John Elkington
Standing the Poor World on its Head
Innovations Case Discussion:
Barefoot College of Tilonia
When someone like Bunker Roy has helped pioneer and define a global movement,
inspiring successive generations of wildly innovative social entrepreneurs, it is
tempting to heap further laurels upon his head. Others, less generous in spirit,
might be tempted to seek out his Achilles Heel. But with the world headed towards
a population of nine billion-plus sometime mid-century, perhaps there is a higher
Aufgabe. Perhaps we should try to dig a little deeper into the question: For all its won-
ders, does Barefoot College provide a model that is sustainable, replicable and scal-
able?
Roy and his co-author Jesse Hartigan have done us all a great service with their
presentation of the Barefoot approach, but our aim in what follows is to reframe
the achievements of what the more brand-savvy might call “The Barefoot Way.”1
Für, much as we may love the Barefoot Way and community, the reptilian part of
the brain keeps nagging away, asking whether there is not something about all of
this that is more like a set of locally reported modern miracles, together with an
accompanying spray of parables, rather than a global revolution in the making.
And why is this important? Well, given the sheer scale and intransigence of
global poverty, it seems inevitable that there will be a growing number of calls to
turn the current development system on its head, to let the poor find their own
Weg. Handing over responsibility for the future to the poor would provide a very
useful alibi for some to do nothing—or, worse, to continue with forms of business-
as-usual that undermine the world of the grindingly poor. In this scenario, Die
Barefoot parables could be used to reinforce strategies that were about as remote
from the Barefoot principles as could be imagined—rather like what happened
with the crusading Christian Church in the Middle Ages.
Not that we are looking for revolution. History shows that such social convul-
sions rarely produce the sort of sustained changes their instigators hoped they
würde. In der Tat, many of these people end up under the guillotine or with their
backs to pock-marked walls. Stattdessen, accelerated evolution should be our goal.
And here is a public health warning: while we aim to be analytical about the
processes of—and trends in—social entrepreneurship, we often find ourselves
John Elkington is a founding partner of Volans Ventures (http://www.volans.com), A
cofounder and non-executive director of SustainAbility, and co-author with Pamela
Hartigan of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create
Markets That Change the World (Harvard Business Press, 2008).
© 2008 John Elkington
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Standing the Poor World on its Head
completely wrapped up in the alternative realities that the world’s top social and
environmental entrepreneurs so readily conjure.
As consummate marketers, these people typically confront us with stark con-
Bünde. They do it willfully, to catch our attention—and very often it works. Also, Die
Roy/Hartigan case argues, the work of big donors and Western-conditioned
experts has been patronizing, top down, insensitive and expensive, disempowering
the marginalized, the exploited, and the very poor. All true, up to a point, obwohl
very often the failures of devel-
opment have had at least as
much to do with the endemic
corruption and inefficiency that
is the hallmark of many less
developed nations and regions.
While we aim to be analytical
about the processes of—and
trends in—social
entrepreneurship, we often
find ourselves completely
wrapped up in the alternative
realities that the world’s top
social and environmental
entrepreneurs so readily
conjure.
At first glance, at least as
viewed through the Bunker Roy
kaleidoscope, the world seems to
be a place of intense whites and
profound blacks. Big (as in Big
Business or Big Government) Ist
bad, small—in all its infinite
variety—is
Fritz
Schumacher lives. And, certainly,
there are deep, uncomfortable
truths here. But the world is a
very much more complex place
than most propagandists would
have us believe. Western aid and
development efforts may have been deeply flawed, but they are neither uniformly
bad nor beyond remedy, given sufficient political will on the part of both donor
and beneficiary countries. Think of the story of Robert McNamara, then of the
World Bank, coming and sleeping on the floors of Tilonia in his quest for under-
Stehen. These are not Nazis; they are often intelligent, committed, worried peo-
ple desperately trying to work out how to drive political, wirtschaftlich, and social
ändern.
beautiful.
Gleichermaßen, big corporations may operate from sets of values that can seem com-
pletely alien to ordinary people, but many have played a central role in the devel-
opment of what are now better-organized, better-governed parts of the world.
Interessant, when we did our first survey of social entrepreneurs as part of our
three-year research program funded by the Skoll Foundation (refer to the Reasons
to be Hopeful text box), we found that the world’s leading social and environmen-
tal entrepreneurs are hugely interested in finding ways to work with mainstream
Firmen. Some, like Muhammad Yunus of Grameen, are already developing fas-
cinating partnerships with companies like Danone, but most are not—and are
only too ready to declare that they don’t yet know how.
