Keya Sarkar: Leveraging to learn

OUT OF FOCUS

On February 12, the Ashoka Foundation held an induction ceremony for the recipients of the 2004 Ashoka Fellowship from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.

In a lovely ceremony held in Kolkata, many of Ashoka's past recipients of fellowships were called upon to felicitate the latest entrants.

"Ashoka: Innovators for the public" is a global non-profit organisation that invests in social entrepreneurs""individuals with innovative and practical solutions for solving social problems.

Since its inception in 1980, Ashoka has launched more than 1,400 social entrepreneurs in 52 countries.

Ashoka's investments in these individuals (in India this means a stipend of Rs 10,000 to Rs 30,000 per month over a three-year period) have consistently yielded, according to Ashoka, rich returns in the form of nationwide and cross-border advancement in education, health, and human rights.

In India since 1982, Ashoka fellows number 239, working in diverse fields. The fellows inducted this month work in areas as diverse as education, information technology for the poor and illiterate, power projects, water management, and much more.

As I sat through the ceremony and marvelled at what each of the fellowship recipients had contributed to society, I thought of how efforts like that of Ashoka could be leveraged to touch the lives of many more.

Being a non-profit organisation with its accompanying constraints, efforts like that of Ashoka necessarily get limited to benefiting a few.

But if each of the fellows can be a case study for the banks and livelihood promotion schools, the yield on Ashoka's investments can actually be manifold.

Of course, much of the work that Ashoka recognises in its fellows may not be bankable and may not lead to livelihood promotion among the poor, but many of them are.

And thanks to Ashoka's laid-down rigorous process of selection, much of the work is documented. I have no glib solution to how efforts like Ashoka's can be used by the banking sector, whether through refinance (if Ashoka is willing) or by using Ashoka's identification skills.

But what is clear is that what banks and large finance companies are lacking in their lending is the ability to find ideas that are bankable and, more importantly, people that can be change managers.

Not only do I get a sense of inability on the part of bankers to look at spread sheets and sensitivity analyses of cases that do not follow the normal organised sector paths, I am actually told so by many bankers and finance professionals I meet.

What the newspapers reported this week is only a confirmation of this. The government is expected to grant Rs 1,000 crore under a new "Bharat Nirman" programme in the Budget to be.

This programme to be launched as part of the Swarnajyoti Grameen Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) will make it easier for self-help groups (SHGs) to access small loans.

Last year, the allocation for the same programme was Rs 800 crore. But some banks, despite receiving an advance subsidy under the scheme, failed to extend the loans to SHGs.

According to a survey by the rural development ministry, a total of 700 rural branches of banks showed no lending to SHGs. The problem was severe in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, and some of the North-Eastern states.

Apparently, the ministry has suggested that one of the criteria for judging the performance of bank officers for promotion should be lending to the SHGs.

However much bank officers get beaten with a stick, it is a fact that lending in small amounts to the poor for purposes that are sustainable requires a certain orientation and commitment.

It is only now that India is waking up to the fact that the education system does not equip us to effect any meaningful intervention in livelihood promotion.

But now many institutes have been established for teaching appropriate routes of intervention. The hope is that in the coming years bank officers will have better opportunities for training to take up what the government is expecting of them.

But with this entire sector engaging policymakers' attention only recently, there is a lot that needs to be done before the training institutes become effective.

One of the areas which need huge attention and investment is the documentation of much of the work that has been done by banks and NGOs towards sustainable development.

Because, without a documentation of case studies that are Indian, the livelihood promotion training schools would not be able to make meaningful syllabi.

It is towards this end too that efforts like Ashoka's may be leveraged for the greater good. Since much of their work is already documented, what it would imply is to document a few chosen ones in a format that is easily appreciated by bankers/finance professionals.

Maybe one day we will graduate to launching a venture fund for social enterpreneurs by a for-profit organisation, promising its stakeholders modest returns.