The foundation for this course lies with unique synergies between pioneering research, teaching, and social initiatives through the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative. Unique to this approach is a bottom-up understanding of the intersection of poverty and the marketplace. The goals of this course are to help you develop an understanding of marketplace activity in the radically different context of subsistence where much of humanity resides and survives, and for you to design solutions that can be implemented by individuals, businesses, and social enterprises through economically, ecologically, and socially sustainable products for subsistence marketplaces.
Lesson 8-2.1 Concluding Insights and Perspectives
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Del curso dictado por University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Subsistence Marketplaces
20 calificaciones
De la lección
Course Summary and Conclusion
In this module we will recapitulate some key concepts we have learned in the course and offer concluding thoughts.
Conoce a los instructores
Madhu ViswanathanDiane and Steven N. Miller Professor in Business
Department of Business Administration
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC].
In this lesson we are going to do something different.
We're going to have a group of people talk about.
They're insights on the key challenges in working in subsistence
market places and how to overcome those challenges through their solutions.
I'm going to start off talking about what I think are some
of the key challenges and how we try to overcome them.
And then we're going to move on to some of the others, who run enterprises,
that have been used as examples in this course.
So what do I think is the
key, to designing solutions for subsistence market places?
I think the key is implementation.
We can have a lot of ideas and it's very
important to have good ideas, but everything comes down to implimentation.
And to do that, the key is to have the right people.
It takes a lot of patience.
It's very difficult
to do.
We certainly never want to give the impression that, it's
easy to design solutions and implement them for this context.
It is very challenging to do.
But what's most important in designing these solutions are finding
the right people who are committed to this kind of work.
And once we have people its important to have a place.
Its important to work in a set of villages,
its important to find a community platform perhaps in
an urban area that helps you to start small and fail small.
Now to do all of these requires a lot of patience.
It requires a lot of will, and it requires
somebody to be committed in the longer term as well.
I tend not call these projects because we
need to have a longer term commitment than that.
Sometimes these are communities we want to be engaged in for a lifetime.
But again, as far as I'm concerned, implementation
is most of what is required, at the grass
roots level and, that requires the right people
and it requires the right place to work in.
>> My name is Paul Munsen, I'm the president of Sun Ovens International.
We're manufacturer of solar powered cooking ovens.
I didn't invent the sun oven, but one of my clients was
a good friend of the inventor of the sun oven.
Frankly, I knew nothing about cooking.
I knew nothing about solar.
I knew nothing about the, anything in the developing world, but as I started
to work with him on a pro bono basis to just help him out,
I saw the, the need for sun ovens in developing countries around the world and
because of that need I, just released, worked harder with it and can't
say that I was any more successful than he is or he was with it.
It's just that, our ability since, 1997
to communicate around the world has changed totally.
He'd wait an average of four to six weeks for letters to go
back and forth to developing countries and trying to make a project work.
Or rely on faxes that never knew if they went through or didn't.
And now we can, this morning I've communicated
with people on three different continents already.
And don't think anything of it.
People find our website everywhere and we can communicate.
So I can't say we're any smarter than he is.
It's just that.
We've been able to have better communication around the world.
And, so, I put together some investors and we came up with enough cash to pay off his
bank loans and then move the manufacturing of the sun ovens from the Milwaukee
area to the suburbs of Chicago.
And we've been located in Elburn Illinois,
about 40 miles west of Chicago, since 1998.
The need for sun ovens is that there's still 2.5 billion people in the world
who cook with wood, charcoal, or animal dung as their primary method of cooking.
And when a woman cooks over an open fire, she inhales
the same amount of smoke as smoking three packs of cigarettes
a day.
Each year in the continent of Africa alone 1.6 million
children under the age of five, die of respiratory diseases.
In more than half the African countries more children under the age of
five, die of respiratory diseases than they do of HIV/AIDS and malaria combined.
And, the primary cause of respiratory disease is when the mothers
are cooking with the baby at their back or their breast and
the babies are inhaling the smoke.
So, the effect it has on the health of women and children is just devastating.
And so in many of these countries there is a great abundance of sunshine.
So, people being able to cook with the sun can
have a huge effect on the health of women and children.
Also, the issue of deforestation is getting worse and worse around the world.
As you look
at countries like Ethiopia, Haiti you know, Haiti is
almost 99 percent deforested and prior to the 2010
earthquake a typical family spent more than half their
total household income just buying charcoal to cook with.
