmi Dhobi Ghat is the world’s largest outdoor laundry which processes three quarters of a million items daily from households, hospitals, hotels and schools.
With articles to be washed, dried, starched and pressed coming from distant neighbour-
hoods to this central location – they have also developed a coding system to track and assure accurate return. Many customers dispatch their laundry to local hubs which send in bulk orders to Mahalaxmi. Each laundry hub attaches their articles with a scrap of cloth bearing a code penned in indelible ink – indicating the short-form name of their hub and their total number of articles over the recorded individual item number.
Workers in both systems are proud of the value that their services provide to the megacity. Together they exemplify the virtues of bottom-up innovation and entrepreneurship at play in this densely populated urban centre. Most dhobis and dabbawallas are migrants to the city – but in the words of 65 year old dhobi walla, Jan Mohammed [pictured above]: “There’s no city like Mumbai.”
Related links:
You can see and read more on my Flickr sets of Dabbawallas and the Dhobi Ghats
and I have upcoming pieces on both services being broadcast on Radio New Zealand.
Last week I went in search of the handful of Bollywood poster wholesalers at the somewhat obscure Tilak market near Grant Rd Station in Mumbai. These dealers stock posters of the latest films for advertising use by movie distributors, large and small cinemas and a growing number of small DVD projection halls in villages and slums across the state. They also store a selection of older posters printed from hand-painted originals – though this is very much a secondary trade to their bustling wholesale enterprise.
Abid Hussain Vora is 78 years old and originally came to Mumbai from Bhopal in the hope of becoming a movie actor. Instead he got into film production and later started his movie poster business. Like mine, his all time favourite Bollywood film is Mughal-e-Azam (1960).
Rajesh Vora is the most recent in three generations of poster sellers encompassing 65 years of trade. His grandfather, the late Amrat Lal Vora, used to extract the silver from black & white film strips and later set up their poster business. His father, Chandra Kant Vora, notes that the film industry gives so much to this city and that his enterprise is a “soni ka line” (golden job). His favourite film is Naya Daur (1957).
Mansoor Ali Hussain, now in his 60s, was obsessed with film photos as a child but could not then afford to attend movies. Instead he chose this line which now also employs his son. His favourite film is Sholay (1975).
Today I headed to Chor Bazaar (Thieves Market) to seek out dealers of older, collectable posters. Abu Khan is the youngest in a line of antique traders who have done business here since the late 1800s. They buy posters and other Bollywood ephemera from auction and collectors. His favourite film is Aradhana (1969).
Lastly I enjoyed a fabulous visit to Shahid Mansoori’s shop that I have been frequenting on trips to Mumbai since childhood. At 55 he is the third generation of his family to work at Chor Bazaar. As a child he collected Bollywood images that came with chocolates and ice-creams and later this evolved into frequenting auctions, purchasing from collectors and scooping up the remains from rural cinema closures. Eventually he heeded the advice of friends to start a business and he now has 40 people sourcing items for him across the nation. His son, Wahid, is currently collating material for an upcoming exhibition in France. Mr. Mansoori’s favourite film is Nishant (1975).
Related articles:
Viva Vernacular
A Closet Full of Bollywood (Hindustan Times)
And if Bollywood kitsch is your thing you’ll probably also enjoy
my Backview Bollywood set on Flickr.
“Attack complacency. Lay siege to boundaries. Load your catapult with options”
– fundamental Moxism
Recently I participated in a NextPlays lab by Moxie Design Group along with ten others from diverse involvements spanning government, non-profit and corporate realms. NextPlays is a transformative platform encompassing a culture of participation to explore sustainable future scenarios – then to imagine, plan and build strategies around them.
The session was exceptionally well devised as a fast-paced yet flexible programme which harnessed group energy and maintained momentum throughout the day. Activities alternated between presentations and discussion on context and challenges, exposure to inspiring case studies, rigorous team brainstorming around specific scenarios – and the personas that would be interacting with them. The seamless framework focused participants’ energy on a wide range of variables toward cultivating sustainable and transformative solutions.