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John Elkington
Reasons to be Hopeful
The early findings of SustainAbility’s Skoll Foundation funded work on social
entrepreneurship are encouraging, to a degree. Erste, it is clear that there has
been an extraordinary proliferation—and growth—of networks devoted to the
replication and scaling of entrepreneurial models, among them: Acumen,
Ashoka, Echoing Green, Endeavor, The Schwab Foundation for Social
Entrepreneurship, and The Skoll Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.
When we did our first survey as part of this program of work, we quizzed
über 100 leading social and environmental entrepreneurs around the world. Der
key findings of the resulting report, “Growing Opportunity”, included the fact
that these entrepreneurs—unlike many NGOs—have an overwhelming appetite
to work with mainstream business. The main problem is that they say they do
not know how to select appropriate partners, nor do they know how to negoti-
ate appropriate relationships. But such challenges are fairly readily addressed.
In our second survey, we set out to address a problem that surfaced when we
circulated SustainAbility’s corporate clients to say that we were extending our
work into the field of social entrepreneurship. A handful—but we pay attention
to weak signals—said, in so many words, that they were sorry to be losing us as
we headed off into the outer darkness. For them, it seemed, working with NGOs
was now part of business-as-semi-usual (fitting neatly into the corporate citi-
zenship and risk management boxes), whereas working with entrepreneurs
exploring new markets and developing new business models somehow didn’t fit.
This blind spot was our target in our second survey, which produced a final
Letzten Endes, whatever individual social entrepreneurs may insist to their donors
or other stakeholders, there is no single entrepreneurial solution to the world’s
social and environmental challenges. Stattdessen, we urgently need much more entre-
preneurial thinking and approaches right across the spectrum of human activity,
from bottom to top, small to big, citizen sector to public and private sectors. Wir
are tempted to quote Mao Tse-Tung’s line that it’s time to let a thousand flowers
bloom. But while Mao would then hack down the tallest blooms, the citizen, Kneipe-
lic and private sectors alike all need to develop the skills of entrepreneurial incu-
bation, replication, and scaling.
Perhaps Barefoot College’s biggest contribution to the global debate will be in
the form of a demonstration project. Every so often, someone does something
extraordinary, like the people who achieved heavier-than-air flight, broke the four-
minute-mile barrier or the sound barrier, sailed solo around the world, or landed
on the moon—and suddenly the impossible seems entirely possible to the wider
Welt. There is in the Barefoot Way something deeply significant for the twenty-
erstes Jahrhundert, something that could be like a crucial new gene in a population under
stress, something that could help some parts of our collective future to take on
rather unexpected forms. A provocative conversation with Paul Hawken as we
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Standing the Poor World on its Head
report entitled The Social Intrapreneur. If Growing Opportunity focused on the
world of social entrepreneurs like Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank or
Bunker Roy of Barefoot College, this latest report focuses on what we might call
the “Yunus Inside” phenomenon of social and environmental entrepreneurs (oder
intrapreneurs) working inside mainstream companies. The degree to which the
social intrapreneurs surveyed welcomed the process was quite extraordinary:
viele, it turned out, feel quite isolated in terms of the challenges they face inside
their companies or organizations.
The best—or most effective—of these people are adept at fighting and sur-
viving cynicism, caution and the status quo inside their host organizations. Sie
have found that they cannot turn their backs on the savage global inequities and
environmental degradation that characterize the modern world. They believe in
market solutions and are creating new business models. They are compelling
their organizations to look outside their comfort zones—to see both the strate-
gic risks and profound opportunities that exist beyond current business unit
time horizons. They are not satisfied with suboptimal equilibriums, where mar-
kets work well for some, but not at all for others. They flourish where they are
provided with—or can assemble—an effective base from which to leverage
innovative societal solutions.
And many of them are quick to note that their personal vision and work
owes much to the extraordinary achievements of people like Bunker Roy,
Muhammad Yunus, and the other leading edge pioneers we profile in The Power
of Unreasonable People.
developed this commentary helped spur a line of thought in this direction, eins
which we will return to towards the end of the piece.
