Customers not beneficiaries

Was in Mathura yesterday and was talking to a bio medical engineer who gave me the 411 on the Honeywell pilot we're running there. It's not going well.

Basically Honeywell has come up with a small diagnostic machine that can be used by semi trained rural women to conduct simple diagnostics like blood pressure, and other health indicators. While the device works fine and relatively easy to operate, people in rural India don't really want to use the service. So we run clinics, but have no patients because villagers don't want to learn they are unhealthy, they want to be cured if they are sick. And obviously a diagnostic machine can't cure them of high blood pressure and you can't have semi trained villagers running the kiosk prescribe medicine.

I was sort of frustrated on hearing this - the age old prevention is better than cure debate. It totally made sense from the villagers perspective - why find out if you're sick, better to go to a temple or mosque and buy an amulet that can cure you instead. But from a social impact perspective, it regular checkups and prevention is so much more effective.

But how does a social enterprise like Drishtee attack this problem?

I then came across this on Monitors website.

"The most common mistake among unsuccessful market-based solutions is to confuse what low-income customers or suppliers ostensibly need with what they actually want. Many enterprises have pushed offerings into the market only to see them fail. People
living at the base of the economic pyramid should be seen as customers and not beneficiaries; they will spend money, or switch livelihoods, or invest valuable time, only if they calculate the transaction will be worth their while."

The answer (whether I like it or not) is simple. Drishtee doesn't attack this problem. If this is not what people at the bottom of the pyramid want, then as a profit seeking enterprise we shouldn't be offering this. Now if Drishtee had deep pockets and wasn't a nascent start-up, by all means - run a re-education campaign on the benefits of prevention. But till then, leave the re-education to the public sector and non profits, or to the big corporations like Honeywell.

On a side note, Monitor has done India focused research on market based solutions for the bottom of the pyramid market. You can read their report here. They are also running a conference next week in Delhi. If you're interested, you can register on their site.