Sreelatha Menon dedicated her column in the Business Standard on
27 September aptly to the Joy of Giving Week that commenced the same
day. Her opening salvo was even more apt. She wrote that the Joy of
Giving Week (conceived by Give India) wove together thousands of small
efforts at charity to make a big difference.
She was right. Small
charitable contributions meant for many thousand small efforts make a
big difference. In the last several weeks, I have been reflecting on
this very topic. Earlier this decade, I had “graduated” from small
charitable contributions to helping a small-and- micro-enterprise
venture fund come to life. From there, the next milestones in the
“public (policy) impact journey” were supposed to be funding and
founding a public policy think tank. Then came the realization that
op-eds did not bring change (see Bare Talk on 26 May).
download audio
Listen
to an interview with Dhaval Udani of GiveIndia.com, which is organizing
the “India Giving Challenge” - an online fundraising competition which
offers corporates and NGOs the opportunity to participate in the Joy of
Giving Week
Then, Jagdish Bhagwati in his recent lecture in
Singapore reminded his audience that public policy impact could take
decades to achieve. So one has to keep plugging away without impact. Of
course, in some cases, it might be good not to have an impact,
especially if one’s thinking is flawed to begin with.
The
Undercover Economist gave that reply to a reader who wanted to know how
to make as big a contribution to society as possible (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/the-undercover-economist-answers-your-questions/).
Tim Harford wrote that it would be great to make federal policy better;
but without proper impact evaluation, one could actually be
contributing to making it worse, and that many in Washington, DC, were
engaged in doing exactly that. In addition to this warning, he also
gave a positive suggestion in favour of modest projects because they
gave tangible progress, were easier to evaluate, made us feel better
and encouraged us to keep going.
Anil Gupta of India’s National
Innovation Foundation reinforced the case for small efforts in his
characteristic forthright manner in a recent Wall Street Journal interview (http://online.wsj.com/ article/SB125376926792036847.html). He said that scale should not be made the enemy of sustainability.
What
he said further is important: “In other words, if some solutions don’t
diffuse, do they become less legitimate? Are problems of small
communities less important than problems which affect a large number of
people? Sustainability doesn’t mean that the same solution applies
everywhere, because nature is essentially diverse. But we are trying to
remove diversity by scaling up solutions… By treating it as such, it
creates more problems because what was not uniform is being treated as
uniform, which means the dissimilarities and variabilities became more
manifest.”
This is important for public policymakers and
thinkers. India’s size and the scale of poverty that remains to be
tackled, combined with a Western fascination with scale efficiencies,
make many of us suggest blanket nationwide efforts and interventions.
They might make for neat Power Point presentations, but they mostly do
not work. That is what many consumer marketing companies discover when
their national marketing campaigns boomerang in some locations.
Many
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that work on a pan-India basis
confirm that small and context-relevant interventions work. Such
interventions help to build evidence on what works and what does not.
The recognition of this reality gave birth to Poverty Action Lab (www.povertyactionlab.org), housed at the department of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Gupta
suggests that under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(NREGA), villagers could be required to set up a village knowledge
register. If the 250 million people covered by NREGA spend a fraction
of the 100 days they are paid wages on this, the ideas that could be
documented and disseminated throughout the country would run into
billions. There would be cross-pollination of thought and action.
This
is where Give India, which provides a portal for donors to contribute
to social organizations that have gone through some screening, could
take the lead and set up a mechanism for NGOs to interact. In fact,
they should insist on it. Similarly, foundations (see, for instance, www.khemkafoundation.org)
give awards annually to best social intervention efforts. They should
make it obligatory on the part of awardees—whose work has clearly
succeeded and has made an impact—to share their intellectual property
with fellow social entrepreneurs.
Until now, this has been more
of an exception than a rule. For most NGO heads, over time, the cause
becomes secondary to their persona. Anxiety to guard turf and territory
drives action and the original mission is lost. In other words, all the
ills that pervade the for-profit world afflict the not-for-profit or
non-profit world too. It appears that one of the well-known NGOs in the
country—Goonj—is an exception. It is about to put up a “replication
kit” on its website, throwing open its knowledge and experience for
others to adopt.
So, in this Joy of Giving Week, Bare Talk
salutes small and sustainable efforts and hopes that they too discover
the joy of sharing and giving.
V. Anantha Nageswaran is chief
investment officer for an international wealth manager. These are his
personal views. Your comments are welcome at baretalk@livemint.com