Kerry Shields worked in the healthcare industry before coming to U-M’s Ross School of Business for her MBA and has plans to return to it after graduation. So she was eager to find a MAP (Multidisciplinary Action Project) in a different industry, and was ecstatic when she learned she was part of the WDI-sponsored MBA student team working with the Relationship Coffee Institute and Sustainable Harvest in Rwanda.
The Relationship Coffee Institute (RCI) is a nonprofit, public benefit corporation – or, B Corp – working to increase social and economic opportunity for smallholder commodity farmers and their families. Its partner, Sustainable Harvest, is one of the largest importers of fair trade specialty coffee in the U.S.
“What this company is trying to do is important and innovative and I can learn from that,” she said. “Hopefully we will have had an impact at the end of the project and get a better understanding how a private company can help alleviate poverty.”
The MAP in Rwanda is one of eight student projects organized and sponsored by WDI. MAP is an action-based learning course offered at Ross for MBA students who receive guidance from their faculty advisors. Each project requires analytical rigor, critical thinking, and teamwork. Sponsors receive top-notch deliverables and data-driven recommendations from the team of students.
After learning about their projects and conducting research in the classroom for several weeks, the students then spend three to four weeks working alongside their project sponsors in the field.
Sylvia Jimenez will work on a WDI-sponsored MAP team for CARE, a non-profit organization seeking to use business approaches to address social issues.
“I’m looking forward to getting out of my comfort zone and doing something different than I have done before,” she said. “I think I’ll learn a lot about me as a team player, and learn about my teammates and what their strengths are.”
Ted London, vice president of WDI’s Scaling Impact Initiative, is one of the faculty advisors on the Sustainable Harvest and CARE MAPs as well as two others. Before the teams traveled to their destinations for on-the-ground work, he brought them together for a special WDI-focused session to get to know each other better before they left and to touch on some of the key issues the teams will face in the field.
He discussed what it takes to conduct good interviews, particularly in a base of the pyramid (BoP) market context, emphasizing that the goal of these interviews is to develop data-driven recommendations. Among other things, he also told the students to approach people they meet and interview with respect and humility to maximize the depth and quality of the data collected during the interview.
“You are not only there as expert problem-solvers, but also as experts in learning and listening,” he said. “Only by collaborating and co-creating can we build solutions that really work.”
London said his MAP projects allow students to take what they learned in the classroom and apply it in a BoP context.
“For students interested in working in this space as a career, it is an amazing opportunity,” he said. “These MAPs open students’ eyes to this part of the world and to this scale of enterprise and impact. They’re part of the minority seeing how the majority of the world conducts business.”
WDI and its partners get value from the experience as well, London said. Seven of the eight MAP projects are with partners that have long-term relationships with WDI.
“By leveraging MAP and the great skills of the Ross students, we’re providing resources and expertise to our partners to help them solve the problems they’re facing,” London said. “And it’s a way for us to collaborate with partners in the field, apply our knowledge, and learn what are the next-generation tools we need to think about in the future.”
Here is a summary of each MAP project:
Aravind Eye Care System – India
Advised By: Paul Clyde, WDI and Ross School of Business; Peter Lenk, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Jackie Barnum, Katie Redman, Alex Kravitz, Matt Tafoya
Aravind Eye Care System (AECS) has five tertiary care centers, six secondary care centers, six community clinics, and 54 primary eye care centers across the Tamil Nadu state in India. Now AECS is expanding, opening tertiary hospitals in Chennai and Tirupathi in the next couple of years, and there are also plans to expand the services/facilities in the existing hospital units.
The student team will customize and test at two to three AECS facilities an existing process model that will measure performance of each unit and is understandable to everyone in the organization.
Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE) – India
Advised By: Ted London, WDI and Ross School of Business; Jane Dutton, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Karina Cabanillas, David Chang, Takashi Takizawa, Sylvia Jimenez
CARE has been working in India for over 65 years, focusing on ending poverty and social injustice. Its overall goal is the empowerment of women and girls from poor and marginalized communities leading to improvement in their lives and livelihoods.
Most smallholder farmers, a vast majority of whom are women, have limited access to quality and affordable agriculture input, services, finance and technologies. The student team will develop a profitable and socially inclusive business plan that CARE can execute in 2016 that facilitates access for smallholder farmers to inputs and related services. This should be a commercially viable and financially sustainable approach that avoids donor dependency through the development of an agricultural input supply social enterprise in India.
