Keep Smiling...............: Sustainable Investments

The week has been a lot of conferences and workshops.

Last week was the Sankalp Global Summit 2015, at Delhi.A huge event that brought together over a thousand people, on a meet called 'Fueling the Innovation Economy'.

Last two days was our own Sustainable Investment Workshop at Bangalore. Selco brought together Investors, Practitioners and some Government Banking Sector for discussions on Sustainable Investments. A small cohesive group of around forty passionate and committed individuals from varying walks of life, come together with a common social objective. Inspite of some widely differing opinions on the how of things, the positive energy in the room was palpable and I felt a deep sense of glad to belong.

Just so I don't get carried away into the abstract, as I'm so wont to do, I'll cover some disconnected specifics. One statement from Richenda, executive director United Nations Foundation says a lot 'Í wish I could take SELCO and put it in Africa'. And now, that’s on the agenda too.

The week gave me my first macro level peeps into the world of social enterprise and social objectives, and it was extremely informative and enlightening, so to say.

It’s almost like this huge gap of poverty alleviation that’s actually a government mandate, pretty much unfulfilled, the bane of the gap between policy and implementation; while the percentage of the poor has gone down over the years, in actual numbers its higher. 400 million with no access to electricity is one such statistic. We are so protected that we don't even see it today. What we see may at best be the working class, the maids, the drivers. That is not even classified as poor anymore. Beyond that is the poor, the very poor and the abject poor. This is a large large segment being addressed by private partnerships and enterprise, to the extent possible.

It’s such a large landscape that I don’t know where to begin.

It’s like what Harish loves to say ‘Google created the best possible search engine, because the internet existed. We need to create not just the product but the entire internet.’ Meaning to say, the eco system for social enterprise is so not conducive, that to achieve what we want to, we need to work not just on our own product but on the entire eco system, be it policy, technology, human resources, end user finance, enterprise finance, all of it, and that's what makes it so much more challenging.

Selco has been around twenty years, and while it has seen organic growth, maybe even robust growth, it’s been far from steady growth. It’s been lots of trials and errors, and learnings and it’s through all of this that it has developed a holistic approach to addressing the issue, and that’s what we now hope to scale, scale not just at the organic level by extrapolating growth, but by replicating the story and looking for exponential growth.

And this is why we're looking to create more and more such enterprises to cover the rest of the country. We have an Incubation center which enables this process, and we had three of our incubatees come and tell us their stories, absolutely fascinating stories.

I'll do each story separately, but to close down a brilliant two days were the children from the Kalkeri Sangeet Vidyalaya, who brought in some really amazing music. Like what our mc said, there were no words to describe the experience of hearing these children from the really underserved communities, from the remote hills of north karnataka render chaste hindustani classical music. Here are a couple of pictures and short video clips just to give you a flavour of what they did.

What opportunity can do !