Money alone might improve extreme poverty; economic justice requires more. When Upaya looks for companies that create dignified jobs for the poor, we evaluate questions of reliability, safety, and fundamental respect in addition to the economic benefits.
Upaya CEO, Kate Cochran, joined Oikocredit CEO, Matt Eldridge and COO, Sara Shoff, to discuss how to use your values to invest in social change. Kate shared how she got into the impact investing space and what she believes is the secret to Upaya’s success since its founding 10 years ago.
The webinar premiered on Wednesday, July 28 and is available to watch on YouTube.
Seattle, May 4, 2021 — The winners of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards were announced today, honoring the businesses, projects, and concepts that are actively engaged and deeply committed to pursuing innovation when it comes to solving economic equality, health and climate crises, or social justice.
Upaya Social Ventures was selected as a finalist in the Impact Investing category for our Recycling Philanthropy initiative, centered around Upaya’s innovative Pool of Recoverable Grants. We are humbled to be recognized for this project alongside so many inspiring and impactful organizations.
We developed our Pool of Recoverable Grants to activate and deploy philanthropic dollars into businesses with the greatest impact potential. While recoverable grants aren’t new, pooling them is. Pooling the grants together enables Upaya to fund a diverse portfolio of investments, increasing the likelihood of a positive return. Structuring the grants as recoverable enables philanthropists to deploy their funds with the potential to recover and redeploy them for multiplied impact if the investments are successful.
Upaya’s first $1 million Pool of Recoverable Grants was raised in 2019. So far, 12 investments have been successfully deployed from the pool into early-stage companies in India to create jobs for people living in extreme poverty.
World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company’s major annual awards programs and is focused on social good, seeking to elevate finished products and brave concepts that make the world better. A panel of judges from across sectors choose winners, finalists, and honorable mentions based on feasibility and the potential for impact. With the goals of awarding ingenuity and fostering innovation, Fast Company draws attention to ideas with great potential and helps them expand their reach to inspire more people to start working on solving the problems that affect us all.
Upaya Social Ventures is fighting extreme poverty through dignified jobs. Founded in 2011, Upaya provides investment and consulting support to early-stage businesses aimed at creating jobs for the poorest of the poor. Upaya’s continually growing portfolio of impact investments has created over 15,000 lasting, dignified jobs. Endorsed by ImpactMatters as a high-impact, cost-effective nonprofit, Upaya’s teams in Seattle and Bangalore are committed to a goal of helping entrepreneurs create jobs for 50,000 people in India by 2023. Please visit www.upayasv.org for more information.
Devin Thorpe of Forbes asked our CEO, Kate Cochran, how Upaya helps people too poor for microloans. The answer? Stable, dignified jobs. Read the full article here!
Upaya has partnered with Villgro as an Investment Partner for Villgro’s iPitch 2019 program. iPitch is a discovery program aimed an identifying the most impactful social ventures in India.
Upaya’s Sachi Shenoy and Kate Cochran discuss a new take traditional philanthropy in a piece written for givingcompass.org.
Global Washington's March newsletter featured Kate Cochran, CEO of Upaya Social Ventures, as this month's changemaker. The article shares Kate's journey into international development, and how she ultimately became the CEO of Upaya.
Mansi Agarwal, Founder & CEO of Upaya's newest investment, UpSkill, was recently interviewed by Global Washington Executive Director, Kristen Dailey, in a series focused on employment and skills training in the developing world. Watch the full interview from Global Washington to learn more about how UpSkill is creating dignified jobs for India's disadvantaged youth.
As part of its coverage of the Deshpande Foundation's Development Dialogue 2015 in Hubli, thealternative.in sat down with Upaya's Director, Business Development Sreejith Nedumpully to talk about his previous work with Rope International, what initially drew him to Upaya, and where he sees the future of livelihood development in India.
The interview has been reprinted below with the permission of thealternative.in, while the original article can be found here.
Sreejith Nedumpully
In his role as Director (Business Development) at Upaya Social Ventures, Sreejith Nedumpully is enjoying the opportunity to realise his long time passion—building regional eco-systems of small enterprises with big impacts. As the co-founder and former Managing Director of Rope International, a manufacturer and supplier of handmade and handloom woven natural products, Sreejith has had over two decades of expertise in the domain of rural livelihoods and the challenges of scaling small businesses.
At the 8th annual Development Dialogue 2015, organised by the Deshpande Foundation in Hubli, The Alternative spoke to Sreejith about his journey from working with rural artisans to funding impact creating enterprises and the role of small businesses in making big change.
