Yesterday, I was looking for a building for a meeting. Street addresses in India are rare; if you need to get a place, the provided street address is more of a suggestion then a location. My general strategy when I’ve had a meeting, therefore, is this: I show up about half an hour early, ask around for where I need to go, talk to about twenty people (no one ever says they “don’t know”), and take the average of the difference.
Yesterday, I went to the Naandi Foundation, an organization that works closely with government and private schools across Andhra Pradesh, and the only address I had was “Imperial Towers.” I followed the general pattern of asking 20 people and splitting the difference. Along the way, I met a man named Mohammed who stopped everything, walked me around, and ensured I got to the office correctly. We chatted, exchanged numbers, and he invited me to his house for dinner.
I met him later on at a pre-arranged meeting point, and we got in an moto-rickshaw. I take these everywhere in Hyderabad. Usually, they are about 50 cents for a 15-minute ride. This time, though, we paid about 12 cents for a 20-minute ride, but shared it with three other people. Hyderabad has no public transportation system to speak of; they have an erratic and inefficient bus system. In its place, a pseudo-public transit system of auto-rickshaws has cropped up. The very poor pay very small amounts to travel commonly-traveled routes; to get to Mohammed’s house, we “changed lines” once at a large intersection and paid about 15 cents apiece. The route is affordable, even for the poorest, and the route is highly profitable for the driver. Instead of taking one rider paying 75 cents, he takes seven riders who pay, in total, $1. Over the day, that adds up for a larger profit.
This is the concept behind what we’re doing. In the developing world, sustained income won’t happen, the thought goes, if you rely on the generosity of foundations and the fickleness of marketing budgets. There are many dedicated NGOs who do wonderful things, but to get massive amounts of capital/investment in the developing world, many companies and investors need to have a profit-driven incentive because they have the bottom line in order. This rickshaw example shows how, by creatively packing people into a rickshaw and going on high-demand routes, the rickshaw driver can make a greater profit than he would have otherwise ($1 vs 50 cents) and each rider, though very poor, still can afford the traveling fee.
School finance is not a profitable business taken school-by-school. But in large amounts, if smartly executed, we can give a ride to millions of students and do it in such a way that investors will want to make that capital available.
