We ran our first Ideas Circle last night, for the Ideas That Change Lives investment fund.

The aim was to give a group of social entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch their idea to a group of people to get useful feedback, ideas and contacts.

A few years ago, we would have made a play of how it was a bit like Dragon’s Den (like we did when we ran something similar as part of our Starter for Ten course in 2006) – but it’s fair to say that other than the pitch, it’s got very little in common with that format, which to be frank I can’t stand.

We invited people we know – a PR man, a lawyer, an accountant and a Charity chief exec and a couple of social care professionals – to listen to the pitches.  They all gave up their evening free of charge.  We also asked the entrepreneurs to be part of the circle for the other people pitching – to encourage a bit of collaboration and to get past the idea that we’re all competing against eachother.  In the majority of cases, most of us, as small start-up businesses, will have far more to gain from collaborating than we stand to lose by competing.

We were really pleased with it.  The focus was on giving people constructive feedback – so that (with our support) they can revise their business plan before it goes to the Investment Panel next month.

Needless to say, a few relationships were made and no doubt a few deals will be done too, so that’s all good.

We’re keen to do it again – taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people are keen to help other entrepreneurs, if the opportunity is a good one.  I also think it’ll be increasingly important as other sources of support (such as Business Link) disappear.  We need to find ways to effectively support and nurture eachother – particularly start-up entrepreneurs.

If you’re interested in us running an Ideas Circle for your investment fund or grants programme, please get in touch.

I fell off my bike yesterday – a victim of icy roads.  Nothing broken, but I can hardly move, so have spent most of the day sat on the sofa.  It’s a bit of a pain, as I’ve got loads to do, but as always it’s handy to stop, think and read every now and then, even if the thinking is through the fug of painkillers and anti-inflammatories.

One of things I did was watch a TED video about collaborative consumption:

The talk is by Rachel Botsman, co-author of What’s Mine is Yours – The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, which is released in the UK next month.

I’m a sucker for neat concepts and smart phrases such as Collaborative Consumption, but Rachel thinks this is an idea which has staying power.  She reckons we’re hard-wired to share, and it’s only recently, in the age of hyper-consumption, that we’ve begun to crave ownership of more goods, rather than focusing on just securing access to goods or services.

In a world with finite resources, there are clear, negative environmental implications of us all racing to own and consume.  And there’s a decent argument for saying that our desire for private, exclusive ownership doesn’t do our communities much good either.  If we don’t need anything from anyone else, we’re less likely to engage with anyone else.

But the reverse is true also.  If we acknowledge our interdependence, and also recognise that sharing things can save money, be more green and perhaps build a bit of community then we may well find that our neighbourhoods feel a bit more like the kind of neighbourhoods that most of us aspire to live in.

As I dipped in and out of Twitter today there was plenty of talk of library closures in the UK.  It’s anticipated that lots will close as local councils struggle desperately to make ends meet.

I don’t want to discuss the politics of that just now, but I do want to reflect on the rise of collaborative consumption and the apparent fall of the public library.  If some are saved and run by volunteers, will they continue to deliver the same service ?  Or might they re-imagine their service as a local hub for collaborative consumption?  Maybe I could borrow a guide book to Paris, alongside a power drill?  A power drill that someone else in my community has offered up for sharing – at a fee – shared between them and the library? It might be mission drift, or it might just make libraries relevant to more people.

Here’s the final guest post from Liam Black in Bangladesh.

Our delegates have flown off back to Google, Rolls Royce, Astra Zeneca, Lloyds, etc and we have settled all our supplier bills. Flight home leaves in a couple of hours. Absolutely knackered but what a great week. Some of my highlights:

Obviously, spending three hours plus with Muhammad Yunus debating the issues round microfinance and his model of social business was a thrill. Grameen has many challenges, some of it works really well, other parts are rickety; Yunus himself can be inconsistent and a bit slippery. But Christ, look at what the man has created.

You can agree or disagree with him on whether the commercialization of microcredit is simply making money off the poor; get annoyed with the stubborn purity of his non-dividend, non-loss ‘social business’ model; or indeed raise your eye brows at some of the claims he makes about his collaborations with multi nationals. But what you cant put aside is the scale of his achievements not only in terms of the people whose lives he has changed – many millions – but the power of what he stands for in the world. It’s about the poor, stupid.

Not only the younger social entrepreneurs in the room were deeply touched and moved by the man. Even old skeptics like me who’ve been around the block a few times were given a reminder of the simple challenge: when it comes to the battle between the interests of the poor and the interests of the middle classes/rich, whose side are you on?

