Prospects for a Prospectus

Am posting this as a blog rather than as an addition to the comments Diia’s blog.

When we (or people we associate with) started off in development there were not many people around and it seemed natural to get into get into many topics. I think a further reason was because of our association with grass-root rural development. If you want to do something about life in a village you have to get into everything (agriculture, health, gender, sanitation, ecology etc.etc.) But lots has happened since and the whole development game has long been mainstreamed and there are specialized NGOs even in rural development. (microfinance organisations, sustainable agriculture organizations, forestry organizations, housing organizations, dalit rights organizations and so on). So one kind of thought this is leading to is that if you are a generalist it is difficult to scale up activity or even survive.

Bears thinking about. One of my gripes/critiques of what Satyam Foundation does is as follows: How can you work in five cities with seven areas of work (health, education, livelihood etc.) and hope to make an impact in all of them with a miserly budget of Rs.5 crores? You probably need to pick one area and do a really good job of it.

The other thing that bothers me is our tendency to be a boutique and not mass-production (is that the antonym?). As we get into the NGO mode it may be wise to have some service offering(s) that gives us the locus standi (beyond our individual credentials) to participate in public fora. Service offerings have a further advantage of being replicable and scalable – and so once they are designed and validated constant intellectual effort is not needed. It will be really cool if 70-80% of our work did not involve innovation and intellectual effort (but mere operational excellence!) but brought in the bread and butter.

All this in justification of choosing a domain and a niche within it on which to focus. Not that it means you dont do other things (given what we are I think that is inevitable).