Challenges of an NGO and social enterprise in Hyderabad
We continued our “tour” to find out more about CHORD, by visiting their office, an apartment that has been re-purposed into an office space near the school we visited the day prior. We had an interesting discussion about multiple challenges CHORD is facing as an NGO, beyond running their day to day operations, such as:
1. Fundraising becoming more and more difficult — as now about 90% of the funding comes from corporate sponsors (previously up to 20–30% of funding came from government), which require comprehensive and customized business cases, expect objectives that align well with their corporate social responsibility guidelines and tracking and documentation of metrics to measure the impact of their contribution. In addition funding is provided only for shorter time periods and much more targeted, meaning the NGO can’t freely decide where and how the donations are leveraged.
2. Securing and being able to afford qualified resources / talents especially for “back-office” type tasks that are required to run or secure the future of the NGO (e.g. marketing and fundraising), but considered “administrative overhead” by the donors and thus are expected to be limited to 7% of the donations. In this context I would like to recommend a very interesting TED talk, that talks about how we treat NGO’s compared to private sector when it comes to topics like marketing and compensation (see link at the end of my post). We also learned that finding qualified and dedicated volunteers in India for NGO’s is difficult — beyond the corporate volunteers that help with some of the classes on Saturday and enjoy playing with the kids.
3. Urbanization and continued growth of Hyderabad resulting in real estate values rising exponentially. This impacts one the one hand the people CHORD is serving, on the other hand the affordability to buy or rent the required space and provide the infrastructure and facilities. Example: The landlord for the property and buildings of the school we visited the previous day is considering selling the property as developers have made him a lucrative offer, so they can build additional apartments where the school is currently located.
Our next stop was a building donated to CHORD by Supergas, which houses one of 2 stitching facilities for the social enterprise created by the Growth Gene Project (SPRIHA Collections), and a training / skilling center for adults that provides classes for sewing as well as computer skills. The building is surrounded by open land, but even here the real estate values have significantly increased over the past 3 years due to nearby development of upscale townhouses.
This sewing facility
- Provides continuous employment for about 20–25 people (~80% women)
- Has about 2 cutting machines, 30 sewing machines, a machine to make button holes and stitch buttons on, 1 fusing machine (for collars etc.) and 1 steam iron
The primary garments made in this facility are uniforms (school and corporate), followed by designer clothing made as subcontractor for other brands and for SPRIHA collections.
The training facility trains currently about 100 women per year in sewing / garment making and another 100 adults in computer skills. All the training classes are free of charge and targeted towards the less fortunate, to enable and empower them to make a living to support their families. The classes are about 2 hours / day, Monday through Saturday and take about 3–4 months. At the end of the class participants are tested and receive a certificate. While several of the participants would like to pursue an employment at SPRIHA collections, the job openings are dependent on the available equipment. Many of the participants in the garment making classes start their own small enterprise and some of them are leveraged as subcontractors when SPRIHA collections has to fulfill large orders in a short period of time. We got a chance to conduct a quick Q&A session with the participants in the current sewing class. The skills taught here are truly empowering and enabling many of them to transform their lives. We are working on capturing a few of the stories of children and adults that are benefiting from CHORD’s offerings and I hope to share at least one or two with you before the end of my sabbatical.
We made a quick stop for lunch at CHORD’s other formal school that provides classes for about 250 children in pre-school and grades 1 through 10, before we visited a SPRIHA collections stall sale at Accenture.
SPRIHA participates in about 6 corporate stall sales for the employees at various multi-national corporations in Hyderabad. This is SPRIHA collections only direct-to-customer retail channel and limited to a few garments as well as bags. It was important for us to see which products are sold at these sales and how the products and brand are perceived, as CHORD is considering to expand the social enterprise (SPRIHA collections) into the business to consumer market, by developing, making and selling more of their own designs, primarily due to the highly seasonal demand patterns of the uniform orders as well as the small margins in the bulk make-to-order garment business.
I would love to hear your thoughts on
1) this potential shift from mostly make-to-order standardized items (uniforms) to creating and establishing a clothing brand and
2) the TED talk posted below, that points out how differently we think of and treat charities and NGOs compared to private sector enterprises
Recommended TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong/discussion?quote=2082
Other important links:
