Blog FeedThe Potential for Building Social Businesses
Up the main street of Bawjiase, a provincial town in Ghana, march some 60 women in canary-yellow shirts. Actually, they dance up the street in cadence with a raucous brass-and-drums band bringing up the rear of the procession. Still, it looks like a formal march because these exuberant women manage to dance forward in disciplined ranks, waving and shouting to the throng of townspeople going about their business in the roadside shops and stalls. The ranks of yellow shirts are led by an equally yellow banner, declaring August 7, 2008, the official launch date for the HealthKeepers program. Their destination is a large courtyard, where dignitaries wait to honor Freedom from Hunger’s latest social business initiative with speeches and a formal declaration that the HealthKeepers program is now officially launched.
Already there are 73 of these yellow-clad HealthKeepers scattered over southern Ghana, selling mosquito nets and other health protection products in rural villages that never before had reliable access to affordable nets, oral rehydration solution (to combat dehydration due to diarrhea), water treatment tablets (to sanitize drinking water), condoms, wound treatment materials, soap (for handwashing), even reading glasses (essential for women over forty who do fine-detail work with their hands). Soon the number of HealthKeepers and the area they serve will expand dramatically. The plan is to cover half the villages of Ghana with about 2,500 HealthKeepers by 2012.
Freedom from Hunger has been working with Ghanaian partner organizations throughout the country since 1985, and since 1990, Ghana has been on the frontier of our Credit with Education initiative. Our national strategy has been to teach and support Ghana’s many Rural Banks (a specially chartered group of banks located in provincial towns of the country) to provide Credit with Education to groups of very poor women in unserved rural areas. Currently, 16 Rural Banks offer some variant of Credit with Education as a profitable line of service to women in several parts of the country.
In 2002, Freedom from Hunger was supported by GlaxoSmithKline in developing an education module on how to prevent malaria and how to treat it if you get it, a module that could be used cost-effectively by Ghana’s Rural Banks and also our many credit union partners in French-speaking West Africa. Malaria is rampant throughout the region, killing tens of thousands of children every year and keeping millions of adults and children from work or school multiple times a year. It is a major cause of chronic hunger because of lost income and physical debilitation.
Malaria is rampant throughout the region, killing tens of thousands of children every year and keeping millions of adults and children from work or school multiple
times a year.
GlaxoSmithKline went on to support our major impact research project that demonstrated the effectiveness of this module when delivered by Ghana’s Rural Banks to Credit with Education groups. Women learned that mosquito bites are the only source of malaria and that malaria can be easily prevented by sleeping under a mosquito net. They also learned how to recognize early on the symptoms of malaria, especially in their children, and the most effective treatment responses. We discovered that many women in Credit with Education groups now wanted to buy nets and had sufficient savings to buy them, but nets were not locally available for purchase. There was a distribution bottleneck between the nets available in the cities and the poor families in rural villages.
Setting out to solve this distribution problem, we were inspired by door-to-door retailing companies—including well-known brands such as Avon, Amway, Shaklee, and Tupperware—that train and support local women to sell personal and home care products under labels that attest to dependable quality and performance. What keeps these local sellers active in their neighborhoods is making enough money to justify the time and effort. Why not apply the same basic business principles and distribution methods to health protection products? There are two major constraints in the environments where Freedom from Hunger works. First, these sellers must be residents of poor, rural villages where there’s not much education or economic activity. Second, their products must be priced to be affordable even to people so poor they are chronically hungry. This is the challenge we accepted when we decided to build a social business called HealthKeepers.
We have seen how microfinance businesses can, with profit, meet the needs of the poor, even the very poor, for reasonably priced loans and safe savings. Freedom from Hunger is in the vanguard of people and institutions inspired by the microfinance experience to look for other products and services that are truly needed by the poor and that can be sold to the poor at a price low enough for them to pay, yet high enough to fully cover the costs of producing and distributing the product or service.
Freedom from Hunger knows, however, that too much enthusiasm for business solutions can blind us to their inherent limitations. We know that what people want, and are willing to pay for, is not necessarily what they need to improve their lives. Our enthusiasm for selling to the poor can lose sight of what they need in favor of what they want. We might convince ourselves that they only need what they want badly enough to pay for, like loans – when they also need health, nutrition, and additional education, yet are unwilling to pay for it.
Freedom from Hunger responds to this challenge by looking for ways to provide the poor what they will pay for, like loans, wrapped in extra value that they need but will not pay for, like education. If the commodity in demand can be a vehicle for delivering more than the customer initially wants, then we can help our customers come to appreciate the added value as much as or more than the commodity itself. Like selling mosquito nets wrapped in education about the causes, prevention, and treatment of malaria.
We have seen how microfinance businesses can, with profit, meet the needs of the poor, even the very poor, for reasonably priced loans and safe savings.
Even commodity wrapped in extra value is only a partial solution. There are major needs of the poor that cannot be met – not yet, at least – even by such a careful approach to social business. However, we should not doubt the potential of creative minds to come up with ever more ingenious social enterprise business models like the HealthKeepers. If, in our enthusiasm for social business, we can keep our focus firmly on chronically hungry families – women, men, and children – and on what will support their individual and collective courage to help themselves, who knows where our creativity – and theirs – can take us together?
