A yogurt that changes millions of children in rural area in Bangladesh-Stories of Grameen Danone(1)

Before sharing the story, let's take look the magical  yogurt first

The yogurt in my picture were bought in the supermarket below my hotel. It's quite easy to find them in the fridge. The left one is mango flavor and the other one is original.

Original flavor

Mango flavor

This yogurt's named called Shokti+(Shokti means energy in Bengali), which aimes to solve the malnutrition among the children in Bangladesh to prevent the diseases caused by lack of some crucial micronutrient(iron, calcium, vitamin A, for example). This magical yogurt is a social joint venture of two organizations: The 2006 Nobel Peace Price winner Grameen Bank and the other is the largest food company in France- Danone

The birth of this idea was during a talk in 2006, Dr Muhammad Yunus proposed the idea of launching social business in Bangladesh to Franck Riboud. He was intrigued by this idea then decided to join this venture. They spent one year in understanding the local demand, finding the problems and the appropriate product then finally building the product line. The first sell was in 2007.

Yogurt itself is a popular food among Bangladesh people therefore people won't feel strange to Shokti. So people like this new product accordingly. There are two channel to sale this Shokti

The first channel is the store equipped with fridge. It's not enough because it's not common to find such kind of store in rural area. In order to get close to villagers, they create another channel which is called Grameen Ladies. The Grameen Ladies are the women who borrow the money from Grameen Bank to start their micro entrepreneurship to earn more money. This is actually a successful community network of Grameen Bank. Grameen Danone decided to use this channel to deliver their product so they recruited and trained some women to sell Shokti and give them 1.5Tk sale commission. By doing so, they can get hundreds Tk of extra income per month

At the beginning, women are willing to join because it's a good extra income to their family. However, the amount of sale got stuck and the numbers of Grameen Ladies becom unstable. Some of them just joined for several days then leave. Why this effective way(it should be) fail  and result in such result?

I mentioned how sympathy affect our view toward Ramadan and Iftar in the article, Sympathy, a door to understand another world-Ramadan and Iftar. We ususally tend to think and judge our custimer in our frame. We thought it would work to give the women a good reward who were seeking chance to start their own job. However, we forgot how importnat the the role culture play in the local area. Why?

In local cultrue, the women should stay at home and keep house. They can't go too far from their house without their husband accompany or permission, not to mention to ask them do door to door visit sales. Without the permision, it will make women feel uneasy so the family permission play a key role in this strategy. The reason why Grameen Ladies in Grameen Bank succeed was because those ladies do their job at home(sewing, having a small stand for example) and therefore they don't have the concern of going outside without permission.

In conclusion, the reason why this method failed at first was because it overviewed the local life, culture and work. We usually tend to view ourselves as do-gooder,  we are helping them but only in the help thought by our own mind. Realizing this point, Grameen Daone modify the way of Grameen Ladies system. After some communication and modification, it works and the amount of sale start to roar and the number of grameen ladies become stable than before.

The story hasn't been ended due to the crisis in 2008~2009, which was food crisis in the world. It's a tough challange Grameen Danone would encounter. However, crisis is opportunity and also evidence that shows technology is not exclusive to rich people, it can be used to generate value to all people in the world. Please refer to:A yogurt that changes millions of children in rural area in Bangladesh-Stories of Grameen Danone(2)

Note:More details about Grameen Danone, please refer to:Building Social Business-The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity's Most Pressing Needs