Community led movements can become intrinsic to social policy: Siddhant Gokhale

So Isabel Guerrero, the co-author of the book, worked as the VP of South Asia at the World Bank, managing millions and millions of investment money. What she observed was that the programs by multilateral organisations and agencies often fail to reach the last mile. They don’t reach the needy and disadvantaged, especially in areas of frontline service delivery. That’s because of various reasons. Sometimes it’s capacity or capability or lack of incentive. At the same time, there are many of these innovative local solutions developed by people on the ground closest to the problem. But, the challenge there was that, they would rarely scale from where they began. They were usable for that community in that area, but would rarely scale them to match the size of the problem in a larger geography. So, this is what we see as the missing middle. Hence, the idea of the book came from that thought about how we scale up, so that these solutions reach a wider population. The UN has set sustainable development goals for 2030 that are very ambitious. Achieving that target requires reaching scale. Therefore, it’s not only about finding the solution, it’s about having the solution scale up to the level of a state, nation or on a global scale. 

India is a huge country so I don’t want to make generalisations. But, what I described as the missing middle earlier, is also true for India in some sense. There is a lot of scope for an organisation at the community level. SEWA, for example, was founded through self-organising. Pratham also was scaled through community mobilisations at the village level. Today’s India, in my opinion, is unique in the developed world, because some of the democratic ideas and decentralisation have led to strong community mobilisations that eventually form organizations like SEWA. Even though this has happened over a time of 40 years, community-led movements can become big and large enough for the government to take notice and even make it intrinsic to their policy. We have seen at this with the origins of the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM), now part of national policy, but originating from experiments in self-help groups by SEWA, MYRADA and PRADAN. I see more and more civil society organisations trying to bridge this gap working with governments.

I think so, at least organisations like Pratham have been able to do that. Theoretically, it is just moving from one geographical area to another. However, all the initial conditions or assumptions of the intervention that worked in one area are completely removed to another area in ways that one may not fully understand. It is similar to the story of any scale-up in the private sector. Selling a product in a city like Chennai, could be different from selling it somewhere else because consumer tastes change. The only way you can find the right strategy is through feedback and learning. There are parts of the business that remain the same, but there are areas where things change. I think development programs need to have a similar approach if it has to scale. In India, self-help groups have been adapted in different configurations in different states, via State Rural Livelihood Missions. 

So, this is not my real area of expertise, but I can give you a big picture idea.

In India, historically, there have been various movements and innovations that have been organised and scaled. But, the regulatory framework can be improved to support and incorporate these even more. So, one of the big needs, is to have a definition and a legal entity of a social enterprise that is different from maybe the current denominations of just an NGO or civil society organisation, in order to have that recognition and support. These Social Enterprises (SE) need a lot of funding, human capital development and access to information, that can be aided by government policy. In some countries, like in the UK, the regulatory framework is more robust in SE policy. So India can do more in that area. Social enterprises have the freedom to be able to innovate in a way that governments cannot. Governments are not designed for any failure as that can become a political problem, which then means you will do only what you know will work. But, innovation sometimes comes with failure. So it’s almost outsourcing the innovation piece to somebody else who then iterates and finds out what works. Once you know what works, bring it into government to leverage its scale and reach.