Speaker 1: Bushkin im Ave Higgins, and this is Solvable Interviews with
Speaker 1: the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the world's
Speaker 1: biggest problems. My name is Samia Roy and I'm trying
Speaker 1: to solve the problem of marginalized communities by bringing the
Speaker 1: power of micro enterprise and microfinance to strengthen these communities.
Speaker 1: The problem that I'm focused on is to look at
Speaker 1: communities that are in both in poverty as well as
Speaker 1: they faced social exclusion, and to look at how micro
Speaker 1: enterprise can strengthen these communities. So we're in India today,
Speaker 1: a fabulous country that's about ten years away from becoming
Speaker 1: the biggest in the world population wise. India has had
Speaker 1: this booming economy that is slowing somewhat these days, but
Speaker 1: this huge nation has seen massive improvements in the quality
Speaker 1: of life for many of its one point three billion citizens.
Speaker 1: The work that they've done is extraordinary and the speed
Speaker 1: of it too. In the ten years leading up to
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, India lifted two hundred and seventy one million
Speaker 1: people out of poverty. However, the World Bank's median poverty
Speaker 1: line is three dollars and ten cents a day and
Speaker 1: over half of India's population are stuck there at least
Speaker 1: for now. More than two hundred and fifty million people
Speaker 1: survive there on less than two dollars a day. So
Speaker 1: if it takes money to make money, can't they just
Speaker 1: borrow some and clamber up the ladder that way? Sadly, no,
Speaker 1: that particular slice of upward mobility is not available to
Speaker 1: many Indians. Banks will not do it, claiming limitations like oh,
Speaker 1: lack of security, high operating costs. But you know there's
Speaker 1: an alternative, and that's our guest, Sammy Roy is Solvable.
Speaker 1: Microfinance provides loans to poor people with the goal of
Speaker 1: creating financial inclusion and financial equality. Microfinance can also include
Speaker 1: savings and checkings, accounts, microinsurance, and payment systems. It basically
Speaker 1: makes money more affordable to poor and socially marginalized customers
Speaker 1: and helps them to become self sufficient. Samuel Roy came
Speaker 1: to this solvable in kind of a roundabout way. She
Speaker 1: started out as a financial journalist documenting the heyday of
Speaker 1: India's booming economy, and this one piece she was working
Speaker 1: on led her to discover whole communities that were cut
Speaker 1: out of the boom all these neighborhoods that were systematically
Speaker 1: denied banking services. That's called redlining, and red lining, well,
Speaker 1: it happens all over the world. It's a discriminatory practice
Speaker 1: that was actually banned here in the US fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: Red Lining is basically the way of locking people into poverty.
Speaker 1: Samya wanted to do something to help, and eventually, when
Speaker 1: her father retired as Mumbai's police chief, together they set
Speaker 1: up a nonprofit called the Vandana Foundation to help people
Speaker 1: that were targeted by redlining. You'll hear Samia mention a
Speaker 1: place called Daravi, which is considered to be one of
Speaker 1: the biggest slums in the world, but of course it's
Speaker 1: also an affordable place to call home in an expensive
Speaker 1: city like Mumbai. Davi has many Dalit communities made up
Speaker 1: of people outside the cast system, sometimes known as untouchables.
Speaker 1: We'll hear how Samya uses microfinance to lift the people
Speaker 1: in Daravi as well as people in other regions of
Speaker 1: India out of poverty in this great exchange with Malcolm Gladwell. Oh,
Speaker 1: and when she says microfinance, she means it. For context,
Speaker 1: you should know that five thousand rupees is about seventy dollars,
Speaker 1: So one thousand rupees is only around fourteen dollars. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's get yours. You started out as a journalist, a
Speaker 1: financial journalist, so tell me how one gets from doing
Speaker 1: financial journalism to becoming interested in starting a non profit
Speaker 1: in microfinance by making a lot of mistakes. So I
Speaker 1: was a financial journalist. I used to write about the
Speaker 1: stock market, about you know, GDP and all of these things.
