Opinion: India's Social Entrepreneurs Need Shoulders To Stand On

Every aspiring automotive entrepreneur or tech start-up founder today is 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. That is not by accident. A robust knowledge infrastructure has been designed to help them solve problems with speed and scale. Foundational principles are proven and studied in academic environments. Innovators use these principles to create tools that are usable by a wide range of people. There are incentives that are financial (revenue) and non-financial (recognition, as in the case of open source) that encourage people to not only share but continue to invest in these tools. There are journals, fora and marketplaces to discover, discuss and provide feedback, which ensures that there is a natural selection by merit. It is on top of this infrastructure that an entrepreneur aspires to go above & beyond.

A social entrepreneur improving the quality of education in underprivileged communities rarely has such an infrastructure. She starts from scratch based on her experiences. She gets mentoring on essentials, inspirational case studies and networking opportunities. She occasionally meets a fellow entrepreneur whom she can partner with. However, chances are she is making the same mistakes and learning the same things as many before her.

There are early efforts to build a knowledge infrastructure for impact. Academic programmes have emerged with a focus on principles and practice of solving social problems. Platforms like DIKSHA help share and reuse resources for public education. ASER's assessments are trusted to assess the learning levels of children. Initiatives such as the Life Skills Collaborative have created assessments as public goods. However, these are vastly inadequate for the scale and complexity we are working with. We need a paradigm shift in how we solve social problems. I believe three key levers are critical for this

Setting Up A Marketplace For Resources 

If a public health entrepreneur needs tools to assess communities on mental health, where does she go? Science progressed because journals and fora, imperfect as they may be, served as the infrastructure to discover and assess knowledge and resources on merit. We need a similar infrastructure for impact. Today, anyone looking to share resources with the ecosystem carries the lodestone of ensuring adoption. We need digital spaces for sharing innovations, communities built around those spaces that provide feedback, and a decentralised model that can let a thousand flowers bloom.

Restructuring Capital Flow 

Why should an organisation continue to invest and create resources for broader use by other organisations? Every organisation is incentivised to deliver 'end-to-end' impact. No organisation has any incentive to reuse existing assets or build on other organisations' work. We need to restructure funding to drive new behaviours. We need funding for public goods that measures rigour, adoption and credibility as success metrics. And funders supporting programmes should measure the reuse of proven assets so that the implementation partners can focus on their core strengths as an organisation. This will automatically create organisations that will invest in building public goods that others can use.

Shifting The Narrative

What we celebrate is what we get. Every funder wants to see his or her direct impact on society. Entrepreneurs are celebrated for their direct impact on communities. Despite all the talk of collaboration, our mental models are of lone warriors solving complex, intractable problems single-handedly. While heroic, it is an entirely suboptimal structure for us to solve problems. Can we create a paradigm where we are not celebrating walking far but paving the way for the next person to travel farther than we did? We should reflect on this paradigm in our investments and implementation.

We are at a moment of inflexion - as India reaches 100 years, we have an opportunity to ensure every citizen has a chance to live a good life. Growing domestic wealth and corporate responsibility will mean more people will start to engage with social impact deeply for the first time in their lives. The deep sense of opportunity will encourage more entrepreneurs to solve social problems. Our cost-based, people-intensive, do-it-by-myself approach is not the model that will help solve social problems. We need a system that has the incentives, infrastructure, and the zeitgeist of working together.

(Rathish Balakrishnan is co-founder and Managing Partner, Sattva Consulting. He is on X @rathish_bala)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.