NextPlays Labs have been conducted by Moxie with a wide range of organisations both global and local – from Air New Zealand to the World Bank and upcoming sessions with big boys Procter & Gamble. Each lab is specifically tailored to relevant issues facing the organisations, with the Moxie team skillfully migrating approaches on the fly to accommodate the unique needs of participating enterprises. Strategist Bert Aldridge notes “NextPlays is not about delivering answers but rather it’s an engagement tool to enable and build capacity around the seeking of solutions” while director Peter Salmon succinctly refers to its power to “catalyse conversations towards sustainable outcomes.”
The labs have been used in both Bangkok and Hanoi to explore urban development in conjunction with the World Bank Institute. Participants in these workshops have included community educators, climatologists, architects, environmental youth groups, waste management specialists and urban planners. In such company NextPlays has played a role in the aligning of agendas towards future-focused outcomes on a civic scale. Through encouraging an appreciation of inter-connectedness, divergent players discover potential efficiencies and opportunities.
And back here on home turf I found the expert guidance from scenarios to solutions, context to collaboration, macro to micro – all made for a highly rewarding and productive experience of the Moxie mix.
Related articles:
Creating Waves Through Collaboration
Change Agents Surmount Style
I’ve been throwing in the odd post to the recently launched REculture blog which explores the informal post-consumption economies of repair, repurpose, recycling and reuse at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP).
“Recycling has an entirely different meaning in the informal economy at the base of the social and economic pyramid across the developing world. Repair, reuse, repurpose and resale of products and packaging forms the basis of numerous small time businesses and services, creating a REculture that sees the potential for innovation and creativity where we might see waste.” – Niti Bhan
The REculture blog was launched by the globally prolific Niti Bhan of Emerging Futures Lab – a multidisciplinary research and consulting team focused on understanding the people at the base of the pyramid in order to improve the success rate of new ventures, products and services across the developing world.
A snippet on REculture from my end:
Advertising Ahmedabadi-style
A Ravivar Bazaar (Sunday Market) is held weekly on the edge of the Sabarmati River which runs through Ahmedabad. Noteworthy is the large tool trader stall which offers re-circulated goods for second-generation consumption. A micro-enterprise that fuels others to repair, reuse, repurpose and recycle.
The stall’s innovation is that by displaying it’s vast array of goods below the busy Ellis Bridge, it acts as a giant self-promoting ground-level billboard for itself. While corporates pay top dollar for hoarding space above street level – BoP entrepreneurs leverage opportune visibility below.
Keep an eye on REculture to shine a light on scarcity being as much of a driver of innovation as the numerous examples we see of abundance being the accelerator elsewhere.
I was reflecting today on my involvement as a mentor on the 2007 Creative Waves Project. It was a 3 month online education initiative which sought to facilitate global participants to propose initiatives to raise health awareness in Kenya. The project championed collaborative practice and encouraged intense and pro-active engagement of participating students, pharmacists, graphic designers, health workers, professional bodies and education institutions.
Over 50 pharmacy students and 50 graphic design students from diverse locations worldwide were united by the comprehensive online platform and had contact with international mentors and participants on the ground in Kenya throughout. Health related concerns including malaria, tuberculosis and immunisation were to be addressed through a well devised learning methodology which spanned 12 weeks. This included ever-inclusive tasks within the stages of Socialising, Gathering, Identifying, Distilling and Resolving – some of which were addressed from within assigned groups and all of which were lively points of intersection.
As a mentor it was interesting to note the principles of self-organisation play out as some students rose to the fore and took up leadership roles, groups figured out their respective skills and capacities, particpants cross-pollinated ideas and assisted each other to overcome technical challenges. The discussion sections with collaborators onsite in Kenya were particularly active and provided essential insight to the project at large. Guest professionals came in at various stages and memorable was the input by Anne Miltenburg, of Studio Dumbar, who spoke of issues surrounding visual communication and illiteracy.
Proposals that came out of the project included a headscarf that could be laid out and used as a board game to highlight health issues, soccer uniforms which vibrantly carried relevant messages and stickers to be adhered to fruit and vegetables, bearing health information. As a mentor I found the process as rewarding as the results. Social media initiatives are gaining popularity in bringing people together to solve diverse challenges. The Creative Waves project was pioneering back in 2007 and gave all participants a taste for the power of participation. One hopes that many were inspired to go forth and… collaborate.
Photo credit: Women’s Que for HIV Testing in Kenya, by Georgina Goodwin for Vestergaard Frandsen.
