As the academic year comes to a close, the 13 MAP teams organized and funded by WDI have finished their projects and successfully delivered final reports to their sponsoring organizations.
Multidisciplinary Action Projects, or MAP for short, is an annual, action-based learning course offered at the Ross School of Business in which MBA students work on projects for organizations all over the world under the guidance of faculty advisors. Each project requires analytical rigor, critical thinking, and teamwork among students. Sponsoring organizations receive first-rate deliverables and data-driven recommendations from the teams of students. (Learn more about this year’s MAP projects organized by WDI here; find more information on WDI’s MAP projects over the years here.)
After learning about their projects and conducting secondary research for several weeks, the students then spend two to four weeks working with their organizations in the field.
Two of those projects – in Hanoi, Vietnam and Madurai, India – focused on laying the groundwork for centers designed to support local entrepreneurs and are part of a joint effort between WDI and the Zell Lurie Institute (ZLI). To assist the students on their projects, WDI Education Initiative Vice President Amy Gillett and Program Coordinator Nathan Rauh-Bieri provided advice and guidance based on WDI’s prior work in entrepreneurship development (see WDI’s newly-launched Entrepreneurship Development Center).
Here is a recap of the two projects.
The Vietnam Partners MAP project was co-funded by ZLI, and hosted by Vietnam Partners, LLC. The project’s goal was to create a launch plan for an entrepreneurship service center in partnership with Hanoi Business School (HSB). The student team conducted more than 45 interviews with entrepreneurs, HSB administrators, and other stakeholders. They discovered that Vietnam’s entrepreneurs need help growing their business – not just starting them – and would welcome an entrepreneurship development center.
“The environment in Vietnam is ripe for this kind of organization,” said Bradley LaLonde, the team’s supervisor at Vietnam Partners.
At the end of their project, the students presented a business plan for a Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at HSB. The team identified a local hunger for practical rather than theoretical training, and training customized to the local ecosystem. More specifically, the MAP team identified a lack of local business cases. After a conversation with WDI, the MAP team suggested that a sustained effort around creating local cases, similar to WDI’s Philippines Case Collection, could be high-potential way to train Hanoi’s practice-hungry entrepreneurs.
Team member Juan Recalde said the project taught him that entrepreneurs have different needs.
“That was a very important learning because we could segment different types of entrepreneurs and based on the segmentation, determine which segment to target,” he said.
Recalde said he will take what he learned – specifically market research and creating a launch strategy for an entrepreneurship development center – and try to replicate it in his hometown.
“Formosa is one of the poorest provinces of Argentina and the government plays a big role in the economy, while the private sector is small,” he said. “I believe that entrepreneurship is the answer to the growth issues that my province faces.”
Stewart Thornhill, executive director of ZLI and the team’s academic advisor, praised the team for how well they represented U-M, WDI and ZLI and for their mature analysis of the project.
“They didn’t treat entrepreneurs as a generic class, but were able to identify specific personas,” he said. “Their in-depth qualitative research will serve this center’s clients well in the future.”
WDI President Paul Clyde, who also advised the team, said they gave Vietnam Partners good insights into the current situation with the country’s entrepreneurs.
“There is no substitute for having information from people who have spent time on the ground to get a good feel for what is going on,” Clyde said. “This is exactly the type of situation in which MAP projects are effective tools for us and for sponsors.”
The MAP team, based in Madurai, India, was tasked with setting up a business model for Aparajitha Foundation to provide services to the city’s Madurai’s micro, small, and medium enterprises – or MSMEs. This work builds on last year’s MAP project with Aparajitha.
The student team’s final report outlined the gaps in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Madurai, the market opportunity, business model, financial model, implementation plan, and key learnings. The team recommended that GROW, a conceptual organization to meet the needs of growth-stage entrepreneurs, be launched. The students also provided an outline of what was needed to have GROW operating within two years and expand to a second locale within five years.
Clyde, the team’s academic advisor, lauded the students’ efforts.
“They were able to get up to speed quickly on the current situation and combined that with some careful thinking about different models for providing services to entrepreneurs,” he said. Aparajitha “has already made significant progress in (its) engagement with the entrepreneurs in Tamil Nadu.”
The project left a definite impression on team member Nancy McDermott, who, though having a background in the community development aspects of business, experienced “what a big impact supporting entrepreneurs locally has on the local economy.”