Again I was hugely impressed with the quality and commitment of the Danone people working their French assess off to make the yoghurt business work. Exec Director Corinne spoke with such eloquence and honesty about the “gymnastiques” involved in struggling to balance the demands inherent in trying to address child malnutrition AND create jobs AND  give the village ladies an income AND be environmentally friendly AND be committed to proving it all. Something will have to give in the next iteration of Grameen Danone Foods but wow what balls they have. How different the world might be if all multinationals sent people like them into the battle against poverty.

“We learn by walking,” she said to us, acknowledging the mistakes and set backs they have received. This is a big reminder to us all who care about changing the world. Wait for the perfect intellectual model and business plan and you will never start the walk at all.

I loved the openness and hospitality of the village people we spent time with. The little boy who wants to play cricket for Bangladesh. The mother who challenged me  – nicely but directly – as to what I would do with the information we were getting from them.

Dr Nabi who runs the Grameen Eye Hospital in Bogra – which operates a cross subsidy model but “Liam, everyone comes and leaves by the same door and gets the same treatment” – made a big impression on us all. His ability to change the lives and fortunes of so many people by giving them back full sight in the face of huge odds means – for at a least a couple of week s anyway – I wont whinge about how busy and stressful my life is! I don’t know I’m bloody born.

It’s not all inspiration and love here though by a long way. Dhaka is a horrible hole which is collapsing under its own weight. Power cuts all day, a road system which means it takes two hours to travel ten miles, a corrupt, inefficient and shameless political class more interested in in-fighting and status then the needs of its people. And – killer fact of the week – 2,000,000 people a year – that’s a year – come on to the labour market in a nation with average 30% unemployment. In the face of that brute reality, arguing about the rights and wrongs of commercializing micro credit seems like a quibbling sideshow.

So, taxi awaits for airport. Thanks for reading this. Thanks Rob for hosting.

Home now for some lovin’ with Maggie, a bag of fish and chips and pint of Guinness.

Liam, Dhaka, 12^th November.

Here’s the second guest post from Liam Black, who’s currently in Bangladesh on an Inside Grameen visit.

Phew. Long old day. Up early and drive through the insanity of Dhaka traffic to a Grameen branch one and half hours outside the chronically overcrowded, choked , dysfunctional capital.  The Grameen structure is (from grassroots up) group (of up to ten borrowers); centre (of 30/40); branch of ten centres; zone; head office; board.  All adds up to 8 million or so borrowers in some 2,900 branches.

Met 30 or so lively women borrowers at a centre meeting (the tall white four eyed stranger was source of much merriment), visited the homes and small businesses of a couple of a big success stories . One woman, a 24 year veteran, now has a fine house and rents out rooms to others. She also served three years on Grameen Bank’s national board of directors – of whose 13 members, 9 are elected from amongst the borrowers. And her daughter is soon to graduate as a teacher.  There is inevitably some canny casting and best foot forwarding for the curious visitors on such encounters .  And without any Bangla, understanding can never be complete but it would be a hard heart indeed that wasn’t moved and impressed by the impacts Grameen makes in the lives of so many individuals.

Then to the branch to meet some ‘struggler’ members. These are former beggars who get interest free loans to sell stuff rather than beg. The women – many of whom were hurled into shame-filled penury by a the death of – or abandonment by – their husbands. Awkward session trying to engage with women whose terribly hard lives were obvious from their haggard and deeply sad faces.

And finally the young people who have been the beneficiaries of education loans. These bright youngsters were very impressive and, with their mums beaming with pride behind them, it was hard evidence that Grameen’s intervention can break the cycle of poverty in families.

The issues we will ask Grameen founder and leader Muhammad Yunus about on Thursday are becoming clearer.

What happens after he goes to the big bank branch in the sky?  There seems to be no succession strategy and I’ve yet to meet anyone here who comes any where near being able to take over a 30,000 strong, multi million pound national bank (plus all the other businesses in the group).

Grameen is a social network, a movement built around a deeply held set of values with a range of financial products at its heart. Leading it would test the mettle of anyone even if that person wasn’t stepping into the shoes of a global icon.

What will Grameen 3.0 look like? The challenges are huge. How does the Grameen Bank – literally the Village Bank – deal with urbanization where poverty is perhaps more acute and desperate than in the rural areas and the stock of social capital much lower?

