Lest you think that we spend all our time adjusting to the culture, I'm going to fill you in on what we spend our 8+ hours a day at work doing. (For a picture of life in the office, see Carl's blog - there's a link up at the upper right of this page.)
The Company: ekgaon technologies (for more about their vision) works with rural farmers by providing them with solutions on mobile devices to help them become more efficient and productive. To explain (simply) the process: The farmers get loans (if needed) to buy a mobile device and then buy a card that gives them access to ekgaon services. They are asked 3 questions: what size land they have (usually less than 4 acres, often less than 2), what their yield has been, and what their crop variety is. Based on this data, ekgaon uses SMS to communicate with them directly about specific steps for their land. It tells them exactly what to do (how much and what kind of fertilizer to use, how to plant, etc.) They also get market updates on suppliers, buyers, costs, and prices, and weather updates for their area. Currently, because of ekgaon's services farmers' income increases, on average, by 15% (and that includes the farmers that don't follow all the steps).
The Project: ekgaon currently helps 11,000 farmers. There are 300 million rural farmers in India not to mention millions more in surrounding areas in South Asia and Northern Africa. Ekgaon wants to expand into these areas but there is still a lot to learn. Carl and I have basically been given the assignment to perform market research about how ekgaon can expand. We are hoping to meet with potential financial investors, possible franchisees, companies that affect the expansion (mobile phone companies) and organizations that we could partner with because they have similar goals.
The Process: Carl and I only had a few hours with the CEO, Vijay (see pic at right) to understand the company and the project. For the last few days, our goal has been to identify as many companies as possible that it would be valuable to meet with. Once we identified them (through online research), we notified Vijay and got any contact information he had with them (that took awhile and was kind of sparse.) Since then, we have been researching each company online, finding someone to contact, and setting up meetings with them (next week in Delhi, the week after, Bombay). We have set up two meetings for next week (we're ecstatic about this because it's way harder than we thought to meet with these people). This first week is pretty much research online all day which gets very tedious, but we're starting to see the payoff and are very hopeful for our meetings next week. I think we're both nervous that we won't be able to add much value to ekgaon because so much of what we need depends on other people (an absent CEO, non-English speaking employees, and contacts with companies that are busy and don't care) BUT we're remaining positive that it will work out and we figure that anything we can get is more than Vijay would have been able to do himself. I'll keep you posted on our successes. :-)
Here are some of the organizations we're getting to know:
Agricultural Insurance Company of India
India Department of Agriculture
Yes Bank
World Bank (this may be my personal favorite)
Union Bank of India
Tata AIG Insurance
Bharti AZA
IFFCO-Tokio
Royal Sundaram
ICICI Lombard
Hindustan Unilever
ITC (they have the best supply chain in rural India - we did a case on them first semester)
Jain Irrigation
Airtel
Aircel
BSNL (check out their website design.... and this is the #1 mobile company in India....)
Vodaphone
Idea
AGRA
Kickstart International
African Economic Outlook
Food & Agriculture Organization
HDFC
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