Sustainable Harvest & Relationship Coffee Institute – United States
Advised By: Ted London, WDI and Ross School of Business; Ravi Anupindi, WDI and Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Stacey Nathan, Whitney Augustine, Erdem Eray, Grant Cowherd
Sustainable Harvest of Portland, Ore. is an importer of high quality, specialty grade coffees from smallholder farmers from 15 countries around the world. In 2012, Sustainable Harvest formed a nonprofit organization, the Relationship Coffee Institute (RCI), to help propagate its business model and advance farmer training. In fall 2015, in conjunction with RCI and 4,000 women farmers in Rwanda, Sustainable Harvest launched Question Coffee, which represents its fundamental goal to empower coffee farmers and foster sustainable supply chains. It is Sustainable Harvest’s first B Corp certified product throughout the entire value chain, meaning it’s a for-profit entity that includes positive impacts on society, workers, and the environment. Net proceeds from Question Coffee go to farmer training, which contributes to better quality, improved yields and increased income and wellbeing for coffee farmers at the base of the pyramid.
The student team will conduct research to identify Question Coffee’s value proposition to consumers, resulting in several specific, actionable recommendations on branding and marketing strategies. The team also will devise several recommendations and strategies for greater market penetration.
Relationship Coffee Institute (in partnership with Sustainable Harvest) – Rwanda
Advised By: Ted London, WDI and the Ross School of Business; Jane Dutton, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Courtney Landy, Aaron Whallon, Juan Marino, Kerry Shields
For this project, the student team will test and evaluate the value of B Corp certification to see if it could improve the lives of smallholder farmers in Rwanda, and how it could be scaled or applied to other commodities.
Zemen Bank – Ethiopia
Advised By: Paul Clyde, WDI and Ross School of Business; Bob Dittmar, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Dana Yerace, Max Jacobson, Florence Noel, Nicholas Mencher
Zemen is a commercial bank located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Its vision is to bring new dynamism to the financial sector and the banking business in Ethiopia. It is interested in serving small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Using a banking scheme in which Ethiopians living in the U.S. could put a hold on some monetary amount in their bank account, Zemen would then access the account for a low interest loan for Ethiopian citizens starting or expanding a small business. The hold on the U.S. bank would be reduced as the loan is paid back.
The student team will develop the business case for diaspora SME loans and assess the prospects for scaling the program to a level that would interest Zemen Bank. If the scheme were deemed viable, then the team would formulate a plan for executing the program.
Imperial Health Sciences (IHS) – South Africa
Advised By: Paul Clyde, WDI and Ross School of Business; Ravi Anupindi, WDI and Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Amit Patel, Jennifer Paxton, Anuja Mehta, Aric Adams
IHS provides supply chain solutions to the public and private pharmaceutical markets in Africa. IHS and the Imperial Logistics group have adopted the Unjani project as its Corporate Social Responsibility project. Unjani aims to establish a network of nurse-owned franchise clinics in historically underserved communities across South Africa. It has 19 operating clinics with plans to add 25 more by May. The group will take over an independent, failing clinic.
The student team will assess the change in the failing clinic’s success level after instituting the processes, controls, training, and marketing of the Unjani franchise network. Examining the operational and environmental factors of the clinic, along with some financial analysis, will allow IHS to better understand why this clinic failed. That will help IHS further develop the Unjani concept and ensure successful clinics in the future.
ITC Ltd. – India
Advised By: Ted London, WDI and Ross School of Business; Venkatram Ramaswany, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Nishant Agrawal, Kee Cho, Arun Prakash, Dave Teebagy
ITC is a major diversified Indian conglomerate. ITC’s e-Choupal initiative is enabling Indian agriculture to enhance its competitiveness by empowering Indian farmers through the power of the Internet. The initiative facilitates the two-way flow of goods and services in and out of villages, and describes itself as the largest Internet-based intervention in rural India by a corporate entity.
The student team will help ITC design the next version of e-Choupal. The team will deliver a report exploring how the first three versions of e-Choupal have created value and where further opportunities for value creation may exist. The team also will look into how other models of rural farmer engagement are being deployed in other developing countries, identify the various stakeholders impacted, and highlight how the proposed model creates value for them.
Aparajitha Foundation – India
Advised By: Paul Clyde, WDI and Ross School of Business; Jim Walsh, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Jamyle Michael, Holly Price, Aaron Steiner, Meghan Sheehan
The Aparajitha Foundation is an arm of the Aparajitha Group. It is committed to the cause of creating transformational change in adolescents by using audiovisual technology to deliver life skills training to economically disadvantaged children in India’s Tamil Nadu state.
The MAP team will develop a complete business plan for entrepreneurship education, training and development. The model should be scalable so that it can be used across the country in the future.
WDI’s Scaling Impact Initiative is working with Walmart to chronicle what the retail giant has learned from its efforts to include small producers in global supply chains.
The successes, challenges, and lessons learned will become a policy brief and a teaching case, both written by WDI in collaboration with Professor Linda Scott of Oxford University’s Said Business School. Both documents will be published this spring, and are geared toward Walmart and other retailers looking to develop more effective sourcing programs in the future.