The bank at grassroots is run with biros and exercise books. Where is the IT infrastructure, the use of mobile phones, the process innovation? What happens when the current generation of bank veterans – at national level and at the grassroots – moves on , those who have the founding principles and passions imprinted on their DNA?

Grameen has renewed itself once before. It needs to do that again. I say this with huge respect for its founder and the phenomenon he has created and its stunning achievements over 30 years plus. Renewal of any organization of such a size is hugely difficult and fraught with dangers.

Tomorrow to Bogra – five hours north of Dhaka – to check out the Grameen Danone Foods joint venture which, since I was here a year ago, has a new MD and staff team.

Going to try and sleep now. Again the Grameen conundrum has got my mind working overtime!

Social entrepreneur Liam Black is with a group of business leaders, social innovators and entrepreneurs in Dhaka for a week.   He’ll be telling us what they get up to over the next few days in a series of guest posts.  Here’s his first post.

Just left room full of 20 jet lagged but revved up people recently arrived in Dhaka for our Inside Grameen week. Senior leaders from the likes of Rolls Royce, Google, Barclays, Unilever, IDEO and social innovators like Sam and Michelle from www.livity.co.uk, Rob of www.bbbc.org.uk and upstarts like Lily, founder of www.mybnk.org. We are all here for a week in Bangladesh to get to the bottom of the Grameen phenomenon and its partnerships with multinationals like Danone.

For me there are two big issues for the week:

1. Does microfinance work and what is the role of commercialised micro finance institutions – MFI’s?
2. Is it possible/right to make personal profit from providing finance for the very poor?  More of this second hot potato later in the trip.

So, does microfinance work or is it a hyped and marginal movement distorted by the high profile of microfinance godfather and social entrepreneur superstar Yunus and his amazing abilities to communicate and enroll the elites of the western world?

Development experts argue about the efficacy of micro-credit (i.e. small loans) as a route out of poverty. One indisputable fact is that after 30 years of microfinance – offered by Grameen and other large suppliers such as BRAC – Bangladesh remains pretty much as poor as it was in relative and absolute terms at independence in 1971. There has been no knock out micro-financed blow against poverty.

There is surprisingly little independent research into Grameen’s work and its real impacts on the lives of poor people in Bangladesh. In 1998 the World Bank reported that 5% of Grameen Bank borrowers moved out of poverty each year. In 2003, Shahid Khondkar again on behalf of the World Bank concluded: “The results of this study strongly support the view that microcredit not only affects the welfare of participants but also the aggregate welfare at village level”. Yunus claims – based upon his own internal survey that “56% of [Grameen’s] borrower families have crossed the poverty line by 2005, on the basis of ten indicators set by Grameen Bank to track impact of its programme”.

Few commentators approach this subject without an ideological axe to grind, but most critics of micro-finance and Grameen – whether from the left or the right – concede that the movement has undoubtedly done a great thing in bringing financial services to poor people and offering an alternative to unscrupulous loan sharks and, by focusing on women, may have contributed to building up their position within society.

But they challenge the overall impact such moves have had on ending poverty. Some critics have questioned Grameen’s claims about the high level – 98% – of repayment and say this is because of clever accounting and rolling over loans to massage the figures. A detailed Wall Street Journal investigation in 2001 made this claim. This is rejected by Grameen.

The New Yorker magazine carried out an extensive investigation into microfinance in 2006:

“Hyperbole distorts the debate on both sides. Yunus speaks eloquently of eradicating poverty, but some argue that microfinance burdens the very poor with debt. Since relatively few rigorous studies on the impact on microfinance have been completed, ideology tends to dominate”.

In India, the government has recently stepped into the unregulated microfinance market and suspended the activities of some providers. There are claims too that anxiety about debt has led to suicides amongst the people. This is strongly denied by the MFI’s involved (which include social entrepreneur golden boy Vikram Akula of SKS who has recently become very rich by ‘privatising’ his MFI)

Meanwhile some Indian MFI’s recently agreed to reduce the interest rates that they charge to borrowers.

New York University’s Professor Jonathan Morduch is a long time researcher in this field who says that there is clear evidence that microfinance can help the very poor but warns that credit alone is not a panacea. It no doubt helps many individuals but loans to the poor have yet to demonstrate an impact on aggregate poverty levels. Quoted in the New Yorker, Professor Morduch said that: “The boldest claim for microfinance – that it can eliminated large part of world poverty –outpaces, by a long distance, the evidence accumulated to date”.

