In 30 minutes, a promising harvest can turn to crop failure. The ability to make a living or feed your family can disappear. For farmers, this isn’t an abstract risk, it is the reality of climate change, a daily threat that can strike any time with devastating consequences.

“A Very Hard Year”

Regardless of where a farmer lives, they are faced with the urgency of the climate crisis. In Sierra Leone, this has meant severe floods.

“Thousands of hectares of crops were completely lost,” says Emiliano Mroue, CEO of Warc Africa, a company that designs, sells, and trains farmers on regenerative agriculture inputs, about unprecedented flooding in 2019. “For farmers, a failed crop means hunger and hunger means death.”

While flooding has proven deadly in Sierra Leone, the following year, it was extreme drought in Ghana that produced devastating impacts on smallholder farmers.

“There is zero water, and the crops are failing,” shares Emiliano. With more drought, come more pests, compounding the toll taken on farmers and the food system: “Fall Army Worm spreads a lot faster in drought and impacts maize the most. This is the backbone of Ghana’s food system, so it’s a big problem.”

Halfway across the world, on May 6, an unprecedented hailstorm struck the Colombian countryside outside Medellin. In just a few minutes, hail the size of golf balls destroyed Siembra Viva’s fields of vegetables. At that moment, the business was set back four months and farmers’ incomes were lost.

Orlay, a smallholder farmer that works with Siembra Viva, lost everything. Because he now needs to replant, Orlay will be without income for at least a month, limiting his ability to purchase food and other necessities.

“Smallholder farmers are really in trouble,” explains Diego Benitez, CEO of Siembra Viva, while detailing farmers’ financial insecurity and the importance of climate adaptation.

Though focused on the farmers, Diego is clear about the storm’s impact on his own business:

“We have an urgency to show the validity of our model…that we can create a lot of good food using regenerative soil and agriculture practices. Before the storm we needed just one more month to show the potential of our approach, but we had to start over.”

Unfortunately, these unprecedented events are becoming increasingly common.

A Fragile Existence

As leaders in the Global North debate how to avoid a climate crisis, farmers in the Global South are already living it. All over the world, smallholder farmers are taking steps to increase their resilience — that is, their ability to anticipate, weather, and bounce-back from climate events — but they need help. Without new investment, support, and tools, climate change will continue to destroy livelihoods and uproot lives.

At Siembra Viva, climate change has drastically altered farmer behaviors, forcing transitions from well established practices. Recently, they shifted up to 50% of crops indoors to contend with increasing hailstorms:

“We had more than 12 storms before the big one. It’s been a big change. Every two weeks we have hail that sets us back,” says Diego.

But even the move into greenhouses doesn’t offer complete protection — Siembra Viva lost an older greenhouse in the big storm because they didn’t have the capital to invest in repairs and/or to build a new one. To be climate resilient, you need money.

“Emotionally it’s very frustrating,” says Emiliano. “You can be doing everything right and… the results are zero.”

In Ghana and Sierra Leone, Warc is encouraging farmers to undertake affordable protection measures like diversifying crops, harvesting on shorter cycles, and ending the practice of tilling soil. But these measures only go so far as unpredictable weather patterns have displaced long-held best practices:

“Rains started a month and half late this year. For those who planted on time, who did the “right” thing, they’ve suffered the most. This year, the right thing was wrong, but we can’t start moving because it’s still very unpredictable.”

For entrepreneurs like Diego and Emiliano, the writing is on the wall: climate change is here and for farmers, climate adaptation and resilience are urgent needs. Without the tools and training that build resilience and enable farmers to adapt, smallholders’ livelihoods will continue to suffer.

“We need to de-risk the whole system, but very few are willing,” says Emiliano. “We, as a company or investors, need to take risk away from smallholder farmers. They’re the least capable of absorbing the risk and yet it all sits with them…We need a lot more investment in agriculture.”

It’s a vicious cycle. While building climate resilience and employing agriculture practices that regenerate the soil, actively restore habitats, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions — known as regenerative agriculture — are some of the best tools smallholder farmers have at their disposal, the agribusinesses supporting these efforts, like Siembra Viva and Warc, are struggling under the pressure of climate change.

“The only way to reverse this cycle is using the force of the market to catalyze resources,” explains Diego. “Regenerative agriculture is the best bet to heal the planet and enable farmers and agribusinesses to succeed.”

As Diego and Emiliano share, regenerative and resilient agriculture provide a strong defense against climate change, but more investment is needed to protect farmers’ jobs and lives. If we are to overcome the climate crisis, we must nurture a new ecosystem of agribusinesses that enable resilience and prioritize the needs of smallholder farmers.

“There is no time to waste,” agrees Diego. “No one can be a spectator.”

Dig Deeper:

• Learn more about Acumen’s investments in agriculture and efforts to enable climate resilience among smallholder farmers.
• Watch our TEDxAcumen series on the intersection of poverty and climate change.
• Visit our agriculture page to learn more about our agricultural portfolio and how social enterprises are addressing the climate crisis.

For Smallholder Farmers, Climate Change Is Life or Death was originally published in Acumen: Ideas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

En un país como Colombia en donde la violencia ha forjado cada paso de su historia, y el último medio siglo ha dejado cicatrices profundas en el tejido de la sociedad, los niños crecen jugando a la guerra y entienden que el sonido de un disparo es la campana de aviso para entrar a casa y esperar a que vuelva a amanecer. En ese país una oportunidad es lo único que se requiere para cambiar el rumbo de una persona y como consecuencia una comunidad.

Andrés Felipe González, nació un 28 de Julio de 1991 en Cali, una ciudad que fue uno de los epicentros de la guerra entre carteles de la droga entre los años ochenta y noventa. Las Minas, el barrio en el que creció, era lo que es considerado hoy en día un asentamiento no regularizado, un territorio fundado por disidencias de grupos armados ilegales, un barrio peligroso como lo denominan muchos de los habitantes de la ciudad. El sonido de las balas y de los estallidos de las bombas son cosas que aún recuerda Andrés, quien incluso en una oportunidad estuvo muy cerca de ser una de las miles de víctimas que ha dejado la violencia en el país. El lugar donde jugaba “maquinitas”, una de las tiendas de su barrio se negó a pagar el dinero de la extorsión de un grupo ilegal, y como retaliación estallaron el lugar en donde murieron 8 personas, Andrés había estado en ese lugar 5 minutos antes.

Desde muy pequeño la calle fue su hogar, con 8 años salía desde muy temprano de su casa y volvía muy tarde en la noche antes de que su mamá llegara de trabajar. Salía todos los días con sus amigos a jugar fútbol en la calle, a nadar en el Río Melendez, a pedir comida en las panaderías o a colgarse de los buses, a veces iba a la escuela del barrio y estudiaba “hasta que la motivación le diera”, repitió tercero de primaria 3 veces porque a mitad de año escolar decidía no volver. Aún habiendo crecido en una familia numerosa, con sus padres, 2 hermanos y 4 hermanas, nunca tuvo quien lo guiara, era lo que él dice “un niño sin Dios ni ley”.

Crecer en un entorno en donde la violencia es el pan de cada día hace que los valores y los límites se transformen, que la cultura se adapte al conflicto o a la ilegalidad y que las personas normalicen los golpes, los disparos y el llanto de las viudas. Andrés creció admirando a los capos de la droga, y creyendo que las armas no solo daban poder sino que también, y de una manera muy irónica, eran su seguro de vida. Muchos lo consideraban un “pillo buena gente”. En el colegio, cuando decidió dedicarse a estudiar nuevamente, fue el representante del salón, aunque indisciplinado era buen estudiante y alguien que muchos admiraban por su liderazgo innato. Fuera de su escuela era el respaldo de muchos, sus amigos sabían que podían contar con él y que si se presentaba un problema él sería quien los defendería ya que junto a sus cuadernos, en su maletín, cargaba el “fierro” un revólver calibre 32, algo que para muchos era símbolo de estatus, pero que para él era su protección. “O soy yo, o son ellos” era uno de sus mantras en ese momento.

“El pandillismo es un poco genérico para los jóvenes, uno está en una pandilla sin saber que se está ahí dentro” dice Andrés, “uno lo ve como estar en un entorno social, y esos muchachos de la esquina que son los amigos se vuelven como la familia”.