WDI Vice President of Scaling Impact Ted London and Research Manager Colm Fay, along with Scott, are studying two Walmart programs.
One is Empowering Women Together, which sources handicrafts from women-owned base of the pyramid businesses in East Africa, Nepal, India and other emerging markets to sell online. The other is Direct Farm, which buys fresh fruits and vegetables from small- and medium-sized farmers to supply Walmart’s stores in Central and South America, Mexico, South Africa, and India.
The team has interviewed managers from Walmart, the Walmart Foundation, and their implementing partners.
This is the second collaboration between WDI and Walmart. Last year, WDI Publishing released a case study on the evolution of a global cross-sector partnership between Walmart and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The case looked at what had been gleaned – both positive and negative – during the 15-year collaboration between the two organizations.
The free 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 came about, how they were supported by the partners, and the level of success achieved as measured by Walmart, the Walmart Foundation, and USAID.
The case also identified lessons learned for the future of the Walmart/USAID collaboration, and insights that may apply to the development of public-private partnerships for development more broadly.
In addition, NextBillion’s Kyle Poplin wrote a post on how the case was developed. And Beth Keck, senior director of Women’s Economic Empowerment at Walmart, sat down for a video interview with WDI’s London about the company’s global work.
Image courtesy of Navel Zaveri/Flickr.
From a spinning scarecrow that sends animal intruders scurrying off the crops to an eco-friendly shelter that helps grow spores into mushrooms, there is no shortage of innovation in Tanzania’s agricultural sector. But what has traditionally been lacking is the business knowledge to nurture these creative products and help them blossom into sustainable businesses.
This is where the Innovations in Gender Equality to Promote Household Food Security (IGE) program comes in. A joint venture between USAID and Land O’Lakes International Development launched in 2012, IGE’s mission is to identify, test and then scale innovations that enable female farmers to more efficiently produce agricultural products and bring them to market. Over half of the agricultural workers in Tanzania are women. Not only do women carry out some of the most labor-intensive work, but they also have insufficient access to financial credit and face discrimination in land ownership. The IGE project seeks to address these hurdles and help women spend less time in the field and more time in higher-value added activities.
Thousands of miles from Dar es Salaam, at IGE project headquarters, Diana Callaghan, an MBA student at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, was in the market for a summer internship. Deeply interested in the potential business has for making change in the world, Callaghan did not want a traditional MBA internship experience – she was seeking an innovative alternative. When she heard about the IGE project in early 2015, she thought it would be an ideal opportunity to apply her studies in entrepreneurship and social impact as well as her previous work experience in consulting. WDI was sponsoring the internship. Callaghan’s work focused on equipping both male and female entrepreneurs in agriculture with the business skills needed to professionalize and scale their businesses. IGE has an effective process for finding the entrepreneurs with the highest potential to participate in the program. They organize business expos during which the entrepreneurs showcase their products. Selected entrepreneurs then advance to the next phase and pitch their ideas before a panel of judges that includes seasoned entrepreneurs and investors. The top performers in each pitch competition are then eligible for an IGE grant and training program.
Callaghan got to know the participants and their business challenges. She traveled to their places of business with IGE staff to familiarize herself with their operations and challenges firsthand. She was impressed by the great ideas and innovations, but quickly realized the need for cultural understanding in designing a locally viable business model. She met Judith Muro, a member of the Dar es Salaam Mushroom Growers Association (DMGA), who designed innovative mushroom-growing technologies utilizing years of academic and professional experience she accrued traveling the globe and learning about mushroom cultivation. As part of her business, Muro created and built her own structures for growing mushrooms from spores. The eco-friendly shelters struck Callaghan as a real innovation, but rather than selling them, Muro taught others how to construct the structures. The mushroom seller told Callaghan that there was no point in trying to sell them, as others would just steal the design of her product. Intellectual property is not easily secured in Tanzania.
Through her visits with other entrepreneurs, Callaghan was able to identify gaps in their business knowledge. For example, some of the entrepreneurs had no accounting systems and little understanding about their cost structures. As a result, they had set their prices much too low to run a sustainable business. Callaghan also noticed that while many of the entrepreneurs had innovative technologies, their revenue models prevented them from scaling successfully. For example, certain entrepreneurs were marketing high-cost innovations to customers who could not afford them. Callaghan suggested alternative revenue approaches such as subscription-based, rental and community shared models that could allow customers easier access.
To further assess the skills the entrepreneurs were lacking, Callaghan created a needs assessment. Entrepreneurs answered such questions as: What need does your innovation address? What is your profit per unit? What problems are you facing in your business? It also asked the entrepreneurs to rate their knowledge across the various business functions.