You have been involved in rural livelihood generation for over a decade. What are some of the chief learnings that led you to co-found Rope International?
During my work with in microfinance with DHAN Foundation in 2002, I got first hand exposure to the enterprising nature of people in rural India and how access to finance – by generating livelihoods – is directly linked to increased rural incomes. Thus, creating opportunities for gainful employment of BOP populations, besides permitting access to finance, can also permit a regular income stream to support a better standard of living. It also became evident that raising rural incomes was key to ensuring the financial inclusion of BOP populations.
At that time, in the midst of the discussion about capturing BOP markets through appropriate technology and customised product design, I found myself siding with those who were looking at reversing this trend by facilitating rural to urban transactions. So, we started focusing on livelihood generation by tying up with companies to outsource a part of their production to rural areas by setting up manufacturing centres in villages, employing and skilling rural manpower especially women’s groups, and supplying raw material to them.
This enabled companies that wished to increase production but, due to lack of physical infrastructure from working at full capacity, were unable to employ more people on site. This outsourced manufacturing model built the capacities of rural people and absorbed them into year-round employment.
Did you see this this creating an entrepreneurial mindset among these people?
It definitely did lead to the development of leadership qualities and better negotiating skills among the women employed in these units. Microfinance activities in the village had already empowered SHG women economically to some extent, making them confident and adept at negotiating with bankers for favourable financial deals. Further, under the outsourced manufacturing model, each unit was put under the leadership of 2-3 women who were responsible for managing finances and operations and that really honed their leadership qualities. Witnessing this transformation fired my own entrepreneurial ambitions.
Rope provides global customers access to lifestyle products and home decor made by rural workers and artisans in India using natural fibres. Pic Courtesy – design21sdn.com
Was this then the beginning of Rope’s journey?
Yes, my initial idea was an extension of the outsourced manufacturing model – outsourcing both production and services to rural areas. With my idea incubated by IIT Madras, I was able to work on the upcoming rural BPO model while simultaneously building my own business plan for the rural manufacturing model.
In 2008, with seed funding from the IIT Madras incubator, we were able to launch Rope (now Rope International) with the aim of creating employment opportunities for rural artisans, many of whom were still employing age-old manufacturing techniques to create produce traditional designs. Many artisans had been left unemployed when demand for their crafts gradually disappeared.
We began Rope using a key account model – partnering with large brands like IKEA and Walmart with a large and steady demand for products with certain design specifications. By establishing rural manufacturing centres that met the supply requirements of these large clients, we were able to leverage the natural skill and traditional craft knowledge of the rural artisans, upskilling them in the process by introducing them to contemporary design ideas. The large volumes (sometimes 10 lakh pieces of a particular product) required by these brands helped us move beyond the level of handicrafts to a handmade production factory, with production flows, quality control mechanisms etc. all established within the village.
The work of Rope, initially centred around weaver clusters in Madurai began to expand to other districts Tamil Nadu, where we trained and employed a few hundred people. As we got buyers from India and overseas, the quantum of production too began to grow. That’s how Rope began to be successful.
What were some key lessons about scale that you learnt through Rope?
With Rope, the idea was to create rural employment opportunities at scale, providing alternative livelihoods to people formerly employed, often as bonded labour in the textile mills and firecracker product units in Tamil Nadu. Our model involved setting up a unit within the village which employs about 50-100 women and replicate those units in neighboring villages. So in two years, we had six such units, each directly employing 60-70 women.
Besides this, each unit also indirectly employed about 30-40 women from the village who would take work home, supply at their own convenience rather than contributing to core production. By 2010, we had established 6 such clusters of units. Besides production units, there was a central hubs that procured and supplied raw material as well as collected ready products from the units, they were places where quality care, packaging, and despatch took place. Thus, we managed to successfully create the best of village level production by shift a large part of the value chain to the rural areas.
Rope is now continuing to produce quality products in large volumes, creating rural livelihood opportunities, generating profit, and maintaining stable business with our key account customers.
Tamul Plates, an Assam based manufacturer of disposable palm leaf tableware is among Upaya’s portfolio companies. Pic Courtesy – dealcurry.com
In 2013, you shifted gears, moving to Upaya Social Ventures. What motivated this decision?
By 2013, Rope had achieved a degree of stability and production was going steady without the need for new marketing. I began getting restless, looking to create newer, more exciting growth models that weren’t dependent on scaling through the establishment and replication of manufacturing units. My own experience showed that Indian government laws were prohibitive, making it especially difficult to access capital, thereby limiting the scale that a manufacturing enterprise can achieve, especially in the case of handmade products.
I have always been interested in working with rural entrepreneurs, helping them develop their business ideas, shape their models, and scale. Upaya gave me the opportunity I was looking for.
Can you tell us about Upaya’s work with early stage rural entrepreneurs and the gap that it is trying to fill?
India is capital-starved country with a big gap in accessing early stage funding, even in the impact investing space, where investors look for proven, profitable business models,, and look to minimise risk with smaller investment sizes. The focus usually, in the investment space, is more on profit and less on impact.
Upaya Social Ventures’ LiftUp Project bridges this gap by providing early stage, for-profit entrepreneurs with seed financing and business development support to help them launch and scale their business. As the first institutional investor, Upaya puts in an equity investment of Rs. 20-30 lakhs in each of these enterprises with proven business models and a revenue of about Rs. 10-20 lakhs. Investments are structured over a 3-8 year timeline, during which an enterprise can scale, attract follow-up capital and become profitable. We handhold entrepreneurs for a 24-36 month period, providing them with technical assistance, financial management, and developing effective market strategies.
We also provide advisory support and help them understand their beneficiaries better with annual surveys profiling potential customers. Working with entrepreneurs to collect and analyse social data on employees to monitor their progress out of extreme poverty.
What kind of enterprises does Upaya support?
We specifically target entrepreneurs, rural and urban, with long-term vision and a strong business plan. Our main focus is on strong business models that create jobs for the poor, ensure a secure income source, and improve their quality of life. While scalability is important to us, it alone will not determine whether we invest in a company or not. We examine the geographical limitations of SMEs, market crowdedness, product relevance, and employment generation before investing in them. At present, Upaya is supporting 6 SMEs across 4 Indian states working in areas ranging from handcrafted paper to urban sanitation. The challenge is in finding and identifying good entrepreneurs in remote regions, often not exposed to networking platforms like conferences.
Upaya’s business incubation support to local providers of essential services enables large scale job creation for the urban poor. Pic Courtesy - Samagra Sanitation
How has Upaya gone about building an entrepreneurial eco-system for its portfolio companies?
Our focus right now is on supporting groups of ventures from a particular region, for example, in the north eastern states. This helps create a favourable eco-system that will attract other capital and service providers there, giving these entrepreneurs wider networks to tap into. For us, it is always more viable to enter a region where we can partner with other service providers.
MFIs, like MicroGraam, for example, which provide small entrepreneurial loans will help meet the SME’s working capital costs to fulfil existing demands, enabling them to use Upaya’s funds for further growth and expansion.
How does Upaya access finance to meet its capital requirements?
With early stage funding, we found that charity is relevant since donors are not looking for a quick exit from the venture, more patient with the capital deployed and reconciled with reaping lower returns (about 5-6%) than commercial and impact investors. So, Upaya, which is registered as a not-for-profit company in the US, raises philanthropic capital from family foundations and big donor agencies based in the US where interest in making recyclable capital deployments to sustainable and impactful social enterprises is on the rise.
What have been some of important learnings for you from this year’s Development Dialogue?
Given Upaya’s own focus on developing regional eco-systems that promote entrepreneurship, I find Deshpande Foundation’s regional hubs model very interesting. The sandbox model, by supporting budding entrepreneurs with access to capital, mentoring, etc., is creating an eco-system that can encourage the entrepreneurial spirit in the region. It is also enabling small enterprises to scale by inspiring and supporting replication in other places. It is important, while doing this, not to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach but to have business models that are customised to regional contexts, are specific to local needs, and that concentrate resources in smaller geographical areas. Thus, factoring scale into the model allows entrepreneurs to come on board irrespective of their size or reach, without scale serving as a barrier to entry.
While there are some models, like Akshaya Patra which have expanded across geographies, most enterprises are small and with application limited to the sandbox and being in the can be really beneficial to these small but profitable entrepreneurs working in niche areas who might not have pan-india scalability. The Hubli sandbox model, by providing support to these value creating enterprises has great relevance for the entrepreneurial needs of different parts of the country.
Upaya was profiled in the 12 December 2014 edition of the Seattle Times. In the article, Upaya co-founders Sachi Shenoy and Steve Schwartz talk about the organization's evolution, the challenges of the work, and how the Upaya model is changing lives.
Extreme poverty is an unavoidable reality in India. The first time I traveled in the country — as an inexperienced and idealistic 20-year-old backpacker — I was shocked by the families living on the street, the children begging for food, the old women breaking rocks on the side of the road.
I wondered what could be done to help these people — the poorest of the poor. Some travelers gave them money, others didn’t. One (loosely) quoted the Bible by saying “Sarah, the poor are always with us.”
Everyone seemed convinced that extreme poverty was an intractable problem beyond straightforward solutions.
But Sachi Shenoy disagrees. She says these “ultrapoor” just need jobs.
“In India we estimate that there are almost 400 million people living under the extreme poverty line. ... One of the root causes (is) unemployment and underemployment” explains Shenoy, executive director and a co-founder of Seattle-based nonprofit Upaya Social Ventures.
Upaya — which recently received a grant from The Seattle International Foundation, the foundation that funds this column — hopes to address that unemployment by investing in business ventures that have the potential to expand and employ those who otherwise have few, or no employment opportunities.
Shenoy says she was inspired to start Upaya while working for a microfinance organization in Delhi, India. Microfinance is a development approach that lends money to poor people, usually for small-business ventures. She says the microfinance approach tends to focus on the “midlevel poor” — people who made $2 to $4 a day — rather than the “ultrapoor” — those who make less than $1.25 a day.
“There was a cutoff for being too affluent and then there were people we would do surveys on and say, ‘These people are too poor; they’re too much of a credit risk,’ ” says Shenoy, describing the selection process for microfinance applicants. “That’s when my interest got piqued ... If we’re really trying to alleviate poverty, what do we do about the extreme poor?”
Her answer was Upaya, which focuses on entrepreneurs who have ideas with big business (and thus big employment) potential. They offer investment (not loans) with the hope of creating jobs for those often left behind by microfinance.
“You can think of us as the angel funders for small businesses in India,” says Shenoy, explaining that Upaya makes a point of working with entrepreneurs who may have trouble attracting traditional investors or securing bank loans. The investments (usually between $10,000 and $75,000) go to businesses from areas that have a large concentrations of “ultrapoor.”
The goal is to help grow promising businesses with capital as well as mentorship. In exchange, business owners promise to hire the poorest people in their region as jobs are created.
In the past three years, Upaya has invested in six businesses, ranging from a dairy collective to a company that makes “luxury paper” out of rhino and elephant dung, and an operation that turns fallen palm leaves into biodegradable plates. All told Upaya ventures now employ more than 1,100 people in jobs that pay, on average, between $2.25 and $4 a day.
It’s still a tiny paycheck for a tiny percentage of the millions living in desperate poverty. But it’s enough to move those few from that dangerous ultrapoor category to the more stable midlevel-poor group. At this level people can begin to secure housing, eat regularly, keep kids in school and even address chronic health problems — all developments that Shenoy says they’ve seen among workers employed by their Upaya ventures.
Creating stable, decent-pay jobs in some of India’s poorest (and often) rural communities is a difficult business. Shenoy says their first business (the dairy collective) endured religious unrest and droughts in the first year. It was an experience that taught them to think in “contingency plans” and to closely consult with entrepreneurs about specific needs (special accountants to help prevent corruption and bribery, for example).
But it’s worth it to reach those who might not otherwise be reached, says Steve Schwartz, a fellow co-founder of Upaya. For him, the mission boils down to one of simple belief.
“The best way to get someone out of extreme poverty,” says Schwartz, “is to pay them better than someone living in extreme poverty.”
Maybe the “ultrapoor” aren’t such an intractable problem after all.
Sarah Stuteville is a multimedia journalist and co-founder of The Seattle Globalist, www.seattleglobalist.com, a news site covering Seattle's international connections. Sarah Stuteville:sarah@seattleglobalist.com. Twitter @SeaStute
Upaya was honored to have longtime supporter Suzanne Skees join our most recent visit to our partners in Assam and Uttar Pradesh.
You can read about her trip and what we all learned on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog.
Upaya co-founder Steve Schwartz talks job creation for the ultra poor on Rainmakers.tv
MokshaYug Access (MYA) was recently profiled in Knowledge@Wharton in an article that highlights how the company's "first-mile" dairy supply chain is creating new opportunities for the rural poor.
The article also includes information about a recent study conducted by Upaya that shows how MYA is making dairy a more reliable, full-time livelihood for farmers in Karnataka's villages.
To read the article, click here.
Upaya's Executive Director Sachi Shenoy and Advisor Brian Arbogast share the story of the organization's evolution and introduce the idea of "Pioneer Capital" in NextBillion's "What's Next for Impact Investing" Series.
Upaya Social Ventures is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
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