Speaker 1: And one of the stories that I wrote about was redlining,
Speaker 1: which exists in the US and it exists in the UK,
Speaker 1: but I wrote about it for the first time in India,
Speaker 1: which is that I got out documents from banks that
Speaker 1: said what are the areas, the people, the communities that
Speaker 1: they don't learn to And that was the time, I
Speaker 1: think two thousand and eight or so, when the Indian
Speaker 1: economy was growing at like a historic base. Call center
Speaker 1: representatives would call up and say, do you need a
Speaker 1: loan for holiday? Do you need a loan for a wedding?
Speaker 1: Do you need a loan for your education? And if
Speaker 1: the person on the other side said yes, I would
Speaker 1: and they would say okay, grides to where do you live?
Speaker 1: And if they said they lived in an area that
Speaker 1: was dominated by Muslims. Often, you know, depending on the
Speaker 1: communities that you belong to where you lived, they would
Speaker 1: say no, I'm sorry, so we can't give you a loan.
Speaker 1: I often went to the Harave and I found that
Speaker 1: there were almost a million people living there and not
Speaker 1: a single bank branch. And if you went any two
Speaker 1: bank branches where and said that you belong to the
Speaker 1: Arave and you needed even to open a bank account
Speaker 1: to keep your own money, they would say, no, sir,
Speaker 1: if you belong there, we cannot open a bank branch
Speaker 1: for you for you to keep your own money. So
Speaker 1: and the other aspect was I wrote about India's farm
Speaker 1: prices and a farmers who committed suicide in spite of
Speaker 1: owning ten twenty thirty forty acres of land. And I
Speaker 1: often thought that, with my meager reporters salary, if I
Speaker 1: ever have the money, I would like to do something
Speaker 1: to resolve this. And yet, you know, journalists we think
Speaker 1: in terms of problems. We don't think in terms of
Speaker 1: solutions or solvables as you call them. So I waited
Speaker 1: a few years. I remember I had gotten award from
Speaker 1: the Asian Development Bank for a story. I did, and
Speaker 1: it was a princely some of five hundred dollars, and
Speaker 1: I saved it for two or three years, thinking that, Okay,
Speaker 1: if I have an opportunity, I would like to spend
Speaker 1: it to to in some way resolve issues like this.
Speaker 1: And then in twenty ten, my father retired from the
Speaker 1: government and we decided that we would start a nonprofit
Speaker 1: together where we would work on financial inclusion, as in
Speaker 1: strengthening these communities where nobody opened their bank account, nobody
Speaker 1: open and gave them credit cards for business purposes and
Speaker 1: if I wanted one for a holiday to Europe, I
Speaker 1: could get a loan. And so we decided to open
Speaker 1: a nonprofit that worked on this, and we also worked
Speaker 1: in rural areas where they faced very similar problems. So
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit about all the reasons why
Speaker 1: particular communities would be either ill served or not served
Speaker 1: by existing financial institutions, because I'm assuming it's some combination
Speaker 1: of attitudes on a part of the financial institutions, but
Speaker 1: also characteristics of the community themselves. Yeah, so it is
Speaker 1: what I would call othering, where it's the bank's call.
Speaker 1: At that point, there was not much data available like today,
Speaker 1: data science makes it possible for us to say who
Speaker 1: can repay and who cannot repay, But at that point
Speaker 1: they didn't have any great empirical data to say so,
Speaker 1: and so it was just a feard. We don't want
Speaker 1: to step foot in this place. It's a ghetto. We
Speaker 1: don't feel we can find addresses in this place. The
Speaker 1: lanes are too narrow even for the sun to get in.
Speaker 1: We don't want to send up people there because they
Speaker 1: could be in harm's way, and so they didn't extend
Speaker 1: their services. They're not based too much on any data
Speaker 1: because in fact we find that today if you see
Speaker 1: India's economy today, corporate defaults are at a historic high.
Speaker 1: So all the people that banks were lining up to
Speaker 1: give loans to have defaulted on their loans left the
Speaker 1: country and they now live in Europe, having defaulted on
Speaker 1: thousands of cross of loans. Banks have known way of
Speaker 1: getting that money back, and yet they targeted the pos
Speaker 1: saying that, oh, we don't feel they would get that money.
Speaker 1: So you identify a couple of different strands of misinformation
Speaker 1: and prejudice on a part of the institutions. One is
Speaker 1: that they're simply don't know the communities don't know how
Speaker 1: to navigate them. And the second thing is that they
Speaker 1: have an intuition, which is that getting people to repay
Speaker 1: their loans will be more difficult in these communities. Do
Speaker 1: they have no empirical support for that second of those institutions.
