India Part 1 - Greetings From Lucknow
Hi All, Well Mark and I are currently in Lucknow which is in the province of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India. We arrived in New Delhi about 11pm last night and then flew here this morning.
After checking into our hotel we have just visited the offices of Opportunity International's partner Margdarshak. The CEO Rahul gave us a briefing on their operations and what they are up to. Uttar Pradesh is one of the poorest areas in India. Approximately 16% of India's population of over 1 billion people live in the province. 45% of its residents live below the poverty line of 32 Rupees per day (approx 75c) and it houses approximately 8% of the entire poor population of the world. What Rahul and his team are doing is quite incredible. In the last 3 years they have built their client list from about 5000 to over 23000. They aren't just providing micro-finance but have built a framework focussed on "livelihoods" and how they can add value to eradicate poverty.
Essentially, the micro-finance that they provide is just the first step. Uttar Pradesh is a predominantly agricultural region where the farmers can only generate income for 4-5 months of the year. If the crops fail in a given year then they generate no income. Rahul and his team are focussing on programmes that build their skills to provide alternative means of generating income. For example they have purchased about 100 bee-hives and they provide these to the farmers, buy the honey at a pre-determined price and then take it to market. They are not just providing finance, but partnering with the local people. Additionally, they are working to improve market access where they can help some of the producers get right to the end users so that they can take away some of the layers in the supply chain and generate additional income. We toured the offices of Margdarshak and it was clear that there was a group of committed people. A number of the people working in the office were the children of early clients of the company whose parents have escaped poverty and been able to educate their children. A number of these children now work to help spread the micro finance story and help other businesses in the region.
It has been very impressive. Tomorrow we are going to visit some of these clients directly and so we look forward to bringing you some updates on that then.
Take Care Chris & Mark. p.s Stephen Robertson from Opportunity International is our Team Leader for this trip and is writing a blog on it. You can check it out by going to http://opportunityinternational.posterous.com/
You can see the second article in our blog series
here:
