How Much Can We Give...?

Green's strategy is to manufacture high quality, programmable digital hearing aids for $40 and sell them with a multi-tiered pricing model similar to Aravind's for up to $200, about $1300 less than the current market rate. He is putting this strategy to work by:

       Hiring the former head of R&D at the largest hearing aid company-getting the instant benefit of long-term experience
       Finding high quality generic hearing aid chips on the market and adapting them for particular hearing aid designs
       Manufacturing at Aurolab in India, where overhead and labor costs are low
       Negotiating discounts with component manufacturers equivalent to those normally offered on purchases of 500,000 units or more

In effect, Green is developing a business model for ethical globalization. It offers affordable pricing, local ownership of distribution and sales, and the training required to establish a multi-tiered pricing scheme, test patients for hearing loss, and provide treatment, fitting, installation, and maintenance of hearing aids. It is a model that not only offers hearing to the world but also builds the capacity of many locales for developing sustaining enterprises. There is, after all, no end to what the world needs.

Creating a Local Energy Industry
Anil Chitrakar has made an art of creating opportunities out of pressing social needs. A tireless social entrepreneur, he is helping to develop enterprises in his native Nepal that build the nation's capacity for sustainable, self-sufficient economic growth.

In the 1990s, for example, Chitrakar and four other Nepalis led an effort to redirect into local initiatives a $1 billion World Bank loan targeted for a huge dam on the Arun Koshi River. For seven years they asked the World Bank a fundamental, often overlooked question: Is borrowing $1 billion and then paying it to contractors from the developed world to build a dam that generates only 200 MW of energy really meeting Nepal's needs?

The answer, made obvious by Chitrakar and his colleagues, was a resounding no. Instead of building the dam, the World Bank loaned the money to Nepal to support an alternate approach that would build the country's industrial capacity and a more locally based energy infrastructure.

Chitrakar's approach was built on three basic principles:

  Invest in local capacity. Hiring western firms to build a huge dam would take the place of smaller hydroelectric projects that Nepalese firms could build, bypassing and ultimately destroying Nepal's existing industrial capacity.

  Maximize linkages to the local economy. Making borrowed funds work both backward and forward, the influx of capital builds   existing local capacity to generate power and creates new capacity for economic growth. Small local firms build capacity as they grow.

  Use natural resources wisely. In a mountainous country with yearlong runoff, energy needs can be effectively met with smaller, less  invasive hydroelectric systems.

Following these principles, local and government-owned firms, along with international companies, have built small and medium sized projects throughout the country, which created twice the energy output of the originally planned dam for half the cost in half the time. The re-directed loan was also used to establish a power development fund for local companies. As Chitrakar has said, the world needs a bank, but we must be able to direct the bank's capital to projects that truly meet a nation's needs.

Doing What Only You Can Do
Dr. V, David Green, and Anil Chitrakar are making a difference because they are each doing what only they can do. On a visit to California to meet with other social entrepreneurs, Dr. V said he was not going to apply his business model to distributing hearing aids because that's not what he does-restoring sight is what he does. David Green, on the other hand, does hearing aids and he's decided to take up the challenge of providing hearing to the world. Anil Chitrakar, meanwhile, is showing nations rich and poor how to build sustainable enterprises-that's his calling and his unique gift to the world.

Jerry Garcia, who has perhaps not been given the credit he deserves for giving sharp business advice, captured this confluence of calling, vision and leadership quite well when he reportedly said, "You don't have to be the best of the best. Just do what only you can do."

What do you do? There are literally millions of answers to that question. No single vision or leader can possibly build a truly sustaining world. It is going to take all of us.

It will take thousands of affordable hospitals, an idea taken up by Lions Aravind Institute of Community Ophthalmology, which is offering the Aravind model to other eyecare organizations throughout the world.

It will take institutions like the Grameen Bank, which extends loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional credit-$1 billion lent to 2.4 million borrowers, 95 percent of whom are women-and thereby offers an empowering catalyst for community economic development.

It will take technological ventures like the Benetech Initiative, which uses entrepreneurship to harness the power of technology to meet social needs, from removing land mines to safely storing human rights data to providing an Internet library for the blind.

It will take groups like Associacion ANAI, an NGO helping Costa Ricans integrate people-centered conservation and development initiatives that strengthen local communities capacity to be economically self-reliant while preserving the biological wealth of their remarkable rain forests.

Ultimately, that is what we are all working for: commercial activity that is economically profitable, ecologically regenerative and socially empowering-a regenerative economy whose benefits are shared by all. And when we ask

"What do I do?"

"How can my work make a better world?"

"How much can I give for all I get?"

we can begin to become powerful catalysts for change and take the first small steps toward creating a world of fairness, hope and sustaining abundance.

++++