Particularly, the project’s scope exposed her to how entrepreneurship can “spark job creation at a grassroots level,” she said, adding that she saw “what a big impact this is having on Madurai’s economy, and what kind of impact it can have on other economies as well.”
This summer, a WDI intern will pick up where the student MAP team left off and develop diagnostic tools that will identify the challenges a given entrepreneur faces and thus how GROW can work with the entrepreneur most effectively.
Image courtesy of Walmart.
Note: WDI’s recent research and case studies involving Walmart can be found here.
WDI Publishing has released a new business case study that examines Walmart’s successes and challenges in its efforts to incorporate smallholder farmers and female artisans from developing countries into its global supply chain.
“Walmart and Small Producers from the Developing World: Linking Demand with Supply,” which is free to download, studies two specific programs the retail giant created to target local producers. One was the Direct Farm program, which sourced fresh fruits and vegetables from farmers in developing countries. The other, Empowering Women Together, sourced handmade clothing, jewelry, home goods and other products made by women-owned businesses and sold online by Walmart.
It was written by Ted London, vice president of WDI’s Scaling Impact Initiative, and Colm Fay, program management analyst for Scaling Impact.
The case follows Walmart’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kathleen McLaughlin and two of her associates as they review the programs and consider whether modifications would improve their ability to work with local producers. The three also wondered if the lessons learned by Walmart about small and medium producer capabilities, global standards, partnership development, and funding requirements would be useful to others also trying to engage producers from the developing world.
If these small businesses were to become reliable Walmart suppliers, they would need to build significant capacity. That would require a considerable investment of time and money, flexibility and collaboration, the company determined. However, Walmart managers believed that achieving this could benefit the company, enhance how customers view the company’s environmental and social efforts, and improve the livelihoods of small producers worldwide.
So the question the company faced was, given the modest successes and the remaining challenges, should Walmart halt these efforts or continue to invest? And if they persisted, what changes should be considered?
Fay said the teaching case “prompts students to not only consider how both social and financial value might be prioritized differently across projects by companies such as Walmart, but how they then need to identify the appropriate execution approach for these strategies to achieve the outcomes they intend.”
The case originates from a report that Fay, London and Linda Scott, Emeritus DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, produced and presented at the 7th Annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2016. The report – “Incorporating Small Producers into Formal Retail Supply Chains” – takes a deeper look at how companies might prioritize different sourcing scenarios for small producers from developing countries.
This is the second case study about Walmart to be produced by WDI Publishing. In 2015, Fay and London – with assistance from a team of graduate students from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and the Ford School of Public Policy – wrote a case on the evolution of a global cross-sector partnership between the retailer and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The case examined what had been learned – both positive and negative – during the 15-year collaboration between the two global organizations.
The case, “Walmart and USAID: The Evolution of a Global Cross-Sector Partnership,” focused on partnerships that sought to engage smallholder farmers in the developing world, and highlighted examples from Honduras, Guatemala, Rwanda and Bangladesh. It explored the ways in which these collaborations occurred, how they were supported by the partners, and the level of success achieved as measured by Walmart, the Walmart Foundation, and USAID.
The co-founder of a start-up venture in South Africa that aims to save the honey bee will share how he designed the initiative to have economic, social and environmental impact as part of the WDI Global Impact Speaker Series. The talk begins at 5 p.m., Nov. 16 in room R2230 at the Ross School of Business, and is free and open to the public.
(Click here to watch Madison Ayer’s Nov. 16 classroom presentation.)
Madison Ayer, who has led several social ventures in Africa, including Honey Care Africa and Farm Shop, will discuss what he learned from those enterprises to launch Mbuyu Group, a large-scale honey bee conservation initiative. Mbuyu Group is working with South African National Parks to protect some of the world’s most critical honey bee ecosystems and strengthen the bee population. The group also hopes to become one of the largest global producers of organic honey.
Ayer has been featured in the WDI speaker series in the past. Last year, he talked about Honey Care Africa and Farm Shop, two ventures in Kenya that serve those living at the base of the pyramid.
Honey Care Africa provides smallholder farmers with beehives and harvest management services. In addition, it guarantees a market for the beekeeper’s honey at fair trade prices, helping to provide a steady, consistent source of income.