Speaker 1: So that has changed over the last ten years. The
Speaker 1: for profit microfinance sector has stepped in and it's become big.
Speaker 1: It's sort of fairly well regulated, and now we have
Speaker 1: credit bureaus even for the poor. So we do report
Speaker 1: our data to the credit bureau that we have a
Speaker 1: fair ranular data in terms of who repays who doesn't repay.
Speaker 1: There are also national identity cards through which subsidies go in,
Speaker 1: so that has changed a lot in the last ten years.
Speaker 1: But but yes, at that point that was the case
Speaker 1: very much. But now, so what is empirically the state
Speaker 1: of our knowledge about the credit worthiness of poor communities?
Speaker 1: What is it? Yes, we know how much how many
Speaker 1: loans they have, we know if they've defaulted on loans
Speaker 1: they have. They also have a credit rating, so you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes they'll even try to game this. They know what
Speaker 1: they have a sense, they have a degree of soface,
Speaker 1: they have a slightly sophisticated sense of what is their
Speaker 1: credit rating, and that that drives consumer behavior as well.
Speaker 1: They know that in order to get the next loan,
Speaker 1: or to get a higher ticket loan, they need to
Speaker 1: maintain their credit worthiness, and they do what it takes.
Speaker 1: Having said that, access to credit for say Muslims, for
Speaker 1: the lids for schedule cast is still not comparable with
Speaker 1: what it is for uppercasting, those etc. Yeah, So even
Speaker 1: if I provide a financial institution with data showing which
Speaker 1: people in a particular community are credit worthy, that's not
Speaker 1: going to be sufficient to get them to serve that
Speaker 1: community as well as they do other communities. So there's
Speaker 1: a there's a there's a bias on top of suspicion
Speaker 1: about credit worthiness. Yes, I would say, first of all,
Speaker 1: if you were to have done nothing, Yes, if no
Speaker 1: nonprofits were stepping in, would this problem naturally resolve itself
Speaker 1: over time? Do you think the banks would eventually come around?
Speaker 1: So what happened was that, as you know, gramming became
Speaker 1: a huge success in the microfinance space, and since the
Speaker 1: time when we started, when we started in where they
Speaker 1: would hardly one or two microfinance companies, but then this
Speaker 1: sector became very big in the for profit space, so
Speaker 1: there is a lot of lending now. Many of them
Speaker 1: have become banks, they become small banks, They raised private
Speaker 1: equity money and successfully returned it. Having said that, do
Speaker 1: I see the lives of the poor having changed, Not necessarily,
Speaker 1: the lives of the poor remain in many ways, just
Speaker 1: as fragile. Their studies to show that many of these
Speaker 1: loans become consumption smoothening loans they go into say medical expenses,
Speaker 1: educational expenses, emergency expenses. We don't see the kind of
Speaker 1: asset creation, not them. And it's something that bothers me
Speaker 1: as well that I don't necessarily see the poor becoming
Speaker 1: rising to the middle class or the lower middle class.
Speaker 1: Any blow that comes, like say in the form of demonetization,
Speaker 1: really does get them back to the ground as they
Speaker 1: were before. Yeah, So describe to me your the particular
Speaker 1: niche that you're operating in as this nonprofit you're involved in.
Speaker 1: What is it? So you're trying to address a specific
Speaker 1: part of this problem. Yes, So, our ticket sizes of
Speaker 1: loans are the smallest in the industry in India by far.
Speaker 1: The average ticket size in India would be about twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand rupees for per loan. We started five thousand,
Speaker 1: so we are specifically targeting porest of poor. About eighty
Speaker 1: percent of our borrowers are Muslims. Then, in the rural
Speaker 1: area where we work specifically look for widows of farmers
Speaker 1: who committed suicide. In the last nine years our work
Speaker 1: has grown, so while they are not all the widows,
Speaker 1: we also have at risk women like who have whose
Speaker 1: husbands have defaulted on loans, they're working on farms, they
Speaker 1: maybe single mothers for different reasons. So we are looking
Speaker 1: for the most vulnerable communities. We work a lot with
Speaker 1: waste because who work on the landfill of Bombay, So
Speaker 1: we definitely look for the most vulnerable of communities, and
Speaker 1: apart from microfinance, even to make them credit worthy, we
Speaker 1: give them everything from say counseling to my enterprise training.