So, much to ponder as we go deep into Yunus rural heartlands on Sunday to meet those who borrow money from him and prepare to debate the issues with the Professor himself next week.

Liam, Dhaka, 5^th November 2010

I spend a lot of my time working with third sector organisations.  Usually – and this isn’t a criticism – it’s just the reality – what people want from me is a little vague.  Often someone has been tasked by their management committee to “find out how we can become a social enterprise”.  Whatever that might mean.

What does it mean?  It’s a question perhaps for another post.  My response to that kind of question is to fall back on the social enterprise as a verb not a noun stuff.  What is it that you do that is socially enterprising?  How are you enterprising in achieving your social mission?  How could you be more enterprising, more effective?  And how could I help?

The trigger for many organisations exploring “becoming a social enterprise” is that the markets that they work in are changing rapidly.  Funding is increasingly hard to come by, and, in fields such as social care, money is starting to follow individual “customers” – rather than being allocated to organisations as a block grant.  These issues present massive cultural and organisational challenges.

This transition – I saw it described the other day as “from wholesale to retail to bespoke” won’t happen overnight – but the direction of travel is clear.  And in my experience this is causing significant anxiety for a lot of third sector organisations.

If we borrow the language of the transition movement, how does an organisation respond to “peak funding”?  The problem we have is that peak funding has already happened – whereas peak oil is perhaps a few years away.   How do organisations plan for a pretty immediate future where they’ll need to be more resilient in order to survive?  Funding being cut, contracts shortened, commitments from commissioners postponed.  It’s very tough.

I don’t have a simple answer.  There isn’t one.  But perhaps we can look to the transition movement for inspiration.  What is inspiring about the transition movement is that people are coming together to come up with practical ways to help their communities to become more resilient in difficult circumstances.  They aren’t relying on others to sort out their problems.

It’s not quite that simple for third sector organisations.  But I do feel that there’s a tendency amongst some people to look outside of their organisation for a solution, rather than considering what they can do themselves.  And of course I know that lots of third sector organisations are proactive and are coming up with ways to do more with less money.  But I see plenty of others who seem to be waiting for someone else to sort things out.

I have news for them.  They’ll be waiting a long time for that bloke on a big white horse to come galloping over the hill.  I hear he lost his job in the cuts.

Things feel pretty gloomy this morning.  I’ve been spending the last couple of days telling myself and others that we need to stay hopeful.  That the word prosperity has its roots in the latin word for hope.   That we don’t need growth as we’ve always known it anyway.  We’ll work it out, I tell myself.  There are opportunities here, we must look for them, not lose hope, I keep repeating.

And I do believe all that stuff.  I have to, because I think if you don’t, you might as well just give up.  And I’m not prepared to do that.  I  have a son who’s 4 and we owe it to his generation to try to think of ways to work our way out of this mess.  But that doesn’t stop it feeling pretty bleak this morning.

I grew up in Liverpool in the 1980s.  I was 7 when Thatcher came to power.  I’m not pretending that my life was all Boys From The Blackstuff gloom, far from it.  But Liverpool, caught between Thatcherism and Militant, was a pretty grim place in the 1980s.  The city is recovering, but has never really recovered.  Many families and communities were scarred for life.

I haven’t digested all the news from yesterday yet so I don’t really feel like blogging about it today.  So in true blogger style I’ll just talk about myself instead.  What am I going to do now?

If I truly believe in my strapline – make it your business to change the world – then I need to see our current situation as a big opportunity to make a difference.  Once the cuts start to hit there will be service after service which people say “We can’t lose that”.  Amidst all of that, some of those services could be run by people themselves.  Perhaps I can help there.

But I’ll also need to help by working with people to be realistic about opportunities.  Lots of my work is done in areas where there is market failure – where the market has been propped up for years by funding of one kind or another.  Sometimes even the most socially entrepreneurial group of people can’t do anything if the State retreats and takes its money with it.  Or, the best they can do is think of a totally different way to meet the need.  We need to be careful to not go down a load of dead-end streets which just waste everyone’s time and cause more anger.

And personally, where will I get my work?  Like most people in the social enterprise sector I am overly reliant on the public sector to fund my work.  I know the dangers in that but that’s where the money’s been.  I don’t work in a sector where entrepreneurs come to me, wanting to spend some of their money on me.  Other people pay me to work with entrepreneurs – Business Links, local Councils and the like.   That money is going to be thin on the ground.

