Karmic Repair in Nepal

Holy smokes I’m in Nepal. I had some funny preconceived notions on what I would see here. For example, I thought that Kathmandu would look a lot like Darjeeling (mountain town) on steroids. I write having completed one INSEAD period since my last post.
I’m in this country on a social entrepreneurship trek. You see, before the beginning of the period, we had a choice of the following courses: Building Business in China, Building Business in India, Social Entrepreneurship in Nepal, and Building Business in Brazil. The Brazil trek got canceled for insufficient enrollment, and the remaining BRIC country’s course, Drinking Vodka in Russia, was expunged for unknown reasons. These days the talk is about BRICi, where the little I is for Indonesia. I am aching to visit that little i’s Jakarta, preferably as part of a trek in the autumn P4. Drumming up interest from my fellow INSEAD students is proving tricky, many are looking for the next sandy beach to visit on weekends . . .
One nice thing about elective courses such as these treks is that students are effectively self-selecting into affinity groups. So for example, I meet the guy who has spent his career to date with the Red Cross in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Bain consultant who worked with Technoserve on cashew supply chain optimization, also in Africa.
On this trek, we visited villages where their agricultural output has increased multiple times over allowing them to transition from subsistence farming to market participation with their surpluses. I like the examples of development initiatives where the target’s earning input has increased, as opposed to just making their life a little easier under their current income regime. This usually involves facilitating markets access. In one initiative I was part of, we were enabling lighting in a productized package for low income villagers in India. Perhaps the lighting could increase their productivity, say at night, but it was really about making the customers’ lives easier without necessarily increasing their earning power. On the other hand, it gives villagers who don’t have the income potential to buy the product something to aspire to. Seeking increased utility and status is a powerful force in capitalism – recall ‘the pursuit of happiness’, a notion whose effect on the world isn’t to be underestimated.
But it’s hard to productize the act of facilitating market access. In the case of the above village where they learned how to cross high quality strains of oranges with large size strains, or teaching drip irrigation to maximize targeted water usage without wasting it on weeds, there’s not much you can monetize except for consulting time, which is a subjectively valued product even in the first world.
We also visited a group of social entrepreneurs – they were an inspiring lot with such diverse projects in operation including breweries, training initiatives,distributed biofuel power generation, and housing conversion to traditional architecture styles. We also visited an urban housing project for the homeless, a community drinking water diversion project, and an instance of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) in action for Nepali schoolchildren. Now here’s where I’m going to push the INSEAD brand. Whereas a student delegation from your typical, run-of-the-mill social entrepreneurship-oriented business school (ahem, Stanford) would show up on site, see some villages, take some photos, and ruminate on the airplane back home, we INSEAD students said, “Screw that, we’re cutting the original observation schedule short, and make a presentation to all the entrepreneurs we met and show them how to get the entrepreneurial ecosystem right-side-up again.” We created a brand and illustrated a pathway to bring up Nepal’s tourism, agricultural export, and hydropower industries, all under one licenseable brand (kind of like the ‘CE’ label for product safety) designed to inspire commitment in Nepalis and confidence in foreigners on their supermarket store shelves. Remember when you come to Nepal as well as your local organic supermarket storeshelf and see brand “Jaya” posted all over the place, you saw it here
first! Although seeded by our finance guy and our Red Cross worker, cheers to the consultants in our group for pushing the presentation structure along, you’re a tribute to your profession.
After the week-long class was over, we took a flight to the Himalayas and back - $140 for an affirmative response to the question, “Oh you were in Nepal, did you see Mt. Everest?”. Yes, I did, and here are the blurry pictures to prove it.
Alas, the summer is finally here. Many students are in internships with banks and consultancies. Following my unsuccessful “cross the t’s, dot the I’s” banking applications, valiant multi-weekend-in-the-Singapore-library effort at VC internships, and a few artistic stabs at industry, I’m once again mobile and traveling in Asia, my conscience restful in the knowledge that I pulled out all the networking stops at my disposal for an internship in the region.
So on deck we have Delhi starting tomorrow morning where I’ll catch the remainder of the Building Business in India folks, followed by Inner Mongolia in China, and then the holy grail of travel adventures, Tibet. My trusty cell phone camera is taking requests on what to point and shoot it at. Email them or send me a message via comment.