Todo se resume a una oportunidad

A sus 17 años el único anhelo que tenía era el de cumplir 18, ser mayor de edad, cargar su cédula y poder entrar fácilmente a las fiestas a las que sus amigos asistían todos los días y sin problema. A esa edad aún estaba en noveno grado y no tenía muy claro qué sería de su futuro. Una de sus hermanas gestionó unos cupos en un colegio fuera de su barrio, en otro entorno, en una realidad diferente a la que conocía y que quedaba a dos horas de su casa, algo que sin intención lo fue alejando de las dinámicas a las que estaba acostumbrado.

Para poder llegar al colegio tenía que levantarse entre 2 y 3 horas antes de salir, y se demoraba el mismo tiempo al llegar, lo que lo mantenía fuera de las calles. Este nuevo inicio le mostró la normalidad de un contexto alejado de la violencia, donde las armas no tenían protagonismo, donde los amigos no estaban en la calle y donde las posibilidades no eran limitadas. Allí conoció a nuevas personas, y otras personas conocieron al joven alegre, y el líder que quería ser, ya no estaba en su barrio en donde lo conocían por su pandilla, por las peleas o la fiesta.

Por ese mismo tiempo, y en el periodo en el que Andrés se unió a una congregación religiosa, la alcaldía de Cali creó un proyecto que buscaba intervenir zonas vulnerables y dar asistencia psicosocial a los jóvenes pandilleros y ayudarlos a crear sus proyectos de vida alejados de la violencia, algo que encendió en él un propósito, y vio la oportunidad de cambiar el rumbo y su camino de vida. Esto le demostró a Andrés que muchos jóvenes tenían historias similares a la de él, familias ausentes o disfuncionales, amigos problemáticos, una cultura de la violencia, y una falta de oportunidades para su desarrollo.

Con el pasar del tiempo, y algo que ocurre cuando cambian los gobiernos municipales, la iniciativa de la alcaldía finalizó dejando en el aire no solo los proyectos emprendidos sino la vida de muchos jóvenes. En ese momento Andrés, que ya se había graduado y se ganaba la vida rapeando en los buses y como un artista callejero, tomó una decisión que no solo enrutaría todo su camino, sino que le ayudaría a entender cómo su experiencia y su trayectoria servirían para ayudar a otros. Ese grupo de jóvenes no se quedaría huérfano, y fue en 2016 cuando nació “Prisioneros de Esperanza” un colectivo que desarrolla talleres de arte para jóvenes que van desde rap hasta fotografía y producción de videos y grafitis. Con estos programas, Andrés busca ofrecer a los jóvenes la oportunidad de cambiar sus propias vidas y soñar más allá de su entorno inmediato, y demostrar que es posible construir una comunidad nueva libre de violencia, algo que muchos ven como imposible.

Fares “El que se abre brecha”

A Andrés todos lo conocen como El Fares, que en la biblia es “el que se abre brecha” y es que eso es lo que ha hecho desde que entendió que todo lo que se necesita para cambiar el mundo es una oportunidad.

“Si un niño que a los 14 su primer arma dispara, pero a los 16 ninguno sabe en donde para, que pasaría si aquel joven comprendiera que no era necesario que tanta gente muriera, solo quisiera que logremos lo imposible, poder erradicar las fronteras invisibles” es uno de los versos que Fares entona y que resume no solo su vida sino la de miles de niños y jóvenes que han tenido que crecer en lugares y contextos donde la violencia prima y donde la posibilidad de salir adelante está en la ley del más fuerte.

Las Minas, su barrio, y donde actualmente trabaja con su colectivo sigue siendo un lugar estigmatizado, del que muchos, como aquellos que logran encontrar la forma para prosperar quieren huir, haciendo que los ciclos de pobreza y desigualdad continúen. “En mi barrio es más fácil vincularse a una banda delincuencial que a un grupo cultural o recreativo” dice Fares, pero él ve un gran potencial en su gente. Recuerda con mucho cariño el caso de “Jiggy” un joven que al principio del proceso llegaba a los talleres sucio, sin bañarse y con una actitud pasiva, y que después de un tiempo, y con el “ojo” que lo caracteriza para ver potencial donde otros ven desesperanza, empezó a florecer un interés por la parte profesional, específicamente por proyectos audiovisuales. Un tiempo después un amigo suyo le pidió recomendados para trabajar en una productora y él, sin titubear, le presentó a “Jiggy”. A partir de ese momento, el desarrollo profesional de este joven fue impresionante, aprendió sus labores rápidamente, y gracias a esa experiencia ha podido no sólo continuar creciendo, sino empezar a construir su vida profesional, demostrando el valor que tiene una oportunidad.

Fares trabaja todos los días para lograr que miles de jóvenes vulnerables de Cali puedan acceder a los recursos necesarios que los ayuden a encontrar un propósito de vida, alejados de lo que se llama el camino fácil pero peligroso, y que salgan del ciclo delincuencial, que puede empezar por el olvido de sus familias, o por las facilidades que encuentran al hacer parte de una pandilla. Y aunque muchas veces ese trabajo se ve obstaculizado por la falta de recursos, por la finalización de los proyectos municipales o estatales de los que dependen, por la dificultad del cambio de mentalidad de los jóvenes o incluso por la violencia a la que actualmente se enfrentan los líderes sociales en Colombia, saber que su labor y que el arte está salvando la vida de muchos es lo que lo motiva a seguir todos los días.

Los jóvenes con los que trabaja inicialmente llegan solamente interesados en aprender a hacer rap, y a través de la música es que “Prisioneros de Esperanza” les enseña sobre rimas, literatura para desarrollar el pensamiento crítico, y en potencializar sus habilidades y desarrollar su proyecto de vida. “El arte que me rescató a mi, puede rescatar a los jóvenes, y es la herramienta para devolverles la capacidad de soñar nuevamente” dice Fares. Actualmente el 90% de los jóvenes que hacen parte activa del colectivo han terminado mínimo el bachillerato y otros están estudiando carreras técnicas.

De una influencia por accidente a una con propósito

“Por mucho tiempo fui un líder sin saber qué era ser líder, como un líder empujado” comenta Fares cuando recuerda las cualidades de liderazgo que sus compañeros y amigos veían y que él aún no había identificado, sin embargo, su trabajo de resocialización con los jóvenes lo ha fortalecido, ahora como él dice “como un líder positivo”.

Él es un claro ejemplo de una persona que prospera y florece en las dificultades, y quien quiere ser un referente frente a otros, no solamente ser el modelo a seguir que él nunca tuvo para aquellos jóvenes que necesitan un propósito de vida, sino un catalizador de impacto, ayudando a unos para que ayuden a otros.

Fares hace parte de la cohorte 2019 de Fellows de Acumen, algo que le ha permitido no solo aprender de él mismo, de sus fortalezas y vulnerabilidades, sino de otros 22 agentes de cambio cuyas trayectorias le han servido como punto de referencia para continuar con su labor. “Yo antes me creía el hombre increíble, el que no lloraba, el que no se equivocaba, el que no podía mostrar debilidad, pero con este proceso en el Programa me di cuenta de todo lo contrario, además de conocer un grupo maravilloso que es un soporte para cuando uno quiere tirar la toalla” dice.

Ya no está solo, su cohorte se volvió su familia, esa que tanto necesitó al crecer y que ahora está más presente que nunca. Después de finalizado el primer año de inducción continúan en contacto. Celebran las glorias, abrazan las desilusiones, y como toda familia unida están dispuestos a tener conversaciones valientes que muchas veces incluyen el futuro del país. “Lo que más me impactó fue crear un vínculo familiar con ellos, además de saber que existen personas en otras geografías trabajando con la misma pasión, eso me llena de esperanza, de una esperanza de hierro”.

El Programa de Fellows de Acumen “fue una experiencia muy valiosa en la que me di cuenta que lo que yo estaba haciendo valía la pena y que era importante seguir trabajando por eso. Verme rodeado de gente tan valiosa marcó una pauta en mi vida, me siento muy orgulloso de ser Fellow, de haber encontrado esas dinámicas que me han permitido evolucionar, de conocer un liderazgo diferente”.

Andrés, o Fares para los que lo han escuchado rapear, continúa transformando la vida de los jóvenes a través de las líricas. Ha cambiado para muchos el sonido de las balas por las rimas, y nos demuestra que Colombia se construye a partir de pequeñas acciones de paz y esperanza.