Farm Shop recruits and trains franchisees who then independently operate community-level, agro-dealer shops that supply smallholder farmers with seeds, fertilizers, tools, veterinary medicines and other items to improve crop yields.
In his 2015 talk, Ayer discussed the challenges that come with integrating low-income producers and consumers into the supply chain, including poor infrastructure, security concerns, informal regulations, and high costs. But if successful in overcoming these hurdles, Ayer said it can lead to long-term competitive advantage and positive economic impact on communities across the supply chain.
Watch Ayer’s 2015 presentation here and his interview with WDI Senior Research Fellow Ted London below:
In addition to his previous talks, Ayer also has engaged with WDI’s Scaling Impact Initiative and the Performance Measurement Initiative (PMI).
As part of a project funded by the German development agency GIZ, WDI studied the landscape of BoP facilitators in the sub-Saharan Africa region. The Scaling Impact initiative conducted field visits to Ethiopia and Kenya – including to Honey Care Africa and Farm Shop.
WDI’s Performance Measurement Initiative team also conducted a qualitative impact assessment in 2012 to identify Honey Care’s impact in alleviating poverty on children age eight years and younger, and developed a case study as part of the series entitled Focusing on the Next Generation: An Exploration of Enterprise Poverty Impacts on Children. The goal of the series, funded by the Bernard Van Leer Foundation, was to gain a greater understanding of the ways in which businesses in emerging markets impact young children’s lives and the potential to optimize impact on children.
Additionally, WDI Publishing also produced a popular teaching case study on Honey Care Africa that examined the business’s transition from obligating farmers to maintain their own hives to providing hive management services. The case also explored ways to enhance this new model, including strategies to reduce side selling. It was written by London and Heather Esper, senior program manager of PMI.
Kristin Babbie, a senior project administrator at WDI’s Grants Management team, recently attended the Global Youth Economic Opportunities Summit and authored the following post for NextBillion.net. NextBillion, a WDI affiliated site, originally published the article on Oct. 12, 2016.
In 2013, I interviewed a group of young people at a youth empowerment center in Kenya about their perceptions of agriculture as a livelihood. The interviews were part of a study driven by concerns about Kenya’s youth bulge, coupled with anecdotal evidence that the country’s youth had negative attitudes about working in the agricultural sector. The attitudes of the youth I interviewed were shaped primarily by the significant barriers they faced in accessing the capital needed to develop agriculture-based enterprises. Indeed, my findings pointed to the conclusion that the youth and agriculture problem runs deeper than the “youth are not interested” narrative.
Fast forward to 2016 and the Global Youth Economic Opportunities Summit hosted by Making Cents International, where the youth and agriculture problem was highlighted and the simplified assumptions underpinning it – such as “youth just are not interested” – were challenged.
So why is the youth and agriculture problem a concern to international development practitioners?
For one, agriculture is the “backbone” of many sub-Saharan countries. For instance, agriculture accounts for about 70 percent of the total labor force and 30 percent of Gross Domestic Product in Kenya. Second, rural households in Kenya rely heavily on subsistence agriculture for food consumption. And third, the country’s labor market lacks the ability to meet the demand of young job seekers. The highest unemployment rates in Kenya are for 20-year-olds, at 35 percent, followed by 25-year-olds, at 25 percent.
At the Global Youth Economic Opportunities Summit’s plenary titled “Seeding the Future: Land Tenure, Technology, and Opportunities in the Rural Economy,” panelist Thomas Jayne, a professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics at Michigan State University, emphasized that agriculture is not a “declining sector” in sub-Saharan Africa. Over the next 20 years in sub-Saharan Africa, he said 350 million youth will pursue employment, but even under the most favorable conditions only 25 percent will find wage-paying jobs in the formal economy. Agriculture offers a potential solution.
USAID’s Feed the Future Initiative cites the World Bank’s “Agriculture for Development” report, which makes the investment case for agriculture in developing countries. Perhaps the most compelling finding is that for people with the lowest incomes, “GDP growth originating in agriculture is about four times more effective in reducing poverty than GDP growth originating outside the sector.” Jayne presented the argument that multiplier effects offer the most significant benefit for investments in agriculture. Given the sheer size of the agricultural sector in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of number of producers, a slight increase in per capita income would have an overall positive economic impact.