LEVERAGED NONPROFIT
So much for the teaser. More fundamentally, what sort of organizational life-form
are we talking about here? And where do Bunker Roy and Barefoot College fit into
the entrepreneurial spectrum? In our ongoing work on social entrepreneurship, Wir
have focused on three main forms of social enterprise: Leveraged Nonprofit
Ventures (Modell 1), Hybrid Nonprofit Ventures (Modell 2), and Social Business
Ventures (Modell 3)2.
With Model 1 enterprises, a public good is delivered to the most economically
vulnerable, who do not have access to, or are unable to afford, the services ren-
dered; there tends to be a high degree of dependence on various forms of philan-
thropy; there is often a central goal of enabling direct beneficiaries to assume own-
ership of the initiative; and frequently the founding entrepreneur morphs into a
figurehead, in some cases for the wider movement, as the processes of succession
work through.
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John Elkington
Modell 2 enterprises also serve the under- or un-served, but the notion of mak-
ing (and reinvesting) a profit is not totally out of the question. The enterprise is
able to recover a portion of its costs through the sale of goods and services, im
process often identifying (and in some cases helping to develop) new markets. Der
entrepreneurs here mobilize funds from public, private and/or philanthropic
organizations in the form of grants, loans, oder, in rarer cases, quasi-equity invest-
gen.
As mainstream investors and businesses enter the picture, even when they are
not seeking mainstream financial returns, they tend to push hybrid nonprofit ven-
tures to become Model 3 social business ventures, to ensure access to new sources
of funding, particularly capital markets. Here the entrepreneur sets up the venture
as a business with the specific mission to drive transformational social and/or
environmental change. He or she
seeks out investors interested in com-
bining financial and social returns.
The enterprise’s financing—and scal-
ing—opportunities can be significant-
ly greater because social business can
more easily take on debt or equity.
We urgently need much
more entrepreneurial
thinking and approaches
right across the spectrum
of human activity, aus
bottom to top, small to
big, citizen sector to public
and private sectors.
All three pursue social or environ-
mental ends that markets have largely
or totally failed to address, and they
use different means to do so. In the
Verfahren, they may adopt unique lead-
ership, management, and fund-raising
styles, each with its own implications
and lessons for people working in
mainstream organisations in the citi-
zen, öffentlich, and private sectors.
Using this taxonomy, Barefoot College is a Model 1 venture. Ask most Model
1 entrepreneurs why they are now working on a for-profit basis, and they will look
at you as if you are from another planet—which you just as well could be. Diese
people aim to meet needs that are ignored by current market mechanisms and
businesses. Maybe this blinds them to the occasional opportunity to operate on a
for-profit basis, but generally they operate where the market air is too thin for
mainstream businesses to even think of venturing.
The following characteristics tend to be typical of Model 1 enterprises:
• A public good is being delivered to the most economically vulnerable, who do
not have access to, or are unable to afford, the service rendered.
• Both the entrepreneur and the organisation are change catalysts, with a central
goal of enabling direct beneficiaries to assume ownership of the initiative,
enhancing its long-term sustainability.
• Multiple external partners are actively involved in supporting (or are being
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Standing the Poor World on its Head
recruited to support) the venture financially, politically, and in kind.
• The founding entrepreneur morphs into a figurehead, in some cases for a
wider movement, as others assume responsibilities and leadership.
You could argue that entrepreneurs applying leveraged non-profit approaches
are modern-day alchemists who, with minimal financing, leverage the power of
communities to transform an otherwise grim daily existence. While they learn a lot
from failures, as Roy and Hartigan note, the best of them are proving more suc-
cessful than most alchemists, whose fumbling experiments heralded the dawn of
the industrial era. In like manner, leading social entrepreneurs signal where some
of tomorrow’s largest market opportunities will be found—and, at least in outline,
the sort of business models that will help turn those opportunities into social and
market realities.
That said, companies—and other potential mainstream partners—should not
be fooled into thinking that these entrepreneurs’ dependence on external funds
and in-kind support will make them easy partners. Quite the contrary. Many carry
an understandable rage born from years of watching their communities being
shortchanged, ignored, or destroyed by greed. Trotzdem, mainstream businesses that
create successful partnerships with these enterprises will likely find their thinking
challenged, their horizons stretched, and their own employees reinvigorated.
SEXY, BUT WILL IT SCALE?
