Social Entrepreneurship in

India

DR. K. JEYAKODI,
Associate Professor,
S.N. College, Madurai.
What Solutions do we have Today*
 Government – alone is not the answer
 Inefficiencies, slow, bureaucratic, prone to corruption….

 Nonprofit Orgs. – inadequate

 dependent on donations (uncertain, demand far exceeds supply)
 “compassion fatigue”
 Raising money takes time and energy, which can be spent planning
growth/expansion

 Multilateral Institutions (World Bank…) - ineffective

 Conservative, slow, under-funded, unreliable
 Success is measured by
a) GDP (might not be helping poor)
b) Volume of loans negotiated (not measuring impact)
 Exclusively work with the government

 Corporate Social Responsibility - fundamentally flawed

 “as long as it can be done without sacrificing PROFITS”

*From: Creating a World Without Poverty, Muhammad Yunus, Book, 2007

New kind of Business
Social Business
 Creating business models revolving around low-
cost products and services to resolve social
problems

 Social business is for ‘more-than-profit’

combine revenue-generating business with a
social-value-generating structure

 Can be two kinds

 Creating services for poor
 Owned by poor (** not a SB )
How can you do business and serve social goals?
Why is profit-making not conflicting with social objectives?
Profits -
 Promotes R&D, innovation, new technologies
 Increases efficiency
 Enables penetration to new geographical areas and serve deeper layers of low-
income people
 Helps recover costs and pay back investors, thus encourages investments

PMBs (profit max. businesses) vs. SBs (social businesses)

How they are same yet different
 Employ workers, create goods & services for consumers
 Must recover full costs
 Profits are important
 YET objective is to create social benefit and not limited to personal gains

Can there be a HYBRID i.e. 60% PMB and

40% SB??
Social Business –
Some Examples
 Banking and finance is the biggest
beneficiary of technology-enabled social
startups
 Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank What are their stories!
(Nobel Peace Prize 2006) ** not founded in India
 Vikram Akula, SKS Microfinance (Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award
2006)
 Kiva (peer-to-peer micro-lending website) ** not founded in India

 Energy
 Solar Electrification - Harish Hande, SELCO (Social Entrepreneur of the Year
Award 2007)

 Other examples
 Education (Same Language Subtitling, Janarth - education solutions for
children of migrant laborers)
 Many more…
Need for Financial Services for Low-income
People
 Why do poor need financial services?
A study in Andhra Pradesh revealed that for the poor, about 50% of all risky events were
characterized as “health-related” and another 28% were “nature-related”.
Responses to these risks -
 1st preference of the rural poor is borrowing (money lenders have very high interest rates,
subject to exploitation),
 followed by mortgaging/selling assets (often under difficult conditions that limits the value
received for such assets).

 Why don't they just go to a bank?

The poor rarely have access to the formal financial sector
 No money to open a savings account
 No collateral or credit record to secure a loan
 Illiterate – so can’t do paperwork
Microfinance - Role of SHGs
 Microfinance is providing financial services to
the poor such as loans, savings, money transfer
services and microinsurance.

 In India, Self Help Groups (SHGs) form the basic

constituent unit of the microfinance
 SHG is a group of a few individuals – usually poor women (group of 5 to 20)
 They pool their savings (as low as Rs. 10 or 20 cents monthly per member) into a fund from
which they can borrow as and when necessary
 Such a group is linked with a bank – where they maintain a group account.
 Over time the bank begins to lend to the group as a unit, without collateral, relying on self-
monitoring and peer pressure within the group for repayment of these loans.

 The group is eligible for ‘bank-loan’ after atleast 6 months of ‘inter-loan’ repayments
 Maximum loan amount is a multiple (usually 4:1) of the total funds in group account –
starts with lower multiples (1:1 to 2:1)
 Microfinance - Key Challenges
 High ‘Cost-to-Serve’
 Accounts are low in value but large in volume
 High transactions costs (as frequent transactions)
 Low levels of automation
 Intense supervision requirements to maintain high recovery rates (trade-off between
supervision cost min. and recovery max)
 Very small scale – figure shows SHGs linked to banks are in handful of States
(mostly in South India – AP) [Chakrabarti, Georgia Tech, 2004]

What is the role of technology in

lowering these costs?
What is AP doing different?
Microfinance - Key Challenges
 Deficiency of Capital – Constrain on Outreach
 Until recently, MFIs were dependent on donor grants, but grants are limited in size and
availability and are becoming harder to access as the pool of global MFIs grows.
 Many of the MFIs are registered as not-for-profit entities that make it an unattractive choice for
investors
 Low profitability of MFIs because of reasons mentioned above is also a barrier to raise equity
capital

 Regulatory/policy Issues
 If the NGO earns a substantial part of its income from lending activity, it violates the Income
Tax Act and could lose its charitable status.
 If an MFI opts to become an NBFC, it should be able to satisfy the entry-level capital
requirements of Rs. 20 million. (In India, there has been strong advocacy for bringing down
the capital entry norms for NBFCs in the business of microfinance)
 In the case of NBFCs, deposit mobilisation is not possible at least for the first 3 years, till a
satisfactory credit rating is obtained.
 Borrowing from foreign institutions is hard due to the credit rating requirements imposed by
RBI.
 Challenges present Opportunities
 SKS, specializing in microfinance
is one of the largest and fastest-growing microfinance
organizations in the world (disbursements exceeding
$500 million to about 2.2 million women)
Inter-linked three principles:
1. for-profit methodology 2. best business
practices 3. latest technology

 N-logue Communications, a company incubated by

IIT Madras, has built an entrepreneur-led
business model for deploying rural internet kiosks
across the country.
These networks are capable of providing multiple services such as agricultural
information, education and health applications and communication.
For microfinance, this enables updation of databases real-time and remote
monitoring (reduces the ‘cost-to-serve’)