So, in places like Haiti that's blessed with an abundance of sun, sunshine.
The ability to be able to use that
sunshine rather than have to use wood or charcoal.
And the ability then to take money that was being
spent for charcoal and use it for much more productive things.
In many cases, like food, is really strong.
So, we've decided to do everything we can.
And to promote solar cooking in deforested developing
countries that are blessed with the abundance of sunshine.
If you on on the internet, you'll find plans for solar ovens.
Without exaggeration,
I'm sure you can find 5,000 different websites
or plans on how to build solar ovens.
So, the idea of a solar oven is not new, it's been around for centuries.
But almost everybody who approaches solar cooking, approaches it based on cost.
So the assumption is, well somebody can make something out of
cardboard and aluminum foil, that's only going to cost less than $10.
That should be sufficient and should work and the fact that a
pat of rice that would cook on a three stone fire in you
know, 45 minutes to an hour, would take four or five hours in
a cardboard aluminum cooker is a thing that people think, well, so what?
And so, much of solar cooking has always
been approached based on costs and approached by non-profits.
Different approach, our goal has been to create self
sustaining business, as a company to become [LAUGH] self sustaining.
But also to create self sustaining businesses in developing
countries, rather than take a non-profit approach because unfortunately,
many things with a non profit approach are totally
contingent on grants and, and finding funding becomes almost the
mission more than the actual mission of the product where as something can become
self sustaining than it can continue so what we've looked at when comes to
the culture is that Women do not change cooking habits easily.
People who have cooked the same way for generations and consequently they're
if something is going to take that they used to cook in an hour
is going to take four or five hours
it's not something they're going to necessarily embrace.
So we've tried to look at the culture, but unfortunately,
if you're going to make something that's, that high quality.
It costs a lot of money and is something that, when
your market is people who live on less than $2 a
day, it's very challenging to have something that people can afford
but, the reality is people live on $2 a day can't
afford a $10 solar cooker any more than they can afford a $150 solar cooker
so, consequently There has to be a solution
so we developed programs where we use micro-finance.
We use the Gromene Bank Model of micro-finance, but instead of
using it for income generation, we use micro-finance for cost savings.
Using Haiti as an example where people spend more than half their household
income on buying charcoal.
If we have programs in Haiti, where we have people.
A typical family in Haiti spends approximately
ten U.S dollars a month on charcoal.
And so some of them can be used for at least 70% of their cooking, year round.
So their savings is about seven U.S. dollars a month.
And so what we do is, we develop programs
where women can pay for the sun oven out of the savings.
So to create an economic incentive, and the reason
to use the oven, we make the payment about 60%
of what they save, which comes out to about
$4.20 US a month, or about a dollar a week.
So we form groups of women.
The groups then something and I had to collect a dollar from each individual
person, groups of 15 to 20 women and then the payment of $15 or
$20 was collected using the Gromene model.
The women could guarantee each other's loans and
they wind up then being able to you know,
support each other, and there's a lot of
peer pressure And peer support in changing cooking habits.
If one woman says, well I stopped using my
sun oven because the goats took it over the
other says, well, I put the, put brackets next
to them so the goats won't kick it over.
I mean
simple things, but things that are important, and then as the money we paid,
another oven can be made, and money can be relent and we can become self sufficient.
We take an entrepreneurial approach, so what we attempt to do is
wait in essence for entrepreneurs to come to us, who see the need, understand the
product, and understand their culture.
So we have a program where initially we start in developing countries by Having
licensing an entrepreneur who makes the ovens
originally from parts that are shipped from
the US after the first 1000 ovens have been made with US shipped parts, we
provide all of the specifications, all of the drawings, the CAD drawings So that
they could find local job shops that could make the component parts.
There's one gasket in the Sun oven that's proprietary, and that gasket is why a Sun
oven will get considerably hotter and hold the
heat more than any other type of solar cooker.
And then we sell the gasket with a small royalty, but that then allows the
price to be reduced even further by making it in the country it's going to be used.
And then using the micro finance system
to allow women to pay for it.
>> Hi, my name is Ehsan Noursalehi, I am the Vice President
of Bump, non profit design studio, and we're formerly known as IPT.
So, in, in Bump, our mission is to look
at areas where we think that there hasn't been
enough development or enough solutions, for people specifically in
difficult situations, you know, ty, typically that means poor
people living in the developing countries well we
take a, a slightly broader look on them
and our first problem that we really looked
at is prosthetic arm what we found is that.