Speaker 1: I remember when we worked with widows. We wasted months
Speaker 1: and months with us saying hey, we have a grant,
Speaker 1: we can give you money, why don't you start a business,
Speaker 1: and they, having faced years and years of abuse and
Speaker 1: depression and vulnerability, said we can't do anything. What do
Speaker 1: we do even if you give us the money, we
Speaker 1: have no way of doing anything we just endlessly do
Speaker 1: weating and debating on farms. So we started classes for
Speaker 1: them that hey, here's what you can do, and once
Speaker 1: they started, almost all of them have been highly successful.
Speaker 1: So describe your typical loan applicant and then tell me
Speaker 1: the ways in which they're with your help their life
Speaker 1: might change over the course of After the course, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you, I'll take a rural example, if you don't mind.
Speaker 1: So we have many of these widows. We've picked widows particularly.
Speaker 1: You think that they will be old, but many of
Speaker 1: them are very young. They're between twenty and forty years old.
Speaker 1: Often they'll have two children or more. They will be
Speaker 1: looking after their parents in law, who are typically old
Speaker 1: and real. When we spend months and months telling them
Speaker 1: you should do something, they'll say, we can't do anything.
Speaker 1: We've had many women calling us up. When we call them,
Speaker 1: they say, please don't call us, because you're going to
Speaker 1: push us to do something and we can't do anything.
Speaker 1: So one or we've had a few who've dropped out
Speaker 1: for that reason. And eventually when we'll push them and
Speaker 1: there's there'll be a lot of motivation and a lot
Speaker 1: of counseling everything, and when they agree, just that act
Speaker 1: of stepping out of the house to take our loan
Speaker 1: or to take a grunt. Sometimes we've even given small
Speaker 1: grunts when we feel they don't even have food in
Speaker 1: the house. We've given them a grunt to start with.
Speaker 1: So now they have a lot of fear in their
Speaker 1: mind that if they were to sit. Let's say, we've
Speaker 1: had a woman who sat outside on the street and
Speaker 1: sold glass bangles, and people came and told her, you know, like,
Speaker 1: have you forgotten. Women are supposed to stay within the house.
Speaker 1: They're not supposed to be sitting on a street and
Speaker 1: selling bangles. And at first she said, and then she
Speaker 1: thought about everything she had learned in her glass and
Speaker 1: she said, you know what, I'm doing this to look
Speaker 1: after my children. If you will give me money for
Speaker 1: my house, I will stop doing it. And just the
Speaker 1: confidence to say that took a lot for her. But eventually,
Speaker 1: she being a widow, it became very big in though
Speaker 1: marriage market. As you know, Indian weddings are very big.
Speaker 1: It'll always be bigger than what the parent can afford.
Speaker 1: So she started walking miles and miles to different villages, saying,
Speaker 1: here I can sell bangers and whatever else. It is
Speaker 1: you need for a wedding, and so she would walk
Speaker 1: something like ten to twenty miles a day. In spite
Speaker 1: of having sickles cell anemia. She educated her daughter who's
Speaker 1: now a teacher. She treated her son, she treated herself.
Speaker 1: She had throat cancer and you know, but she never
Speaker 1: stopped working through any of that because she knew that
Speaker 1: that is what was keeping her family going. Another one
Speaker 1: has educated her son is an engineer today. He works
Speaker 1: for one of the biggest auto companies in India. Some
Speaker 1: of them had mortgaged their gold and they brought it back.
Speaker 1: So I think that first step is the hardest. So
Speaker 1: in that case, the only you were talking about, you
Speaker 1: did you begin with a grant or alone. We began
Speaker 1: with a grunt and so the grant would have been
Speaker 1: how large thousand rupees a month? Yeah, oh I see.
