BoP Interview at WDI
About a year ago Ted London, Director of the Base of the Pyramid research initiative at the William Davidson Institute (WDI), kindly asked me to come out to the University of Michigan Business School to do a guest lecture in his MBA class Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid. Ted was previously a professor and Director of the BoP Learning Lab at UNC while I was a student there and we had worked together on project to explore innovative business models for renewable energy technologies in the BoP. During my visit to Michigan - which also included a guest lecture for Mike Gordon’s Social Enterprise: Innovation in the Information Society course - Ted also interviewed me about my experiences working in the BoP and with the BoP Protocol in Kenya.
The interview was part of WDI’s Global Impact Speaker series, which includes interviews with Stuart Hart of Cornell University, Jesse Moore of CARE, Dr. Jordan Kassalow of the Scojo Foundation, Somshankar Das of e4e, and a number of others. I came across the video for the interview recently and you can see the video via the link below.
I also had lunch with a number of students to discuss career options in the BoP and was thrilled to meet up with one of the students several months later in India, where she was working on a BoP initiative of her own!
WDI Links:
- Donohue Delivers BoP Career Advice (Article)
- Ted London (Director of Base of the Pyramid at WDI) talks to Patrick Donohue of BRINQ (Video)
(
Windows Media format)
The interview is a little under an hour.
-Patrick
By Patrick Donohue, August 2005
“In Nairobi, stay away from the shanty towns, especially at night.”
The door closes, Kibera opens, and East Africa’s largest shantytown swallows us into the night. It’s dark near Edwin’s place, a sight sapping blackness that is darker with the knowledge of the trenches and trips that lie ahead, a misstep can send you rolling down make shift steps to soak in the flowing runoff, Kibera’s sewage system. Edwin can see well enough in the dark and navigates the pitfalls without hesitation; I make a joke about mzungu eyes and then switch on my torch. I notice as we walk that the only other people using torches are the mzee, the old men or women. We walk through small alleys and walkways, passing row after row of mud houses with radios blaring, stray light seeping through cracks around the doors and below the roofs. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m walking across somebody’s front porch but I soon realize that’s exactly what we’re doing.
The passing people are dark African shadows; it’s a surreal experience and I fancifully imagine that I can slip by without notice, achieving that anonymity I find impossible during the day. A mzungu in the dark, does he finally become a mtu, a person? To the young children I’m just a another mzungu, a white person, but the kids old enough to have seen kung-fu movies will shout out “Chinese”, “Jackie Chan”, or that distinctive “hi-ya” cry, matched with chopping hands and a comically fierce look. Onush, my colleague Erik’s host, later tells me that the children are probably afraid of me, fearing that I’ll open up some karate on them if they’re not careful. My fleeting hopes that my sun-browning skin will help me escape notice are dashed when I learn that some older Kenyans think I might be Indian, the much maligned minority of Kenya, disliked because they’re said to run all the businesses and pay Kenyans little. It’s too hard to stop and explain that I represent the Vietnamese-Irish people, a difficult mixture to appreciate in a land where your tribe is supposed to explain so much about you. For all that I wear my winter hat - not so much for the cool night, which for the bundled-up Kenyans is a biting cold - no, I wear my winter hat to hide my hair, too long to ever be mistaken as Kenyan. I think it might be working, the children aren’t shouting their mzungu bird call, their sing-song “how are you?”, and there are no sudden looks; but perhaps the night just offers a different pace and people keep their notice to themselves. Edwin jokes that people are probably too surprised to say anything. What would a mzungu be doing in Kibera after dark?
This weekend I’m heading out to join another 
Another story about one of the BoP Protocol Pilot’s most important partners: 
After five months of intense work in communities in Kenya and Brazil we’ve got a long backlog of stories to share. Now that we’ve got a short breather we thought we’d post a few. This one from Kenya came up recently when we were asked via our colleague & mentor 
To cap off our visit, Ed and a colleague took us on a ride around Lake Victoria, where we became the envy of all the local bicycle taxi and cargo operators. “You want to be popular?” Ed said, “just ride one of these bikes around Kisumu and you’re sure to meet lots of new friends.” Common questions we were asked on our ride were “How soon can I get one?” Soon, the program is currently in a test market phase to produce and sell 50-100 bike kits. “How much will it cost?” Not sure, perhaps 3000-4000 Ksh ($40 - $50 US). “How many people can it carry?” Three on a downhill or a straightaway, and uphill depends on the size of your calves, though three people would be tough and heavy cargo like us wazungu, Westerners, could be even tougher.