***

Las aplicaciones para el Programa de Fellows de Acumen en Colombia ya están abiertas. Conoce más y aplica aquí.

Las Oportunidades que Generan Cambio was originally published in Acumen: Ideas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Acumen Colombia Fellow Andrés Felipe González has spent his life choosing hope over despair — despite the odds.

When Andrés was born in Cali in 1991, the city was one of the two main hubs for Colombia’s drug cartels. He grew up with his parents, two brothers and four sisters in an informal settlement called Las Minas, a neighborhood founded by illegal armed groups — one locals knew to be a dangerous place.

Finding Your Way When Violence is the Norm

While their parents were at work, Andrés and his friends spent their days playing in the streets of Las Minas: playing soccer, swimming in the Melendez River, begging for food or hitching rides on the bus. They returned home only to sleep. Andrés went to school sporadically “when his motivation allowed,” missing so many days that he had to repeat third grade three times. As Andrés says, he had no one to guide him, “a child with neither God nor law.”

In a country like Colombia, where violence has shaped every chapter of history, where the last 50-year armed conflict has left deep scars, children grow up learning to listen for the warning sound of first gunshots and bombs. In Las Minas, everyone has their own story of a tragedy or, if they’re lucky, a close call. In Andrés’s case, an illegal group bombed the arcade where he had been playing minutes before because its owners had refused to pay their bribes.

Andrés grew up admiring drug lords and their guns affording protection and power: “In Las Minas, gang activity is the norm for young people. You’re in a gang without really knowing you’re there. You see it as a social group: those boys on the corner become like family.”

Among the boys on the corner, he himself was considered a “good rogue.” When he finally went back to school full-time, Andrés got good grades. But in his backpack alongside his notebooks, Andrés carried his fierro, a .32 caliber revolver that, for him, was more for protection than power. Because outside of school, his friends were counting on him to defend them. At the time, he followed a simple mantra of survival: “It’s me or them.”

It All Comes Down to Opportunity

In a place like Las Minas, what brings change is opportunity.

By the time Andrés was 17, he was finishing the ninth grade and cared mainly about partying with his friends. His life changed when his older sister managed to get him and his younger sister seats in a high school two hours away from Las Minas. Suddenly, traveling two hours to school and back each morning and night, Andrés no longer had time to spend with his friends on the streets in Las Minas.

At school, Andrés found himself immersed in a different world — one where friends met in class instead of on the street, where weapons were not the norm, where the possibilities were endless. As he met new people at school, they met a new Andrés — not the Andrés known for gangs, fights or parties, but a star student and a leader.

At the same time, Cali’s mayor launched an anti-violence program to offer psychosocial support to the city’s young gang members, including rap song-writing workshops to encourage self-expression. When he joined the program, Andrés saw how many young people had stories similar to his: from absent parents to dysfunctional families to a culture of normalized violence. It seemed too simple and yet it was unavoidably clear: undergirding each story was a lack of opportunity, a lack of choices. Andrés realized that he and his friends in Las Minas had been swept up in the environment around them — that, if they had another choice, they may have gone down a different path. Andrés realized he could seize the opportunity he now had in his new school to live the life he wanted.

In the workshop, Andrés found a new sense of belonging in rap music, and started writing songs that expressed his new philosophy: “A child who at 14 fires his first gunshot / But at 16 doesn’t know where to stop / What if he could see / That so many people don’t need to die? / He only wanted to achieve the impossible / To erase invisible borders.”

A few years later, Andrés had graduated from high school and was making a living performing his rap songs on public buses as a street musician. When a new mayor was elected, the former mayor’s anti-violence program ended and, suddenly, its participants were left on their own again. Andrés saw an opportunity to use his own life experiences to help others.

Becoming Fares: “The One Who Opens the Gap”

In 2016, Andrés founded Prisioneros de Esperanza, or Prisoners of Hope, a program designed to serve the young people the mayor’s program had left behind. Prisioneros de Esperanza offers arts workshops — from rap to photography and video production to graffiti — for young people in Las Minas. With these programs, Andrés aims to bring young people opportunities to change their own lives and to dream beyond their immediate surroundings — and to prove that it is possible to build a community anew, free of violence.

This doesn’t come without its challenges. “In my neighborhood it is easier to be linked to a criminal gang than to a cultural or recreational group,” says Andrés. But where others see despair, Andrés chooses to see possibility.

He sees it in people like Jiggy. When Jiggy first arrived at a workshop, his clothes were dirty and disheveled, he hadn’t showered in days and he barely made eye contact. He maintained a passive stance, participating only occasionally and reluctantly in the workshop’s activities. But when Jiggy discovered Prisioneros de Esperanza’s video production programs, he began to flourish. When a role opened up at a friend’s production company in Cali, Andrés recommended Jiggy — who is now beginning to build his professional life as the company’s production assistant. Whereas the majority of students in Las Minas drop out of school after sixth grade, over 90 percent of the young people participating in Prisioneros de Esperanza’s program have now completed high school or are studying in technical careers.

Most of Andrés’s students join the program to rap. Through the program’s rap classes, they learn about rhyme, literature and develop their creativity and critical thinking skills. “The art that rescued me can rescue young people. Rap is the tool to give them the ability to dream again” says Andrés.

Now, everyone in Las Minas knows Andrés not as the “good rogue,” but as El Fares — a nickname based on a Biblical figure symbolizing “breaking through” and leading the way.

What drives Andrés is building pathways for young people like Jiggy to find a purpose in life — one far from the too-easy choice of joining a gang. Despite the many challenges — changing young peoples’ ingrained mentalities, unsteady funding and even death threats as a social leader in Colombia — Andrés continues his work in order to save young people’s lives with opportunity.

From an Accidental to an Intentional Leader

“For a long time I was a leader without knowing what that meant: a forced leader” says Andrés. His work with young people has strengthened his understanding now as he says, in how to be “a positive leader,” one who supports others not by defending them with a fierro but by bringing them opportunities to change their own lives. Now, Andrés aims to not only be the role model he never had, but also a catalyst of impact helping them achieve their dreams.

In 2019, Fares joined the Acumen Colombia Fellowship — offering social change agents the leadership training to increase their impact in a community of like-minded entrepreneurs. Through the Fellowship, Fares not only learned more about himself but also from the experiences of the 22 other leaders in his cohort, who have served as a north star to guide his work. The group taught him about his strengths and vulnerabilities: “I used to think of myself as the incredible man: the one who did not cry, the one who was never wrong, the one who could not show weakness. But in the Fellowship I realized the opposite is true.”

He no longer feels alone as a leader — his cohort became a family, complete with the sense of belonging that Andrés had so craved growing up: “I met a wonderful group that supports each other in the moments when you want to give up. What struck me the most was creating a family bond with them.” he says. After their Fellowship year, the 2019 cohort has remained in constant contact. Together they celebrate each others’ successes, embrace disappointments and dive into honest and courageous conversations about Colombia’s future. The expansion of this community of Fellows across the globe bolsters Andrés in his work: “Knowing that there are people in other geographies working with the same passion fills me with hope — an iron hope.”

The Fellowship “was a very valuable experience in which I realized that what I was doing was worth it, that it was important to continue working for it. Seeing myself surrounded by such valuable people set a pattern in my life. I am very proud to be a Fellow, to have found those dynamics that have allowed me to evolve.”

As Fares continues to evolve, so does Prisioneros de Esperanza as Andrés and his team slowly replace the sounds of gunshots with the sounds of lyrics. Because, as Fares believes, a new Cali — and a new Colombia — will be built one opportunity at a time.

***

Applications for the Acumen Fellowships in Colombia, India and Spain are now open. Learn more and apply here.

Opportunity Brings Change was originally published in Acumen: Ideas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Acumen India Fellow Aniket Doegar was introduced to problem-solving early. In northern India’s Shimla, his mother first showed him what it meant to dedicate one’s life to solving problems of poverty through her work teaching at a local school for low-income children. His aunt followed the same set of values, in founding and running Udaan, a school in Shimla for children with special needs. This early introduction to education at the grassroots level gave him the understanding of the power of education to equip young people with the knowledge and skills required to change their own lives in the classroom and beyond. He says, “I had seen a lot of teachers change lives around me. They helped transform a generation due to the access to education that they provided, which may not have been possible without Udaan and support from the community they built beyond the school.”

