Mindset over matter: Indian nonprofits that know how to grow
With more than 250 million people in India living on a daily income of less than $2, it’s clear that any nonprofit aspiring to reduce poverty needs to have a huge reach. But some nonprofits seem better equipped to meet the challenge of scaling in India than others. What gives them an edge?
The NGOs viewpoint is that the government is the most powerful lever they can pull to extend their reach. (Shutterstock Images: For illustrative purposes only)
With more than 250 million people in India living on a daily income of less than $2, it’s clear that any nonprofit aspiring to reduce poverty needs to have a huge reach. But some nonprofits seem better equipped to meet the challenge of scaling in India than others. What gives them an edge? The answer might lie in their mindsets—the way they think about what it really takes to serve many, and then many more, in the face of overwhelming scarcity.
Over the past year, Bridgespan studied 20 Indian nonprofits that deliver services to hundreds of thousands (in some cases, millions) of people. These organizations differ significantly in style and focus, but their experiences reveal five distinct and recurring mindsets:
Take Agastya International Foundation. Founder Ramji Raghavan originally wanted to build a school, but couldn’t secure funding after the dot-com bubble burst. So he flipped his model, and started to bring science classes to students in existing schools instead, using specially equipped vans (and more recently, even using motorcycles to reach remote villages). Today, Agastya annually delivers science programs to more than 1.5 million rural schoolchildren.
Goonj partners with grassroots organizations in 21 states to deliver second-hand clothes and other used household materials to people in need. But the organization also invites the people it serves to engage in its efforts. Goonj’s “Clothes for Work” program, for example, helps communities help themselves by offering goods in exchange for labor on projects like local road repair; the approach frees up workers’ other income for food, healthcare, or other expenses.
Others continually review processes and regular expenses, looking for opportunities to save. For example, at Akshaya Patra, which prepares and delivers fresh lunches to 1.6 million children daily, all employees know that by reducing the unit cost of producing meals by just one cent, they can feed an additional 300,000 children per year. Focusing on that number pays off. Recently, the organization started buying potatoes when prices are low and storing them, reducing potato costs by nearly 15 percent, and gaining the ability to feed another 10,000 children.
The Self Employed Women’s Association of India (SEWA), a trade union of more than 1.5 million women workers, is another good example. When SEWA launched its own financial institution, it sourced and trained the bank’s talent from its members—women who labor in India’s informal economy.
In 2005, when the government launched an effort to address adolescent health issues, the MAMTA Health Institute for Mother and Child saw an opportunity to develop a training module to educate girls on sexually transmitted diseases, and worked with government officials to make its program an integral part of the initiative.
Almost every organization in our study published today in Impact India, a joint initiative of The Bridgespan Group, Dasra and Stanford Social Innovation Review, has made “the system” a vital ally. The challenges of collaboration, such as dealing with bureaucratic policies and stiff-arming graft, can’t be overlooked. But in their view, the government is the most powerful lever they can pull to extend their reach.
(Soumitra Pandey and Rohit Menezes are partners at The Bridgespan Group in Mumbai and co-authors of “Why Indian Nonprofits are Experts at Scaling Up,” on SSIR.org.)