For those of you looking for more tales from Patrick’s time working on the 
“I’d love to hear your impressions,” Theresa said to me as we boarded the bus outside of Rocinha, “about what you think of the communities here vs. where you lived in Kenya.” Here was Rio de Janiero, Brazil and in Kenya was Kibera, a million-person shantytown in Nairobi, where I had just spent the 
Bezerra quickly started us on a walking tour of the neighborhood and I began making comparisons between Asa Branca and Kibera. My first impression was that most Kiberans would be thrilled to live in a place like Asa Branca. Sure, like Kibera there were some scrap metal shacks for homes and a river with overflowing garbage behind the community, however mixed in amongst it all were charming, locally built houses, one and two story structures of cement or wood with red clay tiled roofs and green gardens in front. Even the shacks had potted plants hanging on their outer walls, the level of care bearing no relation to the quality of the building material. And, trash-laden river aside, the community was clean and the streets were smooth, there were no open sewage trenches and we’d even see the occasional parked car and speed bumps. This is what Kibera could be like if allowed to develop, I thought.
It wasn’t so bad at first, when Theresa began speaking I was able to follow along, she had prepped me before hand (in English) about the proposal she would present, about CatComm’s new strategy for partners and growth. Muito tranquilo. However once people started responding, once bodies leaned forward and hands started churning, my bearings slipped out from under me and the sea became choppy. At times I would grasp the topic of the conversation and understand its flow, but then just as suddenly a new wave of words, sounds, and Brazilian passion would descend upon me, and my head would be plunged into the deep, tumbling out of control and comprehension lost, finally clawing my way to the surface only to think “Meu Deus, como a gente veio pra cá” “How the heck did we end up here?”
There’s nothing like a room full of blank stares to tell you that you have just used the wrong word, nobody there knows what you’re talking about and you need to adapt, but what do you do when that word is at the heart of what you do? When that glazed-eye-inducing offender is printed all over your business cards?
Erik, Kabi, Edwin and I are in a meeting hall in Kibera, a shanty town in Nairobi, Kenya which, with an estimated one million people, is one of Africa’s, if not the world’s, largest slums. We’re running the second of four community engagement workshops in which we are preparing local community groups, entrepreneurs and social enterprises, on how to best approach and prepare for a partnership with multinational companies; in this case, how to partner with our main corporate sponsor, SC Johnson. This is what we do, we bring people from diverse backgrounds and with diverse resources together, “a creative collision of world views”, to create new market opportunities for multinationals and locally grown businesses for poor communities via a process of “mutual value creation”. Buzz phrase laden work, yes, but it’s actually all been going quite well so far, except that now our community partners are stuck on our name. Behind us, on a brown flip chart taped to the wall, is drawn a large three sided figure, a triangle really, with the words 
“Yes!” we say with a smile, thankful for a local translation, “The pyramid is like a samosa! The rich people are up top, that’s where most companies traditionally focus, but down below here in the base are some 4 billion people, a whole world that’s been…”
There’s another hand up in the air now. “Tafadhali”, we prompt, “please.”
“Why should people at the top of the samosa get everything,” one man asks, “when all the meat is at the bottom?” There are a few murmurs of agreement from the crowd, so the man continues, “And why a samosa? A chapati would be better, that way everyone is the same!” This time there are cheers. A chapati is a flat round fried bread, kind of like an Indian version of a Mexican tortilla, and like samosas, chapatis can be found fresh and hot all throughout Kibera. I love chapati, but I’m too much of a free market fan to buy into the idea of it as a symbol of world commerce, nor do I think it’s an accurate representation of how the world really is.
Another man speaks up, “Can’t we just turn the samosa upside down?”
“Upside down?”
“Yes,” he explains, “turn it upside down, then all the rich people are on the bottom and we can force them up to the top!”
“I’ve been wondering,” Salim Mohamed asks me one day, “What do you think of the phrase, Base of the Pyramid?” The question is asked in a way that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the chosen descriptor for our work. Salim is the program manager for 
“My God,” we hear so often, “how can these people get by on less than a dollar a day?” It’s a fair question, an important one even, but it needs to be asked in a way where you expect, and are willing to accept, an answer, i.e. this is how they do it. It’s too quick to say that a dollar a day is too little, and even quicker to just say that the answer is more dollars sent from afar, or even more dollars generated locally. Look at 
Raising income is critical in the Base of the Pyramid, but here in Kenya we’re discovering that income alone won’t create the change we seek: to improve the quality of people’s lives and to create sustainable markets for economic growth. There are other issues that need to be wrestled with, intimately, closely, patiently, while we also seek to raise incomes. Base of the Pyramid may be an income based classification, it may be how we describe what we do, but it need not be our sole focus, we don’t need to be defined by what we call our work, because rich or poor, who really wants to be defined just by how much money you make? Besides, if we define our pyramid differently, say on strength of community, on how many of your neighbors you know, or on the size of children’s smiles, who might be in the Base of the Samosa then?
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