Learning and Serving in Egypt and the US

Ok I lied, I am ALMOST going to bring us up to present day in this next post, only because I had the privilege to take part in an incredible program this summer called LearnServe Egypt, which I think deserves a little mention here. ( For more complete coverage and perspectives, visit www.ifeegypt.org )

LearnServe Egypt was a six week program created by the Institute for Education in partnership with Mercator XXI LLC, and the AUC School of Business, where 6 Americans and 6 Egyptians were united to form lasting bonds of friendship and have endless hours of bus sing a longs (initiated by yours truly) and discussions over everything from sarcasm in different cultures to the Egyptian Revolution and the prospects for its future. oh, and we also had a mission of creating the plans for social businesses that would benefit Egypt and forge greater ties between Egypt and the US.

The first 2 weeks we spent in Egypt, traveling around to visit sites, businesses and listen to speakers from the government, business and education worlds, while staying at the lovely dorms at the new campus of the American University in Cairo. Here we identified social problems and started coming up with business plans that would address our problem areas, culminating in a final pitch on the last day where a group of Egyptian Business leaders shredded our hopes and dreams with a chain-saw.

The second two weeks we tried to keep working on the putting the pieces back together but mostly fiddled with Skype and Google+ and decided it would be easier to sleep alot and post on each others Facebook walls :D

The Third and Final Phase took place in Washington DC, where we all stayed in the Dupont Circle Hotel and at first really enjoyed DC, then met tons of super interesting speakers (like the former deputy secretary of defense and current president of CSIS, the former mayor of DC, the CEO of DCs fastest growing company, and the Ambassador from Egypt, among others!), then had to work ALOT, then enjoyed DC even more! This all culminated in another Final Pitch, this time to a panel of American venture capitalists and Business Leaders who then proceeded to... be alot nicer than we had expected, gave us great feedback and told us our plans were excellent!

All in all in was a fantastic intro to many new things for me, particularly in entrepreneurship and business formation, and I'm sure the many skills and connections will prove invaluable both in the immediate future and on down the long and winding road (dah dah, dah dah, daaa)

Ok next post I really will enter the present, pinkyswear

A little Background for Digestin'

Namaste!

As I may have communicated in the previous update post, I am doing an internship this summer in the small town of Bagar in a rural area of Rajasthan, India. Going into this internship, I am my compadres had little to no knowledge what exactly we would be doing, what the place we were staying at would be like, or even where Bagar was exactly. As we could come to find out during our journey from Delhi to Bagar, we were not alone in this confusion. But before we get to that little odyssey, lets get some background info out of the way.

Myself, Sarah and Meg were selected to receive funds from the Center for the Advanced Study of India at Penn to travel to rural Rajasthan to do an internship with a local NGO called the Grassroots Development Laboratory (GDL), From what I now understand, GDL was set up about 3 years ago through the generosity of the Piramal Foundation, the charitable wing of a major Indian Company run by the Piramal family, a very well to do family that have their humble origins in the small town of Bagar. After making it big in pharmaceuticals and branching out into a number of different industries (real estate in Mumbai?) The Piramals set of the Piramal Foundation to give something back, building a number of schools and hospitals in Bagar and starting GDL to test innovative solutions to many of the issues that rural Indians are faced with, most operating under a Social Enterprise model that seeks to create original businesses run by local talent that address needs in the community and empower the individuals that run them. For a detailed account of this concept you can check out Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism by Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. http://www.piramal.org.in/gdl

GDL's mission is to create social enterprises and test them with the local population in Bagar, and if they prove to be sustainable and successful, look to scale them and expand their models to other parts of India. They have already successfully done with with Sarvagel, a company that provides clean drinking water at a fraction of the cost of bottled water that is the same quality. This enterprise exists now as an independent entity that provides many homes and businesses in Bagar with clean and safe water, and it has expanded to several other states as well.
The projects that GDL currently operates include the Bagar Employment Institute, a training center that teaches classes on English, Computer Skills, Leadership, and other useful trades that can help local people become more employable. The other two main projects are called Source for Change and Mobile Naukri, and I will give a little more detail on them as I will be working with both of them this summer.

Source for Change can be succinctly described as a Women's Empowerment Rural BPO, which means that it is a Business Process Outsourcing center that seeks to employ local women in a rural area to work on projects like translation and data entry outsourced from companies in the Urban centers. The focus on women is an attempt to address the gender gap that exists throughout India, and particularly in Rajasthan, where female infanticide and inhibited access to food and healthcare has resulted in the ratio of men to women being skewed decidedly towards the males. SFC gives women an opportunity to become economically valuable, as well as allowing them to earn an independent income for themselves and to prove that women are capable of doing jobs that have generally been reserved for men. http://www.sourceforchange.in/
The results have been highly encouraging in that many of the women have shown a great aptitude for the work as well as demonstrated changes in their personalities and positions at home where they now have a greater voice due to their earning of an income. SFC has so successfully completed a number of projects for large companies as well as overcome the initial resistance from the community that it is looking to expand into other towns and other areas of India that can benefit from its model.

Mobile Naukri is the newest project at GDL and has just begun to take off in its pilot phase. The concept is that there are many educated people in rural places liek Bagar where there are many colleges and training institutes but no transparency about jobs in the area or advertising by companies in the private sector in rural areas. As a result almost everyone seeks to apply for limited government jobs that may not even fit their specific skills and qualifications. Mobile Naukri looks to connect rural job seekers with companies by using cell phones and SMS, something nearly every person in India possesses. Job seekers make a call to the data collection office (run through SFC) where they are entered into a database with their qualifications, desired job type, and other information. When a job becomes available from a company, a SMS text is sent to all those in the database who match the qualifications for that specific job, and they have the option of coming to interview for that job or passing on it if they aren't interested at that time. The main thrust of the project at this point is building a large database of job seekers through marketing and outreach in the community, and contacting a number of companies to get them to post jobs when they become available. So far the model has been successful and already placed a number of individuals with jobs that meet their specific needs and qualifications and the project is looking at expansion through the surrounding towns and villages.