There is about 25 million people around the world that are, that have an
amputation and we saw that in developing
countries there are a vast majority of people,
98% of the people that it is estimated
cannot obtain a prosthesis when they want one.
And we saw this as a huge issue, and we looked into this more and we saw
that there had not been a lot of
product developments specifically in regards to upper extremity prosthetics.
So that means a prosthetic arm.
And so we found that, we made that our focus
And we, we worked on developing a technology that would increase
that access so that, that 98% of people that
don't have access number, keeps getting smaller and smaller.
For us, the reason we do this is because we find it extremely fun,
interesting, and rewarding its not like, it is, it is about helping people that
are unfortunate, but I think that we can't say that we're doing that, and
like someone who's developing you know a product for you know, western use isn't
necessarily doing you know?
I think anyone that's trying to make a product, sees
themselves as trying to solve a problem that someone experiences.
But I think this is, it's more challenging and more fun .Because.
There's less known about it.
There's more uncertainties. There's more, there's more challenges.
And I think for people that use themselves
as creative [INAUDIBLE] really difficult to work on.
I think working on,
subsistence market place challenges is really, really exciting.
Because the problems are really big and the impact can also be really big.
And that's something that.
You know, as the west gets more and more refined, you know, solutions, although as
good as they might be, the impacts of them keeps getting more and more limited.
But in the subsistence marketplaces in developing countries, you have more room
for impact, and I, and I think that is something that's very exciting.
>> My name is Norma Scagnoli.
I work for the College of Business at the University of Illinois.
And I am, my job there is director of e-learning.
I'm also an agent instructor for the college of education.
I teach management of e-learning programs.
And my interest is adult education and human resource development.
I think that in this project, what I'm going to learn, what I'm hoping
to learn and what I'm going to observe is how the participants of the course are,
inventing, creating, designing paths to continue with a project that
focuses in helping others helping others understand and design their own paths.
So mm-hm, I'm, I'm passionate about that, and I hope that
that's going to be My contribution and my learning from this project.
So my goal is, is to help [UNKNOWN] and
Srini, and the group behind this big project.
Think through the after the course,
what comes after, and how we can expand. I think that this course is
great in the sense that people that will take it will
be ready to start something on their own,
based on what they have learned here, and based on the connections they make here
with other human beings taking the course We are not looking
we are not only preparing college students, or
professionals, who have an idea and a good understanding of
marketplaces, but we are also targeting any
person interested on understanding, designing, developing projects that
focus on, low-income, low-literate people and I think that, that's the beauty of it.
That diversity of audience that we're targeting and what may happen after the
>> Hi my name is Srinivas, Srini in short.
I'm a co-instructor for the course I'm also a graduate student at the University
of Illinois in the marketing department.
And my background is in social entrepreneurship, so prior to starting
my graduate studies in [UNKNOWN] I was running an educational venture, a
social venture in rural India I worked in about 72 villages, providing education
services and low income villages across the state of [INAUDIBLE].
I think the the challenge of product and market development in
subsistence market places is is is a huge challenge, right, so
there are 3 billion people globally who live on less than
$2 a day and it presents to me the ultimate marketing challenge.
There's been a lot of research happening in subsistence market places
and the, and the ability to reach a wide audience enables us
to disseminate this research to a lot of people, and we are also hoping that, that
it fosters entrepreneurial social entrepeneurs to who would try to work
on some of these huge challenges, and we are happy to be able to
meet so many students and We look forward to working with all of you.
>> To
conclude, there are a number of challenges in working is subsistence marketplaces,
but it's very important to learn how to overcome some of these challenges.
Now each of you is going to find your own way to give back to these communities.
You're going to chart your own path.
You're going to. Plan your own journey and travel forward.
In doing that, its useful to think about
your larger purpose, your passion, and your proficiency.
In other words, what is it that you think you should do?
What do you like to do, and what are you good at doing.
Now not always, but sometimes, these three things intersect.
What you're good at, what you like to do, and what you think you should do.
Sometimes a couple of these intersect, it may be
the passion, it may be the proficiency and so on.
In my case I can tell you that all three things intersect.
The larger purpose, my passion for this arena, and
what I am hopefully good at doing as well.
I wish you the very best in finding your own journey, and I
hope it's at the intersection of your
larger purpose, your passion, and your proficiency.
It's been a privilege to teach this course.
Thank you very much.
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