A Social Entrepreneur in the Making

Studying Commerce at Shri Ram College of Commerce, Aniket would return home from college every summer to volunteer at Udaan where he helped with everyday administrative duties. It was at Udaan that Aniket learned the importance of putting the beneficiaries at the center of a model: “The kids came first,” says Aniket. “If you’re designing technology for the most marginalized people, you’re working and designing programs for everyone.” This starts with empathy — by looking at a problem from the user’s perspective and designing the solution from there.

After graduating from college, Aniket taught second graders in low-income areas in Pune as a Teach for India Fellow, served last-mile citizens in rural Maharashtra, and eventually worked with various startups across the country. No matter where he went, the challenge was the same: low-income people didn’t know about their basic rights nor the government “schemes,” or welfare benefits, they qualified for, largely because they lacked access to eligibility information. The impact of this disconnect is huge: only 40 million of approximately 125 million farmers received the full benefit of the national government’s Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana scheme due to awareness and execution issues. In Uttar Pradesh, ₹9,651 crores [$1.3 billion USD] in funds available for minority welfare remained unspent between 2013 and 2017. In Karnataka, ₹5,344 crores [$720 million USD] in worker welfare funds went unused. This is especially a problem in a country where over 90 percent of the workforce is employed as “informal workers,” or temporary laborers making low wages without benefits such as healthcare, a pension or sick leave. How could the government’s welfare benefits be effective in reducing poverty if qualifying citizens didn’t even know about them? No private platform existed to provide citizens with access to this information. Aniket saw a gap that needed to be filled: “I started to think about how we can have this information and all the documents delivered across all schemes to the citizens,” Aniket says. With his belief in education and knowledge as tools of empowerment, Aniket set out to find a way to deliver these benefits at a national scale.

In early 2014, he founded Hands for You Foundation, a nonprofit designed to make government welfare benefits information accessible to citizens across the country. He then partnered with Asha Krishnan and P R Ganapathy, two social entrepreneurs in his network to transform the nonprofit into a social enterprise called Haqdarshak. The decision to set up Haqdarshak as a for-profit organization stemmed from Aniket’s vision to maximize the company’s impact: “To help us scale, we went with the for-profit model and made sure that our focus was still on ensuring impact.”

Connecting Indian Citizens to Welfare Benefits

As he learned early on from Udaan, Aniket put his intended users first, designing Haqdarshak’s approach based on their needs. Drawing on his understanding of the impact of education, he built Haqdarshak with the intention of informing last-mile citizens of their benefit eligibility. These values are embedded in Haqdarshak’s name: Haq means rights in Urdu, and Darshak means the individual or entity that shows you the path in Hindi.

The social enterprise hires local rural women, called Haqdarshaks in 19 out of 29 states and seven union territories across India to show their communities this path to information about government welfare benefits and their eligibility using the company’s mobile platform equipped with information in local languages for all states. Using their own smartphones, the Haqdarshaks first provide a free eligibility screening for people in their community and then offer support applying for welfare benefits such as government funding for girls’ education for a nominal fee. To reach more last-mile citizens, Haqdarshaks also travel to rural villages outside their own communities to inform citizens about new government schemes and welfare benefits for which they may qualify.

Many of the Haqdarshaks had minimal primary education up to the 6–8th grade level and were either previously unemployed or working in low-wage agricultural roles. With Haqdarshak, each woman is able to earn ₹2,000–3,000 [$35 USD] per month, bringing in additional income for their households where men are typically the sole breadwinners.

Beyond one-on-one services, Haqdarshak also partners with large companies, governments, and most recently, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to reach more qualifying citizens — helping corporations like Godrej Properties enable their informal workers to access welfare benefits or incorporating their information on state governments’ local platforms.

Building Bridges with the Acumen India Fellowship

In 2018, Aniket applied for the Acumen India Fellowship — offering social change agents the tools, leadership training and space to innovate new ideas, accelerate their impact and build a strong network of like-minded entrepreneurs — to work on making Haqdarshak’s business model profitable while maintaining its impact mission. Through Acumen, Aniket met Padam Kumar Jain, another Acumen India Fellow who helped Haqdarshak build its partnerships with agricultural organizations to connect their partner farmers to benefits. For Aniket, the Acumen India Fellowship also reinforced the importance of integrity in the work of social change: “Moral leadership for me is defining what you stand for, or what your organization stands for, and sticking by it, no matter the circumstances.”

Consequently, Haqdarshak’s model has not wavered from its focus on designing for the end user — and it’s working. So far, the company’s 5,000 Haqdarshaks have screened applications from over 300,000 citizens and connected more than 250,000 of those citizens to government welfare benefits. And they’re just getting started: in the last year, Haqdarshak has gone from processing 500 to 36,000 applications a month.

While Haqdarshak was continuing to prove the sustainability of its model, Acumen India was busy refining its workforce development investment strategy. Noting the fundamental value of Haqdarshak’s services in enabling livelihoods for informal workers, Acumen invested in Haqdarshak’s pre-Series A round this year — marking the first Acumen India investee founded by an Acumen Fellow.

Haqdarshak’s services have only become more urgent in the midst of COVID-19 as the company rushes to connect citizens to new government welfare benefits addressing the hardships of COVID-19. During India’s COVID-19 lockdown, Haqdarshak has facilitated over 60,000 applications and launched a multilingual app to help citizens in every state use their own smartphones to find and apply for government benefits directly. On-ground, Haqdarshak’s new multilingual helpline is supporting informal workers now unemployed under lockdown with everything from applications for welfare benefits to connecting families to the closest food ration provider. The urgency of COVID-19 has only increased Haqdarshak’s commitment to putting the user first as Aniket and his team tirelessly build new platforms to meet their citizens’ new needs.

Despite the sleepless nights, Aniket is more determined than ever to connect even more of India’s low-income citizens with benefits, with a goal of reaching 100 million people by 2030: “The money that the government collects from taxes belongs to the citizens, and I want to see that ₹9 lakh crore [$120 billion USD] be invested in our people because it belongs to our people. I’d like to see a more logical, rational, and engaging India — at least from the policy side of things — that is able to invest in its people in the right way with our existing resources. I’d like to see a country that is inclusive in all areas, not one that is purely driven by the next big opportunity.” With his customer-centric values and integrity rooted in grit, Aniket is driving India towards achieving this vision, one Haqdarshak at a time.

Applications for the Acumen Fellowships in Colombia, India and Spain open on September 16th, 2020. Learn more here.

Access Granted was originally published in Acumen: Ideas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a teenager, Acumen Fellow Kelvin Hughes took his grandmother to the grocery store in London. A simple task that for many mixed-race families can provoke questions and even insults from strangers.

At the check-out counter, an employee made a racist remark to Kelvin. He laughs, “[My grandma] basically threatened to throttle him with her walking stick.”

Kelvin’s personal heroes like his grandmother (who he describes as a “sassy, little old white lady”), taught him how to walk the fine line between comfort and justice. Now, the 32-year-old CEO regularly leans into dissonance — not just in conversation with others, but also within himself.

A Social Entrepreneur in the Making

His path to becoming a CEO was no exception. As a teenager, Kelvin chased a dream of investment banking. His family’s work ethic was infectious.

They left Ghana for London without much, and throughout his childhood studied at nights while working multiple jobs (including at McDonald’s where they first met).

“When my Dad came home I would sit on his lap and [watch] him reading or studying, always trying to push forward,” Kelvin says. Now, his mother and father run their own successful businesses.

Like the children of many immigrant families, Kelvin and his brother watched their parents chart their own success. They worked “so hard to give us a set of opportunities that means that we don’t have to struggle. We can coast,” Kelvin says.

He attended a top school in England, interned at Morgan Stanley, graduated from the University of Bath with a degree in Business Administration, and pursued a post-grad program at Unilever. “Things were going to plan,” Kelvin says.

He spent nearly three years savoring the delicacies of technology, finance, and marketing, “using aromatherapy to sell shower gel, employing BMX riders to sell butter. These are things that come out of your head and you can make it real, and then you can go and see it in the car park and you see the kids interacting…I really loved the creativity of that,” Kelvin says.

Kelvin later chased an opportunity to join a new team at Unilever: he interviewed families and designed products to address issues of sanitation, climate change, and gender equity. “I was basically given license to sit down with people from all walks of life and ask about their hopes and dreams,” Kelvin says. What’s your biggest fear for your kids? What would success be in your life ten years from now? In turn, Kelvin was asking himself the same questions.