Big Society, I hear you cry.  There’s a big opportunity there.  Perhaps.  But as I suggest above, social entrepreneurs aren’t social alchemists.  Big Society will need investment, on a big scale, and a big change in mindset.  How, for example, will third sector organisations, accustomed to funding, go about setting up new enterprising services?  They’re used to finding funding for salaries etc for the start-up phase.  If they’re not there, will they find other ways to bootstrap the start up?  Or will they just not bother?

So I will need to continue to find new ways to work.  I’m not your average consultant, and I’m by no means a clock watcher, but I still get paid, generally, on day rates.  That’s likely to need to change.

I’m onto it – with my business partner Gill I’m running a DIY Business Planning course next month.

The next few years will be very DIY – as the State retreats people will need to become more resilient and do things themselves.  This is our first attempt to meet some of those needs.

So I don’t feel gloomy, but I feel realistic.  I feel hopeful, but I’m not stupid.  I know full well that the next few years for me will see me fielding lots of interest from people who want to do something, but don’t have any/much money to pay me to do it.  So I’ll have to think of different ways to work.

My interest, and concern is in how we hold together as a society in times like this.  Clearly the cuts will hurt a lot, but its the cumulative effect, the possible loss of hope, and loss of a vision for a better society, which is most worrying.  That’s the world I work in.  So I need to get to work.

You may remember our 14 month quest to buy a house. It may, just may, be coming to an end. After two very near misses and countless fairly near misses, we are a fair way down the road to buying a house. The survey’s been done, mortgages have been researched, and, so far, the vendor has shown no sign of being an irrational nutcase. So fingers crossed.

Of course, there’s a wider question as to whether now is the time to be making the biggest financial decision of our lives. Those feelings will no doubt be stronger on Wednesday evening as we all digest the Comprehensive Spending Review. But this is the road we’re going down at the moment.

I’ve written before, and tweeted a lot, about trying to be more green. The choice of where you live is one of the biggest ones you make, in terms of implications for the environment. I thought I’d try to document our efforts to make green choices over the next few months. It may give you a few ideas. You might have ideas and contacts you can share with me. You might well challenge me and make us alter the decisions we’re thinking of making.

So, first things first – the house. It’s a pretty standard 1930’s semi. 3 bedrooms. Corner plot – so modest gardens to three sides. About 4 miles from the centre of Leeds, a mile and a half from school. So distances you can comfortably manage on a bike. Well looked after – but in need of a lot of updating. It seems that an older couple have lived there for a long time – it doesn’t even have a proper kitchen – just a kitchenette.

The reason I’m telling you this is that it needs a fair bit of work – and there are therefore choices that can be made which could be greener, or less green, choices.

I’ve been doing some research – and here are the things I think we could explore:

Obvious things

Decent loft insulation and cavity wall insulation
Draft proofing
Double glazing

Less obvious things

Solar panels – both types
Electrics/lighting (house needs re-wiring)
Biomass boiler
Multifuel oven
Wood stoves/fires
Velux windows in the kitchen roof (to increase natural light)
Interior insulation on walls which don’t have cavities
Grow fruit and veg in some of the garden
Rainwater harvesting
Choice of furniture, furnishings, carpets, paint etc

There’ll be other things we could do as well – if you have ideas please let me know.

The constraints will be as follows. Can we do that in this house? And can we afford to do it? But we’re keen to explore this in some detail – because we want to see if we can do it, and also because millions of us live in houses a bit like the one that we’re hoping to buy. So if we’re going to make our housing stock more green, we’ll need to work on houses which were built at a time when we didn’t have to worry about this kind of thing quite so much.

I’ll tell you more next week, once I’ve looked into things a bit more – but if you have any thoughts, contacts (particularly in the Leeds/Yorkshire area) or ideas please let me know.

Francis started school last month. He seems happy. We went to chat with his teacher this evening and all seems fine.

I’m interested in education. I’m particularly interested in how boys are educated, given that I was one, I have one and they tend not to do as well as girls at school.

I did well at school because I was bright, academic and compliant. I fitted in. Lots of others did too, but plenty didn’t. There was such a strong sense of you being a bit of a failure if you didn’t go along the conveyor belt of good GCSE’s, good A Levels, and a good degree.

Of course all that matters, and “doing well” has served me pretty well. It got me out of Liverpool which was probably no bad thing. Nothing against Liverpool, I’m very proud to come from there and it will always be “home”, but I think it was important to leave. Going to University gave me that opportunity. It also gave me the chance to work in Ecuador for a year, which was probably my defining life experience.

