Samuel Benoit

That’s right, again.  A couple months ago I got recruited by a couple classmates to spend the last module of my master’s program in Ahmedabad to help run a pilot of social enterprise they had been working on.  I arrived on Monday morning and will be here until mid-August, from which point I will have to rush back to California for my graduation ceremony and present some work at another Association for Baha’i Studies conference.

Pulse Active Food Savings is a social enterprise that aims to tackle food insecurity in urban slums by offering urban slum dwellers a safe, and reliable way to build up a buffer of savings which can be redeemed for food purchases.

The idea for Pulse came from a group of graduate students at Hult International Business School in San Francisco.  It wasn’t pulled out of thin air.  The team of highly educated and experienced young people from five countries (India, South Africa, Nigeria, Canada and Norway) came to it based on their study of emerging trends in technology, development and social enterprise.  It was also based on their collective experience on the ground.

The team and the idea beat out a host of others that competed at the regional Hult Prize competition.  This included those developed by teams from much more prestigious business schools than ours.  Schools like Stanford, Schulich, Warwick, Berkeley, John Hopkins, NYU, and yes, MIT.

The team has also been getting the support and mentorship of a bunch of smart people who know much about development and social enterprise.  It was also selected by judges representing IBM, Autodesk, Saachi and Saachi, IDEO and McKinsey.

We know that many people don’t have bank accounts, making it difficult to find affordable ways to save money that they can use to plan for the future and face unforeseen challenges.  We know that food security is a serious challenge for many of those same people, taking on many forms.  We also know that the majority of them own or have access to simple mobile phones.  We know that simple SMS technology is being used in different places for amazing things such as community mobilization and supply chain management and health education.

All of this doesn’t change one important fact.  We still don’t know if it will work.  More specifically, we don’t know if it is something that would address the aims it is supposed to (food security and financial stability), and if it is something that people would actually want to use.

That’s why I feel this pilot is so important.  Tomorrow we will start our phase of intensive interviews and observation to find the ideal Pulse client and to engage them in the design process.  From there we are going to launch a test of the service to prototype the user experience and see what effects the service might have on people’s lives and how it should be refined.

Our challenge in carrying this out is adopt a humble posture of learning that has been coined the beginner’s mind.  This is to “approach a subject with excitement, an open mind, and no preconceptions, regardless of how much knowledge they have gained about a subject.” (source)

Using simple cell phone technology that people can use to save money and boost food security.  It’s a deceptively simple idea that has already generated lots of excitement.

We set up a page on the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to help translate that excitement into action on the ground.  So far there has been a very encouraging show of support.  Classmates, family members, friends and strangers have been throwing in what they can to make it happen.  Right now we are making one more push so that we can meet the budget on our very lean operation.

If this is an idea you are as excited about as we are, we want to invite you to be a part of it.  Please visit the GoFundMe page for more information on the fun rewards and to support.

This is mostly a repost from my team’s collective blog.  We will be using it over the next few weeks to share photos, videos, stories and reflections from the field.