Speaker 1: So it was an ongoing We gave it to her
Speaker 1: for about a year yea. And by the end of
Speaker 1: it she was supposed to do something. So she has
Speaker 1: no obligations to repay this initial amount of money. We
Speaker 1: actually visited her house and we saw that she had
Speaker 1: no money even to eat and in that position, to
Speaker 1: become another source of debt to her just didn't feel
Speaker 1: right to us. So instead we said that in this
Speaker 1: one year, we'll train you, we'll do anything that you want,
Speaker 1: but by the end of this year, you need to
Speaker 1: become self sufficient. So one of our people when she
Speaker 1: finally she agreed and she decided to keep glass bangles.
Speaker 1: And I remember two months later we decided to visit
Speaker 1: her and we heard that yet she started her business
Speaker 1: and she had a little piggie bank in her house
Speaker 1: and she had kept all her earnings and that that
Speaker 1: in case we came, she could give the money back
Speaker 1: to us. Wow, that's how the degree of responsibility. So
Speaker 1: how in that year, how long did it take her
Speaker 1: to come up with the notion that she wanted to
Speaker 1: do to sell glass Bengals. It took her several months.
Speaker 1: At that point, we didn't have an office. We used
Speaker 1: to sit under a tree thirty forty women, and you know,
Speaker 1: they would all, what will you do? You know, it
Speaker 1: was a deadlock where we would we would have forty
Speaker 1: women sitting around and so, well, we will fund you,
Speaker 1: you know, with a small amount of money, what would
Speaker 1: you like to do? And they would say, we can't
Speaker 1: do anything. And finally this One woman stood up and
Speaker 1: she said, you know, I was pregnant when my husband died,
Speaker 1: and now my son is five years old. I have
Speaker 1: to do something. I don't care what anybody says. And
Speaker 1: when the next time she came for the meeting and
Speaker 1: she said, yes, I've started. I run a little like
Speaker 1: a corner shop within my own house. It's running, I'm
Speaker 1: earning money, and I feel so confident I can face anything.
Speaker 1: And that gave confidence to other women as well, that yes,
Speaker 1: we can do it too. It's a notion, this question
Speaker 1: of there resists the reluctance to do something? Is it?
Speaker 1: You said? How much of it is a product of
Speaker 1: just how kind of traumatic and overwhelming your lives a been,
Speaker 1: and how much of it is if they don't know,
Speaker 1: they actually don't know what it would? I mean, if
Speaker 1: you ask me to start a business tomorrow, I've taken
Speaker 1: a long time figure what I would do right? How
Speaker 1: much of it is simply that what on earth business
Speaker 1: could I do even if I wanted to. It's both,
Speaker 1: and we tackle both. You know. When we've had this deadlock,
Speaker 1: we called a trainer in and he turned out to
Speaker 1: be very nice because he actually he said, let's we
Speaker 1: have a blackboard here right down. Why what are the
Speaker 1: hurdles you face in doing a business. So some of
Speaker 1: them said, well, I have no ideas. What would I do.
Speaker 1: I've never done a business before. And he said, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's fair. It takes a different kind of mindset to
Speaker 1: be an entrepreneur. So he said he thought of the
Speaker 1: smallest of things that they could do. I think it's
Speaker 1: also a little bit of I wouldn't do lack is
Speaker 1: a very strong word, but the lack of imagination, because
Speaker 1: they don't know what urban markets are like. So he
Speaker 1: gave them the most easy examples. He said, could you
Speaker 1: sell crushed peanuts? Could you sell peeled sugar cane? And
Speaker 1: he gave them this example. So you guys in a
Speaker 1: village can just eat a sugar cane. You have strong teeth.
Speaker 1: But people in cities they're not used to it. So
Speaker 1: if you were just to peel a sugar cane and
Speaker 1: sell it, you could earn so much more money. And
Speaker 1: they were just surprised, you know. Or if you just
Speaker 1: crushed chilies and sell it, you could earn a lot
Speaker 1: more money, and they were just like, wow, I could
Speaker 1: do this. So he just gave them hundreds of easy ideas.
Speaker 1: Then one woman finally stood up and said, I worry
Speaker 1: what are people going to say? And he reminded them
Speaker 1: of a Bollywood song, like people are going to say something,
Speaker 1: it's their job to say something. We don't need to
Speaker 1: worry about those people. And suddenly this room full of
Speaker 1: women was just giggling like he just made light of
Speaker 1: the fact that, yes, that discrimination all that, that judgment
Speaker 1: is there, and here let's deal with it head on.