But increasingly I feel it’s not the be-all and end-all. That’s easy to say from a privileged position of having had that opportunity. But in the recent debate about the future of University education, you could be forgiven for thinking that the only way to succeed in life is to go to University. So if we don’t widen participation, the argument goes, we’re by default resigning loads of young people to a second class life.

It’s not a very popular opinion, but I’m not a fan of increasing student numbers. I think we’re obsessed with the wrong statistic – as if our country’s competitiveness is reliant on us having more young people with a degree than Slovakia, Belarus, or India. I genuinely don’t see that there is a direct link between the number of degree-educated young people, and the future economic prosperity of our country. And anyway, is economic growth what it’s all about? If we think it is, then we’re in trouble.

I’m interested in young people being supported to achieve what they are able to achieve. For some that will be a degree, for others an apprenticeship. For others it could be their first business.

This brilliant talk and animation from Sir Ken Robinson via the RSA illustrates some of my thinking on this, in a far more articulate and broad way than I ever will. It suggests that our education system is based on churning out young people so that they are ready to contribute to the country’s economic engine. Do well at school. Go to University. Get a job. Contribute to GDP. My generation, to a large extent, believed that one would lead to another, and to a certain extent that did happen. It certainly doesn’t happen as much now, and it won’t in the future.

How are we to educate young people to cope with what the next 25 years are going to throw at them? I certainly hope Francis won’t be taught how I was taught, even though it allowed me to “succeed”. And from an enterprise point of view, how can we help them to develop entrepreneurial skills, that go beyond producing badges to sell to press-ganged parents?

What will be success for Francis? 10 A*s? Or the ability to think for himself, to challenge the answer at the back of the book? To learn to work collaboratively? Or to be top of the class?

Here’s the second guest post from Liam Black, who recently spent a week in Bangladesh putting things in place for a visit to Grameen next month.

Last week I met for the first time Corinne Bazina who for the last six months has been overseeing the Grameen Danone joint venture in Bogra about 4 hours (or 56 depending on the traffic!) north of Dhaka.

I’m always looking for find examples of ‘corporate social innovation’ – that is, big businesses being very clever in the ways they create products and services which address big social needs by aligning their people, brands and core operational competencies. In London later this month we are bringing the world’s leading exemplars together to share learning and evangelise to the growing Wavelength community of business and social enterprise leaders.

It was Danone that really got me interested in this space when I met Emmanuel Marchant a couple of years ago. Emmanuel heads up Danone Communties, which drives forward the French giant’s social business strategy. I really admire these Danone guys. Not only are they doing and not just talking, they are very open and transparent about what they are doing, why they do it and what they are learning – warts (and there are many) and all. One of their marketeers when asked why are you being so honest with us said “Because we want to be known, understood and copied”.

The origins of the idea which became Grameen Danone Foods Ltd are quickly becoming legend. Groupe DANONE CEO Franck Riboud invites Yunus for lunch whilst he is Paris in October 2005. They get on like the proverbial house on fire and decide to do something together to help the poor of Bangladesh. They shake hands and in less than two years in 2006 the new joint venture social business to help end child malnutrition is being opened to worldwide publicity in Bogra by footballing superstar and Muslim icon Zinedine Zidane and productions kicks in February 2007.

It is difficult to overstate the difficulty of commercial and social challenges which these two men set their operational people. To produce a yoghurt to improve kids’ health in a country with few fridges and daily power cuts (in those areas lucky enough to have electricity); which will recruit and train local unskilled people; be sold door to door by poor women to supplement their incomes; to use its demand to improve the lot of rural milk producers AND be a model of environmental friendliness and reuse!

Production and sales are increasing, 40 people have jobs, 500 poor women supplement their income through door to door selling and rural milk farmers have a more reliable market.

The challenges are huge even if the business gets to break even next year. The biggest one is cultural. Danone is keen to back away and hand over to local people but skills and experience are hard to find a small provincial town in one of the most underdeveloped countries on the planet. Danone’s impeccable intentions of creating a genuinely local business run up hard against the brute realities of educational and skills deficits in a chronically poor place.

Danone’s investment in plant, start up costs and operating losses is around 1 million euros. At the moment the Return on Investment is unproven but the Return on Inspiration is huge. I’m convinced anyway that the French multinational has had a bigger impact by investing in social business than if it had just given the money away in a traditional big corporate CSR way. And the yoghurt – Shokti Doi – is very tasty and good for you!