Winning Harvard Business School’s Top Prize in Social Enterprise

Which professors and classes did you find you most helpful?

I took Business at the Base of the Pyramid with Kash Rangan, who’s one of the leaders of social enterprise. I loved the class, and he’s always been an inspiration to me for taking my ideas forward. Plus, seeing the business models across for-profit and nonprofit businesses really helped. Launching Tech Ventures with Tom Eisenmann and Entrepreneurial Finance with Ramana Nanda were key for getting the Saathi business going. They both forced me to think about funding and launching the business.

What does this win mean for you?

That we’ll be able to go to India and actually launch the business – we’ll be on the ground and able to work directly with the women. HBS is full of super ambitious, intelligent people with great ideas, and I’ve learned a lot from my classmates. Having their support and knowing they believe we can really make an impact means so much to us.

Is there anything you would compare it with?

Other than winning this competition, the two most exciting things in my life were getting into MIT – I always wanted to be a mechanical engineer, and I never thought there was a chance – and honestly the same for HBS. You just never think you will. It’s like, “Am I the admissions mistake?” I would say getting into those two schools is equivalent to this.

What are your long-term plans for Saathi?

By the end of this year we hope to be in five villages. The way our business model works is we partner with rural women self-help groups, which are groups of about 10 women that gather together to start their own microenterprises.

These women will purchase a machine from us for $500 and they’re able to repay that within three months. It’s not like a 10-year investment. Then they will manufacture their own pads and run their own businesses, managing their own books and accounts. You need two women to operate the machine and the other eight to sell these pads in their local communities using a door-to-door distribution model.

We’re targeting villages with a population of 10,000 people, which corresponds to roughly 2,700 women of menstruating age in that village. The idea is one village per machine. We want these women to start their own Saathi enterprises.

The main goal is to address the three A’s: affordability (using waste banana tree fiber); availability (doing local manufacturing); and the biggest one is awareness (using door-to-door distribution and word-of-mouth marketing).

The idea is that whatever village you’re in, whatever country you’re in, your local resources should be able to adapt to your needs – whether it’s coconut fiber or papyrus. This is not just about finding affordable pads but really trying to help these rural women feel empowered, to run their own enterprises and move up the socioeconomic ladder.

My grandmother grew up in a very rural village and missed school every month because it was taboo to go during this time. She says to this day it was something she was always upset about. To know that someone in my family went through this is ridiculous. If we can be the ones to solve this issue, it would mean the world to us.

DON’T MISS: A Frontier Economy For Adventurous MBAs or Social Entrepreneurship: The Best Schools & Programs

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