The Business Solution to Poverty by Paul Polak

Author:Paul Polak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2013-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

What Went Wrong?

Families seemed to have no problem making charcoal with the simple tools Amy and her team had developed. But the amount of bagasse available proved to be less than the project’s designers had anticipated.10 And for too many, the amount of work required to produce a small quantity of charcoal simply wasn’t worthwhile. To make things worse, the price of waste bagasse at the sugarcane factory began to rise for reasons unrelated to the MIT project. Additionally, as D-Lab’s later experience in Uganda has confirmed, Fuel from the Fields in Haiti neglected opportunities to achieve economies of scale, requiring every participant to do all the work of gathering (or buying) bagasse, producing charcoal, and fashioning the briquettes. In MIT’s successful Uganda project, briquetting is carried out by small or medium-sized enterprises that reduce the amount of labor required of participating villagers.

It’s always easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. Failures are a regular occurrence for anyone who implements good development initiatives. That said, the biggest issue for the Haiti charcoal project seems to be that Amy and her team applied the right solution to the wrong problem:

• If Amy and her team were addressing the problem of creating a simple, radically affordable technology that poor families could use to make charcoal out of waste biomass in Haiti, they did a brilliant job.

• But if they were attempting to solve the problem of helping poor Haitian families increase their income by making and selling charcoal from waste biomass, they failed because their design process wasn’t predicated from the outset on the needs and economic aspirations of the customers who were expected to buy and use the charcoal.

To address the second problem, they would have had to find ways to understand and satisfy the customer preferences of two critical groups of people: the families trained to make charcoal, and potential charcoal customers in Haiti who were expected to buy the charcoal those families produced. They didn’t speak to enough people in those two groups, they may not have asked the right questions, and perhaps they didn’t listen carefully enough, either. The fatal flaw in the project was that no one on the field team understood marketing.

To motivate the families making charcoal, some members of the MIT team believe they would have needed to create cost-effective charcoal-making tools that could produce more charcoal with less labor. This would call for a very different system of charcoal-making tools and processes than were actually created. Other members feel the biggest constraint was not the technology but the lack of available bagasse.11 However, they agreed that the project did not integrate marketing concerns into its overall design.

To satisfy the preferences of charcoal-buying customers, the bagasse charcoal produced would have needed to compete better with wood charcoal, and Amy and her team would have needed to put about twice as much time into the design and implementation of aspirational branding, marketing, and last-mile collection and distribution strategies as they did into the design of charcoal-making technology.

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