How did Callaghan know how to create this comprehensive assessment? At the Ross School of Business, she also is the director of investments for the Social Venture Fund, the first student-led impact investing fund. An aspiring entrepreneur herself, Callaghan had also been through the Zell Lurie Institute’s (ZLI) Dare to Dream entrepreneurship competition and has been actively involved with the institute. ZLI is part of the Ross School and focuses on entrepreneurship, offering business plan competitions for students. She borrowed questions from the program’s educational materials and expanded on them based on her field research.
Now familiar with the business culture and needs of the entrepreneurs, Callaghan turned to designing the entrepreneurship training workshop. The project included a program designed by a WDI intern from the previous year. Callaghan used that as a starting point, applied what she learned from her travels and the needs assessment, and took input from the IGE staff to redesign it. The staff gave her many insights, including a suggestion to include more visual components so that the training could be understood by illiterate students and those with limited knowledge of English. Callaghan added graphics as well as a set of engaging videos on business model development from YouTube. Callaghan combed through the training material she had received as a participant in the Dare to Dream competition and added some of that content to her curriculum. It included introduction to the business model canvas, a strategic tool that enables the description and design of a business model. She also provided training to local staff on how to deliver the workshops.
Callaghan is currently back in Ann Arbor as a second-year MBA, student but the training workshops she designed are still being delivered. (Read Callaghan’s blog about her work in Tanzania here.)
“Spending a summer traveling across Tanzania and working with entrepreneurs on the development of impactful technologies was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share insight from my professional experience and my academic experiences at Ross with many of these great entrepreneurs. I hope that the business trainings and workshops will continue to support entrepreneurs as they develop sustainable, impactful innovations that improve the lives of women,” she told me.
“I loved working with a wide variety of change agents in such a creative role,” she added.
FIVE TIPS FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRAINING DEVELOPMENT FROM DIANA CALLAGHAN:
This post originally appeared on NextBillion.net, a WDI affiliate. It was written by Amy Gillett, vice president of WDI’s Education initiative.
Assessment of the role BoP ventures can play in alleviating poverty on children age eight years and younger. This article aggregates impact findings across the six ventures including businesses that sell a product to the BoP, businesses that sell a service to the BoP, and businesses that source from the BoP. The ventures analyzed, work across a range of sectors including housing, renewable energy, sanitation, health care, as well as export-based and locally-based agribusinesses. It compares and contrasts the types of impact experienced by children across different stakeholders, both within the venture and across the six ventures.
The project “Focusing on the Next Generation: An Exploration of Enterprise Poverty Impacts on Children” consisted of qualitatively assessing the impacts of six inclusive businesses across sectors (sanitation, healthcare, agribusiness, renewable energy, housing) and geographies (Latin America and East Africa) on children ages 0-8 years. Funded by the Bernard Van Leer Foundation (BvLF), WDI conducted semi-structured, in-depth, face-to-face interviews with approximately 170 persons from the Base of the Pyramid (BoP). The project team reviewed data regularly to identify emerging patterns. A variety of key and local stakeholders were interviewed to allow for triangulation of impacts. The data collected was coded and analyzed to make cross-stakeholder comparisons within the business on three areas of well-being: Economic, capability and relationship. WDI also analyzed the data to make cross-business comparisons by area of well-being and by stakeholder (customer, distributor, employee and persons in the broader community that do not engage with the venture). The team developed detailed research case studies on six BoP business models from different sectors and geographies including CEMEX’s Patrimonio Hoy, Sanergy, Honey Care Africa, Solar Aid’s SunnyMoney, Villa Andina and Penda Health. These case studies will be used by BvLF for three main purposes: (1) as part of the BvLF’s efforts to mobilize resources and support a Young Child Venture Fund; (2) to identify social investment opportunities for BvLF; and (3) to influence leaders in the field of social impact investing to include metrics related to young children in their measurement systems. The Honey Care Africa research case study was also developed into a teaching case now available through WDI Publishing. WDI also generated an article that summarizes the findings across the ventures. A version of this summary article was selected as a finalist for the Social Issues in Management Division’s Best Paper Award at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting. Additionally findings from research with Sanergy was published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
View report at https://wdi.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/Child-Impact-Summary-Article-v3.pdf.
View summary article at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12345/abstract.
The goal of this project was to increase soil fertility and agricultural productivity through a holistic approach of sourcing urban waste, composing and selling high quality organic fertilizers through a growing network of agro-dealers. WDI conducted a qualitative assessment of potential impacts on farmers through literature reviews and interviews with key stakeholders. The qualitative research informed the quantitative research design and the development of a quantitative survey to capture the changes in potential impacts on farmers. The team then completed a field visit to conduct qualitative interviews with project stakeholders including farmers, staff, partners and members of the community to identify additional potential impacts on farmers. The findings from baseline data collection were used to develop a report of impacts found on farmers. After the field visit, WDI updated the evaluation strategy and develop a baseline survey for farmers and comparison group.