Flitting between prototypes and financial models, he was proud of his work. But for Kelvin, an earnest, self-described “literature nerd,” something was missing. “I think that until I was quite old, definitely in my late twenties, I wasn’t really questioning [certain things],” Kelvin says. “When there starts to be a real divergence, then you’re sort of starting to think, ‘Well, hold on…Money isn’t my definition of success.’”

Clean Team Toilets Bring Dignity and Safety

After nearly five years interviewing customers and testing prototypes before jetting back to London, Kelvin started to question the value of his work from a faraway, Western seat. “Can you get a real feel…a real sense…can you smell it?” If not, Kelvin asked himself, “Should you have a license to make decisions?”

With much deliberation — dotted with some family and friends suggesting that it would be “a little bit ridiculous” to leave London — Kelvin decided to leave behind the hamster wheel of sleepless flights and settle down closer to the questions he sought to answer. In 2018 Kelvin accepted a role as CEO of Clean Team Ghana, a social enterprise founded in 2012 that supplies low-cost, in-home toilets for customers without indoor plumbing. Coincidentally — at least according to Kelvin — this brought him to the town his grandparents once lived in almost 60 years before.

Clean Team is responding to a critical need in Ghana: about 20 million people (almost 70 percent of the country’s population) don’t have a toilet in their homes. Instead, these families are forced to use public toilets for a fee or find a place to defecate outside.

Clean Team visits almost 3,000 homes per week to service customers’ toilets, which don’t require water, electricity nor digging. Not to mention families spend half as much as they would on public toilets.

Clean Team’s product also allows women and girls to avoid harassment or violence while walking to public toilets at night.

Most customers talk more about the pride of having a toilet in their home than about the cost savings. Customers say they’re comfortable hosting relatives with their new toilet, and are happy to avoid leaving their homes in the middle of the night. It’s about “the dignity of being able to go to the toilet in your own house,” Kelvin says. “So many people around the world take that for granted.”

Clean Team wants to make this dignity accessible for Ghanaian. “We’re not delineating by income or job…I find that really powerful,” Kelvin says. “This goes beyond just delivering a world class service, but also ensuring that the company is imbuing a group of leaders with the skills and tenacity to contribute to the development of their communities — and ultimately the country.”

For Kelvin, moving to Kumasi has answered some of the questions that troubled him in London. “I understand what it’s like for the electricity to go out on a regular basis…and when you get up in the morning and you can’t have a shower because the water’s off,” Kelvin says. “I think it allows you to be less invested when you are far away and you have all the confidence.” Now, Kelvin hears “about the problems people have over a beer, rather than every now and again” between trips.

In the next five years he aims to make Clean Team profitable, and continue building the company’s coaching and development program for staff — himself included. Kelvin laughs, “As my team would say, I’ve got many, many flaws!”

In the meantime, Kelvin is thoughtful about providing his team with opportunities to grow, whether on an international stage or in a local training. “Sometimes it’s really simple stuff,” he says. “Some of our team had never flown before, and so rather than me going to speak at a conference in Sweden, we send a different member of the team.” Other times, he leads sessions on Navigating Polarities, curricula from the Acumen West Africa Fellowship.

Finding Community through the Acumen Fellowship

Kelvin joined the West Africa Acumen Fellowship last year, befriending 19 lifelong confidants. “Not just people that if I’m in a city I’ll call and have dinner with, but people that I’m sure will call me in tears and want to chat about something, and I could do the same,” he says. Kelvin laughs, “It’s insane that we actually physically have spent less than five weeks in person with each other. It’s just nuts.”

A handful of late night chats and a pinch of forced vulnerability were just the right ingredients for the group to bake disagreement into growth. In one seminar with his cohort, Kelvin remembers a discussion about marginalization that left many in tears. “It was such a powerful, powerful expression,” he says. “Almost everyone left that room having their own thinking challenged, their own biases…I was angry at people. I was sad for others. And we had this incredibly rich conversation.”

Kelvin ordinarily defaults to listening, but says an important takeaway from the Acumen Fellowship has been, “By keeping quiet, you are sometimes holding things back that others might find useful or even transformative.”

He describes a frequent tension: when to step up versus step back. “It’s a tension that as a male, as someone that’s privileged,” he thinks, “Am I talking over people? When do I shut up?”

According to Kelvin, the Fellowship “can really kind of open your eyes about ‘Not only have I got a role to play, but I’ve got a duty and responsibility to use what I have.’”

The 2019 West Africa Acumen Fellows cohort stays in contact through WhatsApp. Kelvin says that the group celebrates each others’ successes — especially when hidden beneath humility. “Someone will find something that someone else has done and then we’ll call them out for not sharing it,” Kelvin laughs. “That may sound silly, but it’s incredibly powerful because you have this group of cheerleaders” — cheerleaders who, like Kelvin, question conventional definitions of success.

“They understand the stresses and challenges of doing this work,” Kelvin says. “But the massive takeaway and the thing that I’ll have forever is the fact that…if I have a challenge, whatever it is, I’ve now got a group of friends that is invested in my professional success and my personal success, and wants me to do well.”

He’s not working at the Fortune 500 company that his 17-year-old self imagined, but Kelvin is living his values — in pursuit of success defined by dignity.

Applications for the Acumen Fellowships in Bangladesh, Malaysia and West Africa are now open. Learn more and apply here.

Flushing the Rules was originally published in Acumen: Ideas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As COVID-19 shuts down in-person interaction around the world, communities everywhere are increasingly relying on online services. By McKinsey’s estimation, in a matter of months, customers and businesses have leapt forward five years in the adoption of digital platforms to conduct business.

Digital platforms have proven valuable tools for making goods and services more easily accessible for middle and high-income consumers. We are increasingly seeing these online and app-based platforms emerge as a valuable tool for low-income consumers. This growth is driven primarily on mobile platforms as mobile phone access in these communities continues to increase globally, even surpassing access to electricity.

The social enterprises that leveraged these mobile platforms to serve low-income consumers have suddenly taken on new importance in helping these hard-hit communities deal with the pandemic. Acumen is supporting three such enterprises through our COVID response funds.

Sehat Kahani: Online COVID Care in Pakistan

Acumen Fellow Dr. Sara Saeed Khurram founded Sehat Kahani in 2017 to offer quality and affordable virtual health care to underserved patients in Pakistan via video conference and mobile app. The company started offering COVID-19 telemedicine services free of charge in May and has since conducted over 210,000 online consultations, impacting over 1 million people. Acumen Pakistan Director Ayesha Khan sees Sehat Kahani’s model as a prime example of the way that mobile apps and other tech-enabled platforms can enable the scale required to affect change in the region: “Given that there are over 50 million people living in poverty in Pakistan, we need to think more creatively about how to scale solutions effectively. In some sectors, this will mean going beyond solely brick-and-mortar approaches and harnessing the power of tech to exponentially increase reach.”

Boulder Care: Mobile App Technology to Treat Opioid Addiction

In the United States, Acumen healthcare investee Boulder Care has been changing opioid addiction treatment with a comprehensive mobile app offering video visits and messaging. The additional stressors brought on by COVID-19, such as social isolation or job loss can exacerbate patients’ risk of relapse. Boulder Care’s virtual treatment platform has proven even more vital — especially as public health services such as walk-in clinics or syringe exchange programs have been forced to close due to COVID. In response to the surge in demand, the company is now subsidizing or covering the cost of care for patients who cannot afford to enroll in the program. Acumen America Director Catherine Casey Nanda sees business models enabled by mobile platforms as one important way to radically increase access to critical services for low-income Americans: “Some of the most impactful models combine a high-tech approach with a high-touch service model designed not only to reach as many low-income customers as possible but with services that will meaningfully improve their lives.”

Siembra Viva: E-Commerce Maintaining Farmer Income Through COVID

E-commerce platforms are also proving critical in maintaining smallholder farmers’ incomes through the economic crisis. In Colombia, Acumen investee Siembra Viva developed a direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform in 2013 to bring remote smallholder farmers’ organic produce to urban customers. With mandatory lockdowns across the country, the demand for this e-commerce and delivery service has grown significantly during COVID, creating a new normal for both the customer and the smallholder farmer.