Successful entrepreneurs—whatever their field—tend to spin a good story. Bunker
Roy is no exception. One that we have long liked relates to the home-made pup-
pets the Barefoot community has used to change the attitudes of many communi-
ties on issues such as child marriage, the rights of women, equal wages for women,
and legal literacy. Roy loses few opportunities when speaking overseas to tell audi-
ences that puppets were made from papier-mâché produced by recycling World
Bank reports. True or not, the story sticks in the audience’s memory—and with it
the fundamental principle of people taking their destinies into their own hands.
The Barefoot USP is clear. Billed as the only college in India that follows the
lifestyle and work style of Gandhi, it is also the only college built by the poor, für
the poor, and managed, controlled, and owned by the poor. All very exciting, Aber
that every lack of “competition” should give us pause—you know an organization
is truly successful when you see competitors trying to emulate it. Given the role of
competition in opening out markets, Barefoot College’s very uniqueness signals
deep-seated structural barriers in the “market.”
Wieder, while it is certainly fair to claim that Barefoot College is “a microcosm
of a more just and creative world,” its survival and success has been very much due
to the vision, Energie, and stamina of one man, Bunker Roy. Without his enormous
capacity to raise external resources, it would have been virtually impossible to fund
some of Barefoot’s current projects, including the process of hosting solar-engi-
neers-in-training from other countries. This is particularly important because the
College’s efforts have catalyzed generation upon generation of trainees who return
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John Elkington
to their rural communities in developing countries with the knowledge and skills
needed to construct rainwater-harvesting tanks from local materials or to solar-
electrify their villages.
But how scalable is all of this? The case underscores the fact that, to date, 20
colleges in the Barefoot mould have been established in 13 Indian states, all adher-
ing to the same non-negotiable tenets. Later on in the story, we learn that more
als 340 ordinary village women from eight countries have trained as Barefoot
solar engineers—and that they have gone on to solar-electrify some 550 Schulen
Und 13,000 households in more than 600 villages around the world. There have
also been significant parallel achievements in the area of rainwater harvesting in
countries like Ethiopia. Wieder, the temptation is to applaud, to stamp the ground,
and call for the beatification of such extraordinary people.
But it is as if we are watching the Wright Brothers wrestling their ungainly
machines into the air at Kittyhawk, knowing that what they are doing is of myth-
ic proportions and significance, but knowing too that between those epic small
steps and the great leaps that took the aviation and aerospace industries to their
current scales lie a huge amount of history, of technological and financial evolu-
tion, and of extraordinary adventures that help the small become Big. What is
missing from the case—and we admit that this is not the authors’ purpose—is any
assessment of the shifts in thinking and behaviors in the citizen, public and private
sectors that will turn the Barefoot Way into a basic tenet of twenty-first century
Politik, business, and financing.
UNLEARNING
There is no doubt that Bunker Roy qualifies for our highest label of praise: he is a
wildly unreasonable man. The title of the book—The Power of Unreasonable
People—that summarizes our own thinking and work to date references something
that playwright George Bernard Shaw once said. “The reasonable man adapts him-
self to the world,” he noted, whereas “the unreasonable one persists in trying to
adapt the world to himself.” Therefore, Shaw concluded, “all progress depends on
the unreasonable man.”
And one of the most strikingly unreasonable features of the Barefoot Way, bei
least as articulated by Roy, is the notion of unlearning. It may sound uncomfort-
ably reminiscent of the “re-education” camps that so often followed in the wake of
twentieth century revolutions, but the notion that much of what we took for
granted—and that development professionals preached—in the last century is suf-
ficiently flawed to require intense re-examination strikes us as eminently reason-
able, indeed very much overdue. But there is a danger in all of this that acolytes end
up so celebrating the practical wisdom of the poor that we cascade all the respon-
sibility for their state—and for the arduous task of finding relevant solutions—to
those at the bottom of the pyramid of wealth and power.
It is interesting that part of the role Bunker Roy has played is almost akin to
that of Old-World prophets, channelling angels down from the heavens. So we
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Standing the Poor World on its Head
learn not only about McNamara making a flying visit, but also that Tilonia has
seen an endless flow of international dignitaries—among them Prince Charles—
who have helped put and keep Barefoot College on the political radar screen. And
then there are the throw-away lines about people like architect-designer
Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic principles inform some of the most interest-
ing Barefoot buildings. Clearly, this isn’t a black-or-white world, but a chequered
Welt, a world of intensely shaded greys, of combinations, of hybrid outcomes.
And the ability to survive and thrive in such zones of complexity, we have
found, is a key characteristic of successful social entrepreneurs. When we tried to
distill down some of the most crucial characteristics for the book, the following
leaped out at us. Among other things, these entrepreneurs:
• Try to shrug off the constraints of ideology or discipline.