Speaker 1: So let's go back to the example of the woman
Speaker 1: with the Bengals. So she gets a grant for a year,
Speaker 1: a thousand rupees a month. Then she decides at some
Speaker 1: point that she would like to she making the class
Speaker 1: Bengals stuff. Now she's buying them from somewhere else and
Speaker 1: buying them wholesale and selling them on the street. So
Speaker 1: you then, at that point when she has this idea,
Speaker 1: you then say, we'd like to give you a loan. Yes,
Speaker 1: how much of a loan are you giving her? We
Speaker 1: started with five thousand, She's now taken twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: each time from us several times. Yeah, and she what
Speaker 1: is the term of repayment on that twenty five thousand?
Speaker 1: It's interest free. Who's interest free? Yeah, oh, I see,
Speaker 1: and so but she is. So can you tell me
Speaker 1: a little bit more about how kind of credit worthy
Speaker 1: she has been. Yeah, she's been perfectly credit worthy. Actually,
Speaker 1: in rural areas, we found people to be extremely credit
Speaker 1: worthy because also, our loan is interest free, so we
Speaker 1: do tell them. Even when demonetization happened, there were a
Speaker 1: lot of politicians who came and told them, hey, you
Speaker 1: don't need to repay et cetera, and we told them
Speaker 1: to listen, our loan is interest free. So you know,
Speaker 1: we have a bond with you. We're not doing this
Speaker 1: because we're trying to make money off of you or
Speaker 1: we are not like another money lender or something like that.
Speaker 1: So you know, we want to have a long term
Speaker 1: relationship with you, and when you return your money, we
Speaker 1: give it, give it to somebody else who needs it,
Speaker 1: just like yourself. Yeah, so she is she going to
Speaker 1: be using you in perpetuity as a revolving man of credit.
Speaker 1: So we are we are grappling with that at this
Speaker 1: point because she's been with us for now. This is
Speaker 1: our ninth year, so she wants to graduate to bigger loans.
Speaker 1: She also took a loan to take a tailoring machine.
Speaker 1: She makes starry blouses. She's very highly enterprising, so she'll
Speaker 1: have bangals, she'll have jewelry, she'll have anything that sells
Speaker 1: in the manage market, flowers, flower pots. Every time I go,
Speaker 1: I find something new that she's selling. So, yes, she
Speaker 1: can take a bigger loan and she can RepA it.
Speaker 1: Can she go to a bank? Would a bank be
Speaker 1: interested in her? Maybe? Or maybe not? No. This is
Speaker 1: interesting because I would have thought that eventually people would
Speaker 1: graduate out of your program and the banks would see
Speaker 1: this is a woman who's now been an entrepreneur for
Speaker 1: nine years. She can presumably the bank can come to
Speaker 1: you and say, what is your credit history? And you
Speaker 1: can tell you can tell them what a good credit
Speaker 1: risk she has been. What would be problematic for a
Speaker 1: bank about this woman? See, banks don't always have that
Speaker 1: last mile reach. We've tried this in our urban project
Speaker 1: and it's done. It has been successful, but not completely
Speaker 1: successful because the bank will not come to your house
Speaker 1: to take the loan. The bank will tell you come
Speaker 1: to our branch and pay the loan. If you don't
Speaker 1: repay on a particular day, we'll call you. The bank
Speaker 1: may not necessarily call you. They will just say al
Speaker 1: a defaulter, So that last mile connectivity that we provide
Speaker 1: is not necessarily provided by a bank. Having said that,
Speaker 1: we have had borrowers who have taken bank loans and
Speaker 1: repaid bank loans as well. Is the idea to be
Speaker 1: the primary source of credit for a large group of
Speaker 1: people or to be constantly graduating people out into the
Speaker 1: into the commercial credit market. Yeah, we would like to
Speaker 1: stay at the bottom of the pyramid. Those who get successful,
Speaker 1: we would like them to be bankable. We would like
Speaker 1: them to grow their businesses. But yes, this is a
Speaker 1: conundrum that we face. How do you raise the money
Speaker 1: that you Where does the money come from? For your
Speaker 1: pool of capital? We get grunts and we also take
Speaker 1: some low interest of social sector loans, like we had
Speaker 1: a loan from the Social Business Fund, so that came
Speaker 1: to us at a lower interest rate. And what are
Speaker 1: your if you look at your total pool of capital,
Speaker 1: how much of that is grants and how much of
Speaker 1: that is loans? At this point it would be almost
Speaker 1: equal grants and low interests. So some portion of your
Speaker 1: capital is being returned. But but the point of grants
Speaker 1: is always to get someone stable enough so that they
Speaker 1: are taking out loans. So it's kind of now, that's
Speaker 1: sort of super interesting that what you're doing essentially is
Speaker 1: preparing people to enter the credit market. Yeah, and also
Speaker 1: sort of credit related behavior. Just we already have a
Speaker 1: credit history that we create with them. Their first credit
Speaker 1: history is created with us. We have a pass, but
Speaker 1: we show them that yes, every week, this person is
Speaker 1: repaying every week, or they've had so many cycles of loans,
Speaker 1: so they are now credit worthy. They have the kind
Speaker 1: of behavior that you would like from a borrow What
Speaker 1: are the most surprising things you've learned over the course
Speaker 1: of that nine years. I mean, I'm guessing what you're
Speaker 1: doing now does not match your expectations of what you
Speaker 1: thought you would be doing nine years ago. Yeah, it doesn't.