As access to mobile phones and online services continue to increase within low-income communities, we believe the era of COVID-19 will establish a new normal of consumer behavior and services expectations. This new normal will create many new opportunities for future social entrepreneurs and Acumen expects to see more social enterprises looking to digital solutions to meaningfully address the challenges of vulnerable communities.

Acumen’s two emergency response funds are supporting investees and Fellows’ social enterprises serving low-income communities through the COVID-19 crisis. Learn more about our COVID response.

Creating A New Normal was originally published in Acumen: Ideas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Equipped with the teachings of Acumen’s East Africa Fellows Program, Caren Wakoli is building the next generation of ethical leaders in Kenya.

It’s 2011 and Caren Wakoli, 30 years old, stands tall at a wooden podium, addressing an audience of officials at the African Governance Forum. She delivers her remarks on the Kenyan youth perspective on Africa’s democracies in a serious, measured tone. Her hair is pulled back from her face, one unrippled by emotion, her intensity concentrated in her gaze out to the audience.

With an inquisitiveness characteristic of a young person learning the levers of the world, she poses the questions many would prefer to avoid: “Elections are supposed to affect everyone, to lift us up and give us hope and make us believe that all things are possible — is this what elections do for Africa?…What are we doing to leave a positive legacy for generations to come?…After 50 years of various African countries achieving their independence, what do we have to show?” and, quoting Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah: “Why has there not emerged in Africa since independence a new generation of leaders…committed to the interest of the masses of the people?”

This last question has long nagged at Caren. And it was born within another question, one she began asking at age seven.

Caren grew up in a village in Bungoma County, about a nine-hour drive west of Nairobi, Kenya. Her father worked as a court clerk, her mother as secretary to the village chief. They taught their children the value of hard work and determination: that the mind was more powerful than anything else, that they could be anything they wanted to be. What the family had in love and affirmation, however, they lacked in material wealth and at times they couldn’t cover their families’ basic costs. There were some days when the family would have no food, when they couldn’t make their rent payment, when they went to bed at sundown as they had no fuel to light their paraffin lamps. Some days, Caren and her siblings were sent home from school because they could not pay the required fees for attendance.

As a child, looking around her village, her classroom, her church, Caren wondered: “I’m stepping on the same soil, drinking the same water from the same river. So how come one family is thriving with more than they ever needed and other families are barely making it? I thought ‘this is not right.’ There was a sense of injustice in me.”

Caren’s question was not unique. But unlike others who arrive at this same question, Caren did not settle for an absence of answers. She did not resign to the status quo. Instead, she probed for avenues towards justice.

It started with calling out injustice. In primary school, when her math teacher skipped class for over a month, Caren, the 14-year-old class prefect, wrote a letter reporting her teacher to the district education officer.

After making her way through high school with the financial support and mentorship of one of her teachers, Caren enrolled at The University of Nairobi, where, alongside her academic work, she worked to pay her own tuition and send home money for her younger siblings’ school fees. It was there that she discovered the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who sharpened her resolve with the words: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

After one year, Caren was elected to the Student Organization of Nairobi University (SONU) — first as Congress lady, then again as Gender Affairs Secretary and finally as the student union’s first female Vice Chair. Kenya’s student unions are an unofficial training ground for its political leaders, about half of whom begin their careers as student leaders — and they are also the place where political corruption begins. Facing opponents’ bribes and threats of both blackmail and physical violence in the student election as well as witnessing the improper management of the Union’s funds, Caren again refused to be silent. Banding together with other student leaders from public and private universities, Caren started the National Student Leaders Forum (NSLF) to uphold a higher standard of integrity in student unions across Kenya. National ministers and officials quickly came to know of Caren for her integrity and insight into youth leadership through her position as NSLF’s founding Chairperson. As she gained recognition, she was soon called upon to represent her generation in national and continental forums from the African Union’s Peer Review Mechanism to the African Governance Forum where she spoke in 2011.

Sitting at these tables with the continent’s chief decision makers, Caren came to the conclusion that everything hinges on leadership, that “the quality of life that people live is determined by the quality of leaders that they have.” This poses a problem in Africa, where up to $55 billion of revenue is lost annually due to illicit financial flaws. Kenya in particular scored a dismal 28 out of 100 on Transparency International’s 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index — ranking among the top 50 most corrupt nations in the world.

“We have more than enough resources to serve our needs as a people: education, food, sanitation, water,” Caren says. “However, we do not have enough to meet the greed of the few people who are greedy. We have to begin to change that by changing ourselves…Our nation is at a tipping point right now. It needs young people to say no to corruption, young people to stand up and speak out, to make a difference. We need professionals — lawyers, politicians, bankers — who practice professional integrity. Where will they come from?”

Again Caren did not wait for empty answers to this question. Instead, she set out to address Kenya’s “crisis of leadership” — to reinvent the role of leaders as one of service, to redefine success not as acquiring money, power nor fame, but instead as improving others’ lives.

This meant working with young people, those just beginning to cement their values. While school teaches important technical skills, it doesn’t necessarily teach values. Meanwhile, the dominant culture in Kenya, like in many places, encourages many to set their sights on amassing wealth above all else.

Caren founded Emerging Leaders Foundation (ELF) in 2012 to counter this narrative, to connect young people with Kenya’s most ethical leaders, teaching values from integrity to trust to servant leadership. She started mentorship sessions with a few paired mentors and mentees sharing cups of tea in Nairobi parks or The Nairobi Arboretum. Caren failed many times trying to get the program off the ground: a vindictive donor repossessed the office equipment he had provided, she ran out of funding multiple times and, nearly succumbing to the financial pressure, almost abandoned ELF for a more stable job. After a few years of struggle, Caren found that her passion, her grit, even her personal sacrifices, would not be enough to build an entire organization. She needed to learn the practical skills required to facilitate the change in leadership she envisioned in Kenya.

The East African magazine describes Caren as “amiable and pleasant yet possessed of an iron will.” With characteristic resilience, Caren applied twice to Acumen’s East Africa Fellows Program — offering social change agents the tools, training and space to innovate new ideas, accelerate their impact and build a strong network — before she was accepted into the 2014 cohort. The learning for Caren was two-fold: the Acumen Fellowship not only taught her how to run an organization — from the concepts of social entrepreneurship to how to tell her story and fundraise — but also how to help young people grow in her own program. Caren adapted parts of the Acumen Fellowship curriculum and program structure and brought it to ELF.

ELF has since grown from one-on-one mentorship sessions in public parks to a full-fledged six-month leadership training program with learning modules ranging from self-awareness to ethics to the history and Constitution of Kenya. The program has cultivated over 7,500 young Kenyan leaders to date — 98 percent of whom go on to challenge corruption through their roles in government, school systems or as heads of their own organizations. With young people like Oliver Barasa, a trained medic running social accountability audits in healthcare to Eunice Mbithi Vetu, a mortgage advisor at Kenya Commercial Bank, Caren is spreading value-based leadership across sectors to build a better future for Kenya.

As Caren says, becoming an Acumen Fellow “opened doors to so many things,” enabling her to take ELF’s work to greater heights even after her first fellowship year. Through Acumen, Caren came into contact with the Ford Foundation, now a key funder of ELF; Teresa Njoroge, an Acumen Fellow with whom Caren now partners to run the community service module of ELF’s program; and Neha Pandya and Gerald Otim, Acumen Fellows with whom Caren is collaborating to start expanding ELF beyond Kenya to Uganda.

In February, Caren, now 39, sits behind her desk at the ELF office in Nairobi, her face showing no evidence of the nine years that have passed since her speech to the African Governance Forum. Her eyes gleam with the same earnest focus, flashing periodically with a knowing glint of humor or a wide, brilliant smile as she speaks. She has covered so much ground over the last three decades, from questioning inequality in her village to mentoring thousands of young Kenyans, her resolve to seek justice never wavering.

She offers her advice to the leaders following her footsteps: “Never ever give up. Difficult times will come. You will fail. But let nothing shake you…Even the tallest trees have the deepest of roots.”

Leading the Way to Justice: Caren Wakoli’s Movement for Ethical Leadership in Kenya was originally published in Acumen: Ideas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a matter of months, the COVID-19 virus has spread to 2.6 million people across 177 countries, causing over 196,000 deaths. One third of the global population is living under some form of quarantine restriction and, as the economic effects worsen, nearly 26 million people have filed for unemployment in the United States alone. Throughout the numbers, one thing is clear: the COVID-19 crisis is hitting low-income people the hardest.

If ever there were a time to double down on Acumen’s commitment to stand with the poor and vulnerable, it is now. Staying at home and working remotely is a privilege unavailable to most low-income people. In jobs that require in-person service such as grocery check-out or janitorial work, low-income people cannot isolate themselves from others — and face a far higher risk of contagion. Even at home, many cannot practice social distancing as multiple generations of family members often share one living space. What’s worse, many of these same low-income people were already more vulnerable to the coronavirus from the start due to a higher prevalence of chronic health conditions.

In addition to higher health risks, the economic effects of the pandemic also disproportionately impact low-income people. In the worst-case scenario, COVID-19 could set back the world’s progress towards eliminating extreme poverty by three years, with The World Bank projecting that the COVID-19 pandemic will push 40 to 60 million people into extreme poverty.

Acumen’s work starts by standing with the poor. For nearly 20 years, our investees and Fellows have been serving some of the most vulnerable communities in the world — from marginalized indigenous farmers in Colombia to opioid use disorder patients in the United States to unemployed migrant workers in India. Today, Acumen’s 128 investee companies and 700 Fellows across 18 countries have collectively impacted the lives of more than 300 million low-income people. The leaders behind these organizations and companies are no stranger to their communities’ challenges and are exemplars of the grit and determination it takes to surmount them. It is the depth and breadth of our community that makes Acumen uniquely positioned to support low-income people as they bear the worst of today’s crisis — by providing rapid relief support to our Fellows and entrepreneurs on the front lines of the pandemic.

Already Acumen’s companies and Fellows are stepping up to respond to their communities’ needs:

• Healthcare investee Consejo Sano is text-messaging translations of the CDC and WHO advisories to multicultural Americans in 22 languages;
• Fellow Suhani Mohan has repurposed her company’s sanitary napkin machines to manufacture 20,000 masks per day for India’s frontline workers; and
• Sanitation investee Sanergy is distributing free soap and sanitation supplies to Kenya’s informal settlements—where nearly 5 million people lack access to running water—through a partnership with Safe Hands Kenya.

These organizations have the established presence and expertise required to serve the low-income communities most at risk, but they can’t do this frontline work without funding. This week, we are launching two COVID-19 response funds to provide the urgently needed support to Acumen investees and Fellows serving the poor and vulnerable:

• Acumen’s Global Emergency Facility: for investees and Fellows who need funding to expand access to essential services, adapt their business models, cover short-term operating expenses (such as employee salaries) or supply workers with Personal Protective Equipment.
• Acumen America Emergency Facility: for investees in the United States directly supporting frontline workers and customers and expanding access to essential services such as food, shelter and job training.

Beyond providing relief funding to address the new challenges specific to COVID-19, Acumen is working to maintain the progress we’ve made in sectors like off-grid energy. As a founding contributor of the COVID-19 Energy Access Relief Fund, Acumen aims to ensure that the 470 million people who have gained access to energy over the last decade don’t lose it — and that the off-grid energy sector’s growth continues beyond the crisis.

At Acumen, we know that above all else, navigating a crisis like this comes down to leadership. The only way we will make it through is by looking to those with the moral imagination to stand with the poor, to listen and respond to their most urgent needs. These are also the leaders we need to navigate the aftermath: when we will have the chance to change the unequal systems that the pandemic has laid bare and to create a more just and equitable world.

In the face of a global crisis like COVID-19, Acumen is committed to adapting to the needs we see within our community of leaders and entrepreneurs — and to doubling down on our mission of standing with the poor to build a world based on dignity.

Standing with the Poor Through the COVID-19 Crisis was originally published in Acumen: Ideas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Acumen, we are committed to standing with the poor, and the leaders of our portfolio companies share that commitment—even in the face of a crisis. But we also know that many companies are facing an existential crisis and that difficult choices lie ahead. We believe there is much to be learned from our own CEOs, as they lead with humility, thoughtfulness and compassion. With unbounded respect and admiration for these intrepid entrepreneurs on the front lines, we offer some thoughts and observations:

Pause and Assess

Before going into immediate triage mode, our CEOs and founders are benefiting from pausing and evaluating the implications of this extraordinary crisis on their business, markets and stakeholders. On a global level, health systems and economies are under assault and the conditions are ever-changing, but business leaders need to fully grasp the facts in order to respond as effectively as possible. In addition to evaluating country and region-level data, our leaders have found success in staying closely engaged with stakeholders on the ground. Kenya-based Coconut Holdings CEO Kyle Denning has been collaborating on critical decisions with his COO Nathan Gachugi, who is on the front-line managing facilities and working with their staff in the field. Denning says of the situation, “It’s critical for a CEO to not only pause and assess, but to leverage the capabilities and perspectives of their team in order to truly tackle this crisis.”

CEOs should create an emergency response team of trusted staff advisors who can stay on top of the facts, reach out to all stakeholders, identify best practices that have been developed by similarly situated companies, and craft an adaptive response and mitigation plan. By staying on top of an evolving situation and looking forward, unintended consequences can be avoided and the interests of all stakeholders can be optimized. These stakeholders include staff and board members, suppliers, customers, investors and lenders, and the broader community, who will all experience impacts on their health and financial security.

Remain Visible and Communicate

Our most effective CEOs are the ones who are visible and accessible to all their stakeholders. They share information candidly and authentically, understanding that this is a time for erring on the side of overcommunication. For instance, the team at Sierra Leone-based Easy Solar wrote a letter to their employees, customers and community to detail what they are doing to keep everyone safe. This includes providing all shops and offices with hand washing stations, increasing the frequency of regular scheduled cleanings across all facilities, encouraging all employees to follow precautionary health measures and providing a liberal work-from-home policy to allow for those who wish to self-quarantine.

Leaders should attune their messaging to three key audiences.

1. Employees are looking to their leaders for accurate, up-to-date information regarding coronavirus and how their companies are responding. They are eager to be heard and understood and want timely information and context, especially as it pertains to their own health and safety. According to the Center for Creative Leadership, effective communication with a company’s staff reduces stress caused by uncertainty, provides tactical guidance, and demonstrates knowledge and a sense of empathy. CEOs have a responsibility to source their information carefully and responsibly, avoiding sources of information where the facts may be distorted, biased or shaped by a political agenda. Maintaining trust is paramount.
2. Company boards, investors and lenders also need to hear from CEOs. They want transparent and frequent updates. Don’t hide the bad news. Messaging should be simple: These stakeholders want to know that the company is in good hands. It may very well be that for the company to weather the crisis, the board will need to approve additional capital raises and/or debt financings, and investors and lenders need to be prepared to respond if necessary.
3. Smart CEOs are also communicating with customers who want to hear from company leaders. Customers want to know how they will be impacted. They want to know if and when they will lose access to important products and/or services. And they also want to be certain that they won’t somehow be exposed to coronavirus in the delivery of a company’s product or service.

Frequent, repetitious and simple communication ensures the delivery of a message, especially when that message includes what the company is doing about the crisis and how stakeholders can stay safe or get help. Overcommunicate. A bounded message of optimism will inspire others, even in the darkest of moments.

Care for Your Employees

Our CEOs are, not surprisingly, reporting that the health and safety of their employees is their top concern. Senior management should clearly understand national and local health guidelines and protocols, and implement them accordingly. Dr. Bruce Aylward, the senior advisor to the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) said, “When you look to… Africa, for example, and parts of the Indian subcontinent you can see that [the spread of coronavirus is] just beginning. Even though they have very, very few cases, if you look carefully at that curve, it’s also in a phase of exponential growth.” CEOs around the world should understand what they are facing and what they are about to face. They should anticipate the problems and needs of their staff and prepare the right policies to address them.

Employees will have different needs based on their ages, experience-levels and personal situations, and they should be given an opportunity to express those concerns and needs. At a minimum, employees should receive up-to-date information on coronavirus risk factors and protective behaviors, and the personal protection equipment required to do their jobs safely. Since every organization is different, with access to different resources and facing different circumstances, no one response fits all.

