Project Shakti: Growing the Market While Changing Lives
By Janet Roberts
Jella Sujatamma is part entrepreneur, part health care advisor, part hygiene specialist and part mother in the many villages in India that she visits each week as Hindustan Lever’s (HLL) most successful Shakti Amma (“empowered mother”). Earning between Rs. 3,000 and 7,000 per month (U.S. $60 - $150), Sujatamma takes her unique knowledge about what the village needs and which products are in demand and couples it with important lessons in the need for sanitization and hand washing to prevent diarrhea to the vital role the intake of iodine through salt can have in nurturing healthy children.
Sujatamma, a weaver who lost work when synthetic fabrics came into popularity, became the first HLL Shakti entrepreneur on $200 in borrowed start-up funds. Despite the fact that she is illiterate and needs the assistance of her husband and sons to performed inventory and accounting functions, her sales have made her top earning woman in Project Shakti. Shakti is HLL’s pioneering, bottom-of-the-pyramid, corporate effort in creating livelihoods for rural women by providing critically needed additional income to the women and their families – all by improving the bottom line for the company. Shakti women are equipped and trained to become an extended arm of the company's sales and marketing operation for the thousands of small remote villages unreachable by the traditional distribution system.
Local entrepreneur’s like Sujatamma knows their villages needs and can also influence the buying decisions of the villagers. At once salesperson, supplier, trusted advisor, and educator for the village, Sujatamma can convince the villagers that, for instance, iodized salt will be a healthy option for the family. Iodine Deficiency Disorder (IDD) affects more than 200 million children in developing countries, of which over 70 million live in India. IDD is one of the principal reasons for mental retardation and disabilities such as goiter. It is well-known that iodine in common salt is the easiest way to get the required daily dose, but only 20 percent of the salt in India is iodized. Children living in iodine-deficient area have an average IQ that is 13 points lower than that of children in areas with sufficient iodine.
Among the many food, home and personal care products Sujatamma sells to the villagers is Annapurna (an means food or grain and purna means to prepare), HLL’s new line of iodized salt named for the Hindu goddess of abundance. More than just sell her clients Annapurna, she understand that all mothers dream of bright, healthy children and explains that the salt will prevent IDD and goiters as well as increase mental agility and IQ.
India contributes to 30 percent of all diarrhea deaths in the world with 19.2 percent of the children suffering from diarrhea. The preventive measures and cures are relatively simple: access to safe water and sanitation facilities and instruction on better hygiene practices. Research on preventive behaviors for diarrheal disease shows that washing hands with soap could significantly reduce incidences of infection in India. HLL is the largest soap and detergent manufacturer in India, with $2.4 billion in sales in 2001, 40 percent from soaps and detergents. Sujatamma acts as an educator for the local villages where she sells her products, teaching HLL’s “safe hands” idea to promote not only HLL soap but the important knowledge that washing hands in running water may make the hands appear to be clean but they are not safe from disease-causing bacteria unless they are well-washed with soap.
“It is often assumed if you are a business entrepreneur (in India) then you would be a cutthroat, capitalist profit-seeking venture. That’s really something that doesn’t hold at all at Shakti,” says Rohithari Rajan, Rural Market Development Director for Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL). “Shakti seeks to achieve business objectives and believe me those are hard nosed business objectives. But equally important is the social element. To my mind,” he adds. “Shakti is one of those examples that prove business and world benefit can go together and each works best when they go together.”
According to Rajan, about 12% of the world resides in 638,000 Indian villages. Most of these villages form large scattered amounts of very small markets and do not fit the traditional distribution infrastructure. Shaki utilizes women’s self-help groups (SHGs) for entrepreneur development training to operate as a rural direct-to-home sales force, educating consumers on the health and hygiene benefits of HLL brands and nurturing relationships to reinforce the HLL messages. HLL believes the direct-to-consumer initiative not only will stimulate demand and consumption to earn huge profits for HLL, but also change the lives of people in rural India. Sujatamma borrowed the strart-up monies to become a Shakta Amma from her SHG.
“Most of the women [in the villages] are below the poverty line,” said Rajan. “Becoming a Shakti entrepreneur doubles the entire household income.” Currently, HLL has 15,000 Shakti entrepreneurs across 12 states in India. Its goal is to reach 500,000 villages with 100,000 entrepreneurs by 2010.
Shakti has three initiatives, according to Rajan. The Shakti Entrepreneur, a microenterprise initiative; the Shakti Vani program which translates as ‘the voice of Shakti’, training women to be communicators in the villages; and IShakti, a group community portal that enables users to access information in a variety of areas. The software is voice enabled for illiterate users. Rajan says HLL starts with the route sales person who identifies the Shakti entrepreneur for village. HLL then provides the products and helps her understand what to do and how to realize maximum income. Through the Shakti Vani program women are trained in health and hygiene issues then teach what they have learned to the village communities. In 2004, Shakti Vani covered 10,000 villages and the vision is to cover 50,000 villages in 2005. iShakti, the Internet-based rural information service, has been launched in Andhra Pradesh. It provides information and services to meet rural needs in medical health and hygiene, agriculture, animal husbandry, education, vocational training and employment and women's empowerment. The vision is to have 3,500 kiosks across the state by 2005.
The Shakti Amma’s are the wealth creators for their villages. They learn about products, prices, returns, and being and advisor and helper to their customers in the village. Often they have simple goals, by Western standards, for their earnings wishing to buy a telephone, a scooter for transportation, or education for their children. Nearly as important as the money they are earning is the improved social standing for the women. As a Shakti Amma, each woman is looked up to by villagers, approached for advice, and fulfilled by the knowledge that she is helping other people as well as her own family.
“I am privileged in my job because I get to meet Shakti entrepreneurs; I get to meet people in villages across India,” says Rohithari Rajan, Rural Market Development Director for Hindustan Lever Limited about the company’s Shakti Project initiatives. “The challenges they meet are very different. It is very humbling to see the adversity they face and the challenges they overcome. What has been even stronger, in fact, is the kind of social respect that they enjoy.”
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