Speaker 1: So in the rural Project, what surprised me was that
Speaker 1: the most difficult step was the first step. They were
Speaker 1: a lot of exclusion. There was a lot of even abuse.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of like, oh, if your husband
Speaker 1: is dead, you no more have anything to do with us,
Speaker 1: and we can treat you any way we like. While
Speaker 1: I knew that it existed, I think it was more
Speaker 1: than what I thought it was, And that made that
Speaker 1: mountain in their mind tremendous to come out of that,
Speaker 1: to do something, to fight that fight that yes, I
Speaker 1: can do something and I will do it. To have
Speaker 1: that confidence was the most difficult thing. Having started. Very
Speaker 1: few have failed and you going in and thought it
Speaker 1: would be the reverse. Yes, in urban areas. What has
Speaker 1: surprised me? And I mean, I could be wrong, but
Speaker 1: this is my personal experience. I feel that urban poverty
Speaker 1: lacks dignity and there's a tremendous fragility to urban poverty,
Speaker 1: even with our loans. What disappoints me is I don't
Speaker 1: necessarily see people getting to the next stage very easily
Speaker 1: because there's very little social security in India, so one
Speaker 1: illness or you know, like a wedding, can just wipe
Speaker 1: out their savings. I remember we had this. We had
Speaker 1: this one moment who was a fruit seller in Bombay
Speaker 1: and on a handcut. She used to sell fruit and
Speaker 1: she was doing very well. We paid her three we
Speaker 1: gave her three or four loans and one day I
Speaker 1: was just walking through her community and I saw her
Speaker 1: standing there in her fruit cart and it was totally empty.
Speaker 1: So I got very upset with her. I said what
Speaker 1: are you doing? And she just started crying. And she
Speaker 1: was a middle aged woman. I suppose why are you crying?
Speaker 1: And she said, you should have come a week ago.
Speaker 1: Why did you come today? I had so much fruit?
Speaker 1: You didn't come then? So I said, well, what did
Speaker 1: you do with all the money? She said, you know,
Speaker 1: my father, he died in and we had my brothers
Speaker 1: told me that we need to do the funeral immediately.
Speaker 1: So I used all the money I had. I took
Speaker 1: a flight and I went to and she was very
Speaker 1: proud of it that she thought, what better he could
Speaker 1: my money bet that I could go for my father's funeral.
Speaker 1: And if I didn't have this money, I couldn't have
Speaker 1: been able to attend it. So small, I wouldn't say
Speaker 1: this is a small thing, but like medical expenses or
Speaker 1: wedding related expenses. Educated they're very aspirational to educate their children.
Speaker 1: There's been a huge move from government schools to private schools,
Speaker 1: low cost private schools, and they will pay whatever it
Speaker 1: takes to shift their children to private schools. And the
Speaker 1: pressure for that, I feel sometimes is spared more by
Speaker 1: women than by you. You're not arguing with her choices,
Speaker 1: You're saying that that is a that is the outcome
Speaker 1: that they want. In many of these, do you feel
Speaker 1: that their lives are very