Of course, employees aren’t only thinking about their health, they’re likely fearful for their jobs as well, or losing income while sick. This is the time to be as empathetic, as caring, and as fully transparent as possible, so that the employees are well positioned to make informed plans for themselves and their own families, no matter how financially or emotionally challenging those plans might have to be. We’re proud of the action taken by PEG Africa CEO Hugh Whalan. Whalan announced that Ghana-based PEG is setting up an emergency fund for employees that will allow advances on their pay so that employees can pay for unexpected needs. PEG is also offering employees extended sick leave “to accommodate general sickness that might arise from stress, as well as sickness from COVID-19.” Cutting costs in a crisis is understandable, and possibly the most responsible decision a CEO can make. But as we have seen from some of our leaders, the pain of cost-cutting can be shared across a diverse group of stakeholders.

Control What You Can

It’s unclear what lies ahead. We’ll have a clear picture only in retrospect. But with thoughtful planning, some of our CEOs have already taken hold of the reins and reestablished a certain amount of control. This has the co-benefit of reducing uncertainty for stakeholders, and in turn reduces fear and anxiety. These leaders have generally created some form of a mitigation plan. For example, CEO Jonathan Cedar of U.S.-based BioLite has forecasted various sales scenarios for the year and determined how to tighten operating costs accordingly. The key concepts in such a scenario analysis are the following:

1. Cash Management Plan: Cash will be more precious than ever in the weeks and months ahead, and CEOs need to move quickly to assess cash positions and needs. They should review overall spending, with a focus on limiting non-essential expenditures and deprioritizing unnecessary investments. Cash flow forecasts should be revised and stress tested as often as the changing circumstances require, and revenue and cash should be tracked almost daily in order to monitor liquidity. Since most organizations will be cash-strapped, extending payables and accelerating receivables may be difficult, but worth considering. Leaders should be thinking about the reduction of their cash burn, negotiating where possible, for example, with lending institutions, landlords, suppliers and senior executives. Investors should be prepped if they will be needed for additional capital. Some impact investors are already collaborating to create emergency funds to assist their portfolio companies during the crisis and should be contacted for more information.
2. Continuity of Operations: Plans should be made for staff to work remotely where possible. Understand the productivity consequences of working remotely and the incremental risks that stem from employees working from home (including data risks and communication failings). Plan to mitigate these risks. Continuity plans around the most critical personnel and team members should be considered in the event that they get sick.
3. Business Continuity Plan: Plans should be made for backup vendors for IT, remote banking and critical supplies, inputs and services. The disruptions to services and supplies that are crucial to business may be larger and last longer than expected — think many months, not weeks. Shift resources to highest value use where possible (e.g., physical sales to online, longer-term relationships and business development). A plan should identify which parts of the business should be prioritized over others in order to maintain optimal operations.

We are humbled to witness the extraordinary leadership demonstrated by our CEOs during this crisis. By taking into account all stakeholders in developing their mitigation plans and in trying to plan for unexpected and unintended consequences, they are leading with values that make us proud. Our CEOs are finding creative ways to be part of a solution to the challenges this situation creates, generate revenue and minimize adverse impacts on customers and rural communities. We’re proud to be standing with our business leaders as we all work together through this crisis and carry a hard-edged hope into the months ahead.

Additional Resources

EY: COVID-19 and Pandemic Planning: How Companies Should Respond

Harvard Business Review: Lead Your Business Through the Coronavirus Crisis

Harvard Business Review: Special Coverage, Coronavirus: Leading and Working Through a Pandemic

Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship: Crisis Management Resources

Sequoia Capital: Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020

Wharton: Coping with Coronavirus: Five Strategies to Mitigate Business Risks

Wharton: How Emotional Contagion Exacts a Toll

Navigating Through Crisis was originally published in Acumen: Ideas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“I owe everything to the women around me.”

Acumen Fellow Yogesh Kumar has always looked up to women. Raised by his mother and two sisters while his father was away serving in the Indian defense forces, he and his sisters were considered equal at home. But in the world outside, he saw from an early age that women were treated differently. He saw women considered incapable, deflecting unwanted attention on the bus and in the street, restricted to certain jobs like cooking, cleaning, or sewing. And at a national level, he saw women’s workforce participation rates fall from a high of 35 percent in 1990 to 27 percent in 2015. “It bothered me a lot. I always used to wonder: what kind of society are we creating wherein women are treated as second-degree citizens?”

The tipping point came in 2012. That year, Yogesh was working as a production engineer in Delhi when a horrific gang rape on a moving bus dismayed the city.

In the midst of the public outcry, Yogesh knew he had to act. He had to extend the gender equality he experienced in his family’s home to the world outside. But he also knew that good intentions were not enough. He needed to fully understand the problem in order to make lasting change.

So Yogesh quit his job, moved to Mumbai, and enrolled in the social entrepreneurship program at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, where he focused his studies on women’s safety. From launching a crowdsourced violence reporting platform in partnership with the local police to facilitating community workshops on gender equality, Yogesh spent his time at Tata testing multiple approaches to his mission. But none felt like they were bringing the change he wanted to see: “Sensitization and workshops are important, but I thought, ‘What’s happening on the ground?’”

Finally, Yogesh decided that to have the impact he wanted — to bring women into public spaces, increase their participation in society and challenge gender norms in India — he would find a way to get women into drivers’ seats.

Delivery, long considered a man’s job, has historically been off-limits for women. Rather than employing women in industries “appropriate” for women, Yogesh wanted to shatter gender biases by opening up a new industry. To do this, Yogesh thought that employing women in the male-dominated delivery sector would be especially powerful: people all over Delhi would see women driving and making deliveries, confidently navigating public space.

So in 2016, with two two-wheel “scooty” motorbikes and a first cohort of ten brave drivers, Yogesh founded Even Cargo, a female-driven goods delivery company in Delhi.

Even Cargo employs drivers from challenging, resource-constrained backgrounds. Many work as the sole provider for their households — and previously made do on an annual household income of less than $2,000 per year. The company recruits these women and trains them in scooty driving, self-defense, customer communications, and logistics.

But challenging gender norms is big and potentially dangerous work. In the beginning, Even Cargo started small and with caution for the drivers’ safety: making just ten deliveries per day, strictly on safe roads in daylight, and only to female clients. Today, Even Cargo completes around 300 deliveries a day, with a staff of 60 drivers delivering for large-scale e-commerce companies like Amazon and Flipkart, and has expanded beyond Delhi to Jaipur and Nagpur.

The scooty drivers are the first to benefit from the company’s success. Even Cargo delivery women make 15 percent more per parcel compared to their male counterparts in competing companies, and are significantly raising their incomes. Before delivering for Even Cargo, driver Tabbasum’s household income for a family of 11 was 9,000 rupees per month, dependent on her father’s earnings as a cook. Now, she has more than doubled her family’s income, earning 15,000 rupees per month.

For Yogesh, however, the impact of Even Cargo goes beyond the numbers to changing gendered expectations in India: “Even Cargo wants to create a gender-just society, to challenge gender norms by allowing women to have equal opportunities and come into professions that have been traditionally inaccessible to them, to have equal access to public space, to increase their participation in the workforce,” says Yogesh. “Overall, 60 drivers is a small number in a country of over one billion. But our biggest success is that we have created a sector, a profession that was nonexistent. A delivery girl was unheard of before; nobody thought of employing women in these kinds of jobs…Gender inequality is a very big, deeply rooted, global issue. It cannot be eradicated in a short span of time. We have to keep working toward it.”

In his Acumen Fellowship year in 2018, Yogesh developed leadership skills to this end, with a focus on building relationships across lines of difference: “Before the Fellowship…I had a very limited understanding of caste. Had it not been for long discussions with my cohort, hearing and relating to others’ experiences, I would not have developed the necessary sensitivity to that in the business.” For Yogesh, leadership is “ladder-ship: acting like a ladder, helping people realize their potential, and achieve what they want to do.”

This reinforced the way Yogesh envisions empowerment at Even Cargo: “In India, there are other biases that make it more difficult to tackle gender issues, like caste: caste is a major point of discrimination in India, and the women of the lower caste are the worst hit. Ultimately, the narrative has to shift from empowering women to women empowering. We don’t have to see them as people who need help. They are enablers. We have to see them as people who are helping us,” says Yogesh.

Even Cargo is driving this change in perception — from the corporations that contract with Even Cargo to the people on the street who see the delivery women whizzing by on their scooties. As deliverer Shakuntala, a mother of two who previously worked as a maid, says: “I feel a sense of pride. The men see us riding on the road, and they realise, ‘Oh, they can do this as well.’”

Learn more about Acumen’s Fellowship program and Even Cargo.

Delivering Change was originally published in Acumen: Ideas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.