Financial institutions and business corporations working with bottom-of-pyramid communities have China silicone rubber traditionally focused on scaled-down versions of their conventional products for serving their varied needs. Role models matter more than words. This kind of “help” is likely to stunt development because it creates dependency, conflict and feelings of helplessness. It is a tough balance between not being subservient and not coming across as disrespectful. Local users have much better skills than engineers at transforming technologies to suit their own situations. Build with what they have. If the users do not value the benefits, they will not use the facilities. In the absence of inclusive governance, the people at the grassroots, that is, the intended beneficiaries of poverty alleviation programme are left abjectly dependent on a bureaucratic delivery mechanism over which they have no effective control. They are shouted down by those who consider them illiterate and uninformed and who abrogate to themselves the wisdom and the right to speak for the poor. Instead of mapping problems from needs through external solutions, we must help the community identify its values and then map these through local resources to develop a vision and action plan. He can be reached at moinqazi123@gmail.The real tragedy of the poor is that their voice is unheard in forums, even at those which are exclusively devoted to their problems. Incidentally, this process itself is a great capacity-building one on both sides. If you are already inside such an organisation, do what you can to help colleagues realise that development is an ongoing, endogenous process. We must be challenged to see the reality of poverty and vulnerability through the eyes of a particular individual, typically a woman, and to understand how that person strives to overcome it. These clients have different requirements than traditional urban ones and hence research has to be done before introducing products and services in the field of financial inclusion or consumer goods — to see their feasibility for the market. As the Malagasy proverb goes, “Poverty won’t allow him to lift up his head, dignity won’t allow him to bow it down”.

We cannot approach people with readymade solutions. To that end, we must introduce bank clients to people like themselves who are succeeding in the kind of environment in which they themselves will need to succeed. This way we can get a feeling of her daily worries and needs and develop solutions that have relevance to her needs. Mentors are more important than formal training. We must deal with people who are more permanent in the system and are the key interface with children and parents. And yet the majority survives and adapt.We need to be very sensitive while interacting with them.What is required is sympathetic but hard-headed leadership, operating from a variety of institutional bases (government agencies, NGOs and banks). The mobile phone is being integrated into various business processes, from vital health information to rural families, poor farmers gaining access to commodity prices to providing to paying for water.

Personal experience is the best way to create agents for change.You must not volunteer for work where you “educate” the community about its problems, in which you generate plans and then get “buy-in” from the community, and in which the priority is the development product (latrines, health centre, church building) rather than the people, for which you bring in the capacity rather than help build it within the community. Live with them.Approaches to rural development that respect the inherent capabilities, intelligence and initiative of rural people and systematically build on their experience have a reasonable chance of making significant advances in improving those people’s lives. | MOIN QAZI Published: Sep 24, 2018, 1:32 am IST Updated: Sep 24, 2018, 1:32 am IST Thinking about novel uses of existing products, such as mobile phones, is a powerful source of solutions.Our questions should be: “How can we help?” or “How can we contribute” and not “This is what you should do”. Winning a point is not as important as achieving long-term change.Instead of mapping problems from needs through external solutions, we must help the community identify its values and then map these through local resources to develop a vision and action plan.The core of our relationship must be with the people as also with the government at ground level. The alternative system would be participatory development, where the people themselves are enabled to build their own future through elected representatives responsible to the local community and, therefore, responsive to their needs.Consider, for example, the remoteness of our professional lives as bankers from our villages. If, for this, we have to compromise for the time being, we must be prepared for it.Thinking about novel uses of existing products, such as mobile phones, is a powerful source of solutions. The tacit knowledge that senior executives have accumulated over the years must be passed on face-to-face, revealing culture in action. But is it required for accelerated growth to translate into inclusive growth? The answer, I fervently believe, lies in inclusive governance. It is not pleasant for anyone to be pushed away with an “All right, now sit down”, when that person is halfway through expressing an issue of life and death. The oppression of impatience came home to me only when I was on the other side, years later.We need to heed the wisdom of the legendary philosopher Lao Tzu: “Go to the people. Even the best university-taught skills aren’t going to be particularly useful there. It is important to analyse the problems together to evolve solutions. This is why the divide between the professionals and the villages is so serious; now if we do go to the villages, it is to study them, to do good for them — but not to become of them.It’s crucial to help people shift their thinking so they believe they can do the job.

The preference for growth over social justice, indeed, the argument that economic growth is the road to social justice, is advocated over and above increased spending. It should make common cause with rural people, learning with and from them how to make desired and sustainable improvements in the customers’ conditions of life. Intervention may still be called for appropriate strategies to be devised, but the kind of intervention that gets them over a bump in the road, not the kind that builds the road, provides the car, petrol and driver, buckles the seatbelts and pays the tolls.Over years of wandering the villages, I have been compelled to revise much of my received wisdom about what our rural priorities should be. And, of course, the public places where such meetings are held are designed to keep the poor away from any scope for voicing their problems. In the village, each successive generation is born into the rigidity of caste; each generation must bear the rapacity of the moneylender and the merchant and the random cruelty of nature: floods, famines and pestilence. Love them.”The writer is a well-known banker, author and Islamic researcher. They realised very late that low-income communities have their own peculiarities and they require exclusive and mass customised products and services appropriate to their needs. Inadequate investment in locally-led initiatives is one of the two ways in which we fail to ensure that those who are most affected by inequity have pathways to address it. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say ‘We have done this ourselves’.