• Identify and apply practical solutions to social problems, combining innovation,
resourcefulness, and opportunity.
• Focus—first and foremost—on social value creation and, in that spirit, are will-
ing to share their innovations and insights for others to replicate.
• Jump in before they are fully resourced.
• Have an unwavering belief in everyone’s innate capacity, often regardless of edu-
cation, to contribute meaningfully to economic and social development.
• Show a dogged determination to take risks that others wouldn’t dare assume.
• Balance their passion for change with a zeal to measure and monitor their
impact.
• Display a healthy impatience (e.g. they don’t do well in bureaucracies, which can
raise succession issues as their organisations grow—and almost inevitably
become more bureaucratic).
• Have a great deal to teach change-makers in other sectors.
THE TRANSPARENCY GENE
Standing back from the Barefoot case, we are left with the question of whether all
this can—and will—replicate and scale in a globally significant way. The answer
has to be, up to a point. The fact is that even a 100-fold or 1,000-fold scaling of the
current Barefoot College operations would only scratch the surface of India’s chal-
Längen, let alone those of the rest of the world. Aber, mercifully, replication and scal-
ing can happen in multiple ways.
In our first set of bulleted points above, outlining some of the characteristics
of Model 1 social entrepreneurship, we noted that often the founding entrepreneur
“morphs into a figurehead, in some cases for a wider movement.” That is precise-
ly what Bunker Roy has done—and there are ways in which this process can cat-
alyze change at very different levels. Also, for us at least, this is all a bit like gene trans-
fers. There is a set of Barefoot genes that could be adopted to good effect by a wide
range of citizen, öffentlich, and private sector organizations, if only they knew the
whys and hows.
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The “Unlearning Gene” would certainly be one of these, as long as it is accom-
panied by assorted learning genes and related promoters, but maybe the most
important element of the Barefoot Way—and one that even Bunker Roy would
probably admit Barefoot has been singularly unsuccessful in spreading to the rest
of India, at least as yet—is the “Transparency and Accountability Gene.” Given the
way in which the lack of transparency and accountability promotes and protects
corruption and inefficiency, finding mechanisms that let the sun shine in, Das
develop appropriate governance and stakeholder engagement mechanisms—built
on but expanded from the basic Barefoot approach—could rival the “Stand-the-
Poor-World-on-its-Head Gene” as the single greatest contribution that the
Barefoot community could make to the wider world.
Like the early versions of major religions, the austerity element of the Barefoot
Way may limit its spread, but just as new growth can spring through the forest
floor after a fire sweeps through, so new genes, new social and market perspectives,
and new business models can erupt into the market landscape after major discon-
tinuities. And that is where the conversation with Paul Hawken, author of many
fine books, most recently Blessed Unrest,3 comes in.
He and John Elkington were talking about the prospects for a global econom-
ic meltdown, as the sort of natural-resource and environmental limits predicted by
the Limits to Growth team in the early 1970s arrive on an accelerated time-scale,
driven by a Perfect Storm of population growth, spreading consumerist lifestyles,
and the onset of Peak Oil, Peak Water, Peak just-about-everything. Hawken coun-
tered Elkington’s pessimism about the capacity of solar and other relevant energy
and environmental technologies to deploy fast enough to meet the emerging chal-
lenges by noting what had happened in the United States when it finally swung
into World War II and ramped up its mighty engine of production. As Liberty
Ships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, tanks and Jeeps poured off the production lines, Er
recalled, much of the work was done by people who had no previous experience of
engineering or manufacturing: remember the inspirational ad campaigns around
“Rosie the Riveter”4.
Perhaps as the pressures on our economies and societies intensify, with climate
change helping turn up the heat in so many different senses, elements of the
Barefoot model could be hybridised with elements of the cleantech revolution now
sweeping the world.5 The work of Bunker Roy and his colleagues at least allows us
to live in hope.
1. Jesse Hartigan worked at the Barefoot College, Tilonia, from April to August 2007; he is the son
of Pamela Hartigan, who is both co-author of The Power of Unreasonable People with John
Elkington and also a co-founder of Volans Ventures.
2. See John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social
Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, Harvard Business Press, 2008
3. Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why
No One Saw It Coming, Viking Press, 2007; see also http://www.blessedunrest.com/
4. Sehen
5. Sehen
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