“Since 2013, farmers’ sales of Feed the Future-supported crops increased 30 percent, on average. For poor farming families, this means more income to: buy more food, access healthcare, pay for school, save for & invest in the future. Economic empowerment is good for rural families, their communities and countries, and the world. It all adds up.”
Ending Hunger and Poverty: A Snapshot of Progress
Following Jayne’s talk, Odenda Lumumba, CEO of the Kenya Land Alliance, described a rural-to-urban migration trend he has observed in Kenya. Young people move to urban areas to attend school, he said, and once they are there, it is not uncommon for them to move to slums due to lack of opportunities. He implied that in many cases greater opportunity awaits youth in rural areas than in urban areas. The World Bank’s Agriculture for Development report points out that while agriculture is a driver of sub-Saharan African economies, only 4 percent of public spending is allocated to the sector. Lumumba called on governments, donors and the private sector to invest in agriculture where it can have a significant multiplier effect: “Today agriculture has the biggest opportunity to end hunger and eventually end poverty. But how do you do that? That is the challenge.”
Prior to the plenary, Beth Dunford, assistant to the administrator in USAID’s Bureau for Food Security, said that it is not that youth in sub-Saharan Africa are simply not interested in agriculture; it is that they are not interested in pursuing the agriculture of their parents. Dunford said, “Young people bring the kind of innovation, energy and enthusiasm that we need to tap into (for) transformative solutions to many of our biggest problems. Youth are interested in that, and that is what we need for agriculture.” Her message resonated with the research I did in 2013, in which youth frequently reflected on their experiences witnessing their parents’ hard manual labor. Dunford described Feed the Future’s approach to development, focused on creating enabling environments with youth – not for youth – to grow and expand their agricultural enterprises. A key takeaway message was that “there is money in the soil,” an expression Dunford heard while in Zambia.
The panel included two youth who both provided on-the-ground perspectives of how they had pursued agriculture in their home countries of Tanzania and the Philippines. First, 22-year-old Sirjeff Dennis of Jefran Agrifriend Solutions (JAS), based in Tanzania, shared his experience of growing up in a slum where finding a meal was difficult. When he saw a woman in his neighborhood lose her baby to malnutrition, it gave him the passion to end hunger through agriculture. Despite earning his degree in petroleum engineering, Dennis decided to become an agricultural entrepreneur, or “agripreneur.” Five years ago he started his company with $50 USD. He purchased 50 chickens and eventually expanded his enterprise to include maize, rice, tomatoes, Chinese cabbage, okra, eggplant and onion. On one hand, he explained, there is a common stereotype among Tanzanian youth that agriculture is something that should be done by poor people with a low level of education; on the other hand, people throughout his country really love it.
Dennis’ comments suggest that there is a cultural value to agriculture; however, there is a perception that those who pursue careers in the sector are minimally educated and are destined to be poor due to the difficulty in generating sustained incomes. To assist in debunking this attitude, Dennis created a youth and agriculture initiative within JAS, recruiting and training young people to start their own agricultural enterprises. He had hoped for 30 applicants but received 300, demonstrating the interest of youth in agriculture.
Today, Dennis’ business employs 37 people, with 80 percent of them 23 or younger – and 20 percent are women. Despite the success, he points to key challenges that threaten the sustainability of his enterprise. For one, access to finance is a significant problem for Dennis. For example, despite the exposure he gained through winning a MasterCard Foundation award, the local bank was still not willing to provide him with a loan. The reason? Because he is 22 and doing agriculture. Another challenge, he said, is access to equipment. He had to import equipment through Alibaba, an online marketplace, to scale his business, which was very expensive. Dennis recommended that the government in his country lower taxes for young farmers, provide assistance to youth to form farming cooperatives, and provide financial assistance. He stated that development practitioners must create awareness among banks and governments about the unique challenges agri-preneurs face, so that investments in agriculture make sense.
Another young agri-preneur, Cherrie Atilano, shared her perspective as it relates to a social enterprise she founded called AGREA, based on the island of Marinduque in the Philippines. AGREA leads a youth movement in support of agriculture, offers a variety of trainings and events, promotes sustainable agricultural technologies, and bridges the gap between farmers and consumers. AGREA is known for its tagline, “Making farming cool, smart, sexy, and humane.” Atilano starting farming when she was 12 years old and 18 years later, she is still involved. She said a lot of young people in the Philippines, especially professionals, are going back into the sector. There are thriving high-value markets for organic and artisan foods in Southeast Asia, she said, and the Filipino government has begun to recognize the value of agriculture. For example, a new law mandates all public and private schools visit a farm once per year as a field trip. Finance, Cherrie noted, remains the most significant barrier to young farmers working to start their own agricultural enterprises in her country.
Speakers at the summit made a strong argument for the potential of agriculture and why the development community should continue to challenge the assumptions behind the notion that youth are not interested in it. However, the transformation of structures (including government and the private sector) and processes (such as laws, policies, culture and institutions), which in turn influence ability to respond to shocks, trends and seasonality, must be addressed within the local context. These macro factors have an ultimate influence on the ability of youth to access key capital to develop, sustain and scale their agri-enterprises.
Photo by Neil Palmer (CIAT) via Flickr
This study was undertaken with the financial support of the Inclusive Business Action Network (IBAN). IBAN is a global multi-stakeholder network enabling and promoting inclusive business worldwide. It is implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
The focus of this report is to shed light on the opportunity for inclusive business leaders to leverage partnerships to overcome the challenges they face in seeking sustainability at scale. Our findings, based on interviews with both entrepreneurial and corporate-led enterprises engaging with smallholder farmers in Kenya and South Africa, offer important insights on how these enterprises can enhance their performance through building an effective partnership ecosystem. In particular, we focus on addressing the following two questions for IBs seeking to transition from pilot to scale:
The “who” – Which partners should enterprise leaders prioritize as most crucial to enabling sustainable, scalable inclusive business development?
The “how” – Once these inclusive business leaders have identified their priority partners, what are the strategies and processes they will need to use to develop and maintain these relationships to maximize their effectiveness?
The William Davidson Institute (WDI) at the University of Michigan received a grant from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) through its Inclusive Business Action Network (IBAN) initiative to implement the project, “Selecting the Right Partners: Strategies to Support Inclusive Business Scaling.” The project built on prior research supported by IBAN to further understand the process of developing robust partnership ecosystems, specifically in context of Base of the Pyramid (BoP)-oriented inclusive businesses (IBs).
The project was made up of two main stages: Stage 1, Building the Right Portfolio and Stage 2, Partnership Building. During Stage 1, the question, “Which partners should enterprise leaders prioritize as most crucial to enabling sustainable, scalable inclusive business development?” was explored. Stage 2 focused on the question, “Once these inclusive business leaders have identified their priority partners, what are the strategies and processes they will need to use to develop and maintain these relationships to maximize effectiveness?”
During the past decade Walmart has opened up several channels for distributing products sourced from small producer enterprises in its stores and on its digital platforms. The overall purpose of the project is to present both the challenges and success factors involved when integrating small producers and enterprises, particularly artisans and small holder farmers, into the organized retail supply chain. The intention will be to help other businesses and organizations who wish to engage in such programs, and to show where the involvement of governments, NGOs, and other industry sectors is essential to achieving desired outcomes. The illustrations will include specific examples from Empowering Women Together and Walmart’s local food sourcing programs, both of which undertake to integrate small businesses and producers and women-owned enterprises into the supply chain. The project will result in both a policy brief aimed at the retail sector, and a teaching case that facilitates better understanding of the challenges and success factors in integrating small producers at the base of the pyramid into formal retail supply chains.
The William Davidson Institute (WDI) at the University of Michigan received a grant from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) through its Inclusive Business Action Network (IBAN) initiative to implement the project, “Selecting the Right Partners: Strategies to Support Inclusive Business Scaling.” The project built on prior research supported by IBAN to further understand the process of developing robust partnership ecosystems, specifically in context of Base of the Pyramid (BoP)-oriented inclusive businesses (IBs).
The project was made up of two main stages: Stage 1, Building the Right Portfolio and Stage 2, Partnership Building. During Stage 1, the question, “Which partners should enterprise leaders prioritize as most crucial to enabling sustainable, scalable inclusive business development?” was explored. Stage 2 focused on the question, “Once these inclusive business leaders have identified their priority partners, what are the strategies and processes they will need to use to develop and maintain these relationships to maximize effectiveness?”
Each summer, as part of its mission to provide high-quality learning opportunities to University of Michigan students, WDI sponsors interns who work overseas with international organizations.
This year, five U-M graduate students representing five different schools across campus are working in the education, healthcare and poverty alleviation fields. The projects are based in Ghana, Rwanda, Ethiopia, India, Peru and the Philippines.
In addition to providing the students with meaningful business and cultural experience that comes with working internationally, the summer internships also provide WDI’s five initiatives with important insights from the field. This summer’s internships are managed in collaboration with WDI’s Performance Measurement Initiative (PMI), Education Initiative, and Healthcare Initiative.
“The PMI team is excited to provide measurement advice and support to WDI’s interns, learn from their related experiences, and apply those learnings to current and future projects,” said PMI Program Manager Heather Esper. “In particular, we are interested in learning more from the Pearson Affordable Learning Fund/ Affordable Private Education Centres internship in the Philippines. (Learn more about these projects below). Implementing and institutionalizing a new measurement system centered on learning, and conducting demand analyses and customer segmentation are both areas of great interest to our partners.”
Here are the interns and their projects.
Naomi Wilson, School of Education
Organization: Pearson Affordable Learning Fund (PALF) in partnership with Omega Schools
Country: Ghana
PALF makes minority equity investments in for-profit companies to meet the growing demand for affordable education across emerging market countries. Their vision is to help millions of children in the world access a quality education in a cost effective, profitable and scalable manner. Additionally, organization wants to demonstrate to governments and donors that private education can help to educate their youngest citizens in an efficient way.
Omega Schools is a chain of affordable schools in Ghana delivering quality education affordably to 15,000 low-income students.
As Omega continues its growth, it needs a structured, evidence-based, and easy-to-use software tool for selecting new school sites and determining what price point would be appropriate for specific locations. Wilson will research similar tools already in place, analyze enrollment and profitability of current schools, visit current and potential school site and identify key factors to be considered in site selection.
Michael Manansala, Ford School of Public Policy
Organization: PALF in partnership with Affordable Private Education Centres (APEC)
Country: The Philippines
APEC is a chain of affordable, high-quality secondary schools based in metro Manila focused on employability and life skills.
Manansala will aim to improve annual student assessment and quarterly academic reporting by analyzing existing student performance data and benchmarking it against publicly available data to determine learning outcomes. He also will review existing research and conduct a series of qualitative customer interviews and quantitative customer surveys to better understand why some parents send their children to APEC while others don’t.
Carissa De Young, Ross School of Business/School of Natural Resources and Environment
Organization: Shared-X
Country: Peru
Shared-X is a for-profit, startup social impact business in its first year of operation. It works to lift thousands of farmers out of extreme poverty by deploying advanced farming techniques on highly productive land to close the agricultural yield gap between developed and developing nations. Through the direct sale of specialty crops to international markets, Shared-X provides social, environmental, and economic benefits to local farming communities and generates strong returns for shareholders. Shared-X operates test farms that demonstrate best farming practices and secure contracts for its crops. It then expands access to its technology and markets to smallholder farmers in surrounding communities.
De Young will design a strategy to measure, communicate, and expand the social impact of Shared-X’s model of engagement with smallholder farmers. She will identify and measure impact by conducting interviews with stakeholders and experts ranging from current and potential future cooperative members, Shared-X personnel, and leaders in similar companies. She will then compare her findings with industry best practices to create a proposal for key performance indicators.
De Young also will identify a pathway to continue replicating the Shared-X model with additional smallholder farmers in other regions where Shared-X farms exist.
Elisabeth Michel, School of Public Health
Organization: The Ihangane Project (TIP)
Country: Rwanda
TIP empowers local communities to develop sustainable, effective, and patient-centered health care delivery systems that holistically respond to the needs of vulnerable populations. It envisions a world in which quality health care leads to healthy, inclusive, and empowered communities. TIP has been working with Ruli District Hospital in Rwanda and its seven associated health centers to determine key strategies for improving health outcomes within the community.
Michel will facilitate a successful hospital retreat that creates a shared vision of high-quality and patient-centered health care at Ruli, and includes an implementable framework for decision-making and problem solving. She also will help the hospital staff implement recommendations that come from the retreat.
Dilparinder Singh, Ross School of Business
Organization: PATH
Countries: India and Ethiopia
PATH is a Seattle-based international, nonprofit health organization that creates sustainable, culturally relevant solutions, enabling communities worldwide to break long-standing cycles of poor health. PATH is one of many global health organizations working with countries to reduce malaria deaths.
Singh will work with PATH to conduct a market landscape of current malaria testing and treatment algorithms in Ethiopia. He also will work with PATH’s India Innovation Hub, which encourages innovative approaches to healthcare.
Sir Fazle Hasan Abed was recently on the University of Michigan campus to receive a global health award. While there, he sat down with Kyle Poplin, editor for NextBillion Healthcare, an initiative of WDI, to talk about his work in Bangladesh. This article was originally published April 13, 2016 on NextBillion.
It was 1972 and Bangladesh was “an international basket case.” The Liberation War had just ended and the country was still reeling from the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded, Bhola, two years before.
The desperate conditions in his native country convinced Fazle Hasan Abed to quit his executive job at Shell Oil and try to help. But he couldn’t have foreseen the impact he would have on Bangladesh – and the world – when he founded what was originally a short-term relief effort called the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.
That original group of a couple dozen people grew into what is now called BRAC, the largest non-governmental development organization in the world, with a $1 billion budget and 111,000 employees offering services to 138 million people. And Bangladesh, not coincidentally, has transitioned from the world’s second poorest country to lower middle income.
BRAC’s overarching philosophy is that poverty has many causes, so many solutions are needed. The organization provides programs in microfinance, education, health care, job training, empowerment of women, sanitation, agriculture, etc., and owns 16 social enterprises that provide $700 million in revenue. The remaining $300 million in revenue is generated through donations.
Abed – now officially Sir Fazle after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II – has been called one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders, and was hailed as “a public health hero” when the University of Michigan awarded him one of its most prestigious honors, the Thomas Francis Jr. Medal in Global Public Health, on April 6.
The next day, in a sit-down interview with NextBillion, the 80-year-old talked about his four-decades-and-counting quest to empower the poor.
“The greatest influence on me about people’s lives and poverty was my mother. She was very concerned about poverty and poor people and she tried to help them as much as she could,” he said. “(After starting BRAC) I got to know poverty firsthand in the villages of Bangladesh. I became more aware of the multidimensional aspect of poverty. It’s not just lack of income, it’s lack of opportunities, lack of health care, lack of education. It’s all kinds of deprivation that constitutes poverty. Ultimately, it’s also powerlessness to do something about poverty, how to come out of it.
“In the old days, one used to think that one takes resources to the poor people and distributes them, and they come out of poverty. But we thought you have to involve the poor people themselves in the fight against poverty.”
He said he developed that concept – considered revolutionary in the ’70s – from reading “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. “Oppressed people have got their own way of thinking about life,” Abed said, “and if you can somehow mobilize them, make them critically aware of their own condition, and get them to act on their own behalf, make them an actor in their own history, then things become much easier.”
Perhaps the best example of Abed and BRAC putting that idea into practice was an oral rehydration therapy (ORT) program aimed at ultra-poor women in Bangladesh starting in the early 1980s. Diarrheal disease, the second leading cause of death in children under age 5, leads to dehydration, but it can treated with a simple mixture of water, sugar and salt known as ORT. Conventional wisdom held that illiterate, uneducated women were incapable of properly mixing and administering ORT, but BRAC taught millions of women from Bangladesh’s slums and villages how to do it. And today Bangladesh’s ORT rates are among the best in the world.
BRAC also pioneered a “graduation model” that empowers the ultra-poor to move from safety net programs to income-earning activities and self-sufficiency.
In the free-ranging video interview below, Abed talks more about BRAC’s future than its illustrious past.
He’s optimistic, for example, about the next generation of businesses that might help support BRAC, highlighted by a transition from a free to paid education model. He believes everyone can afford to pay $10 to $15 a month to ensure their children’s future, so BRAC is “looking into providing quality education for poor people.”
He’s wary of religious fundamentalism. The interview was conducted the day after a secular blogger was hacked to death in Bangladesh – the fourth such incident this year – in an attack attributed to a local chapter of al-Qaeda. Abed said that while “intolerant religion is becoming quite a force in our society,” it hasn’t yet had much of an impact on BRAC’s empowerment efforts, specifically of women, and he hopes such intolerance can be kept under control.
And he’s certain that it is, indeed, possible to eliminate extreme poverty worldwide, in accordance with Sustainable Development Goal No. 1. As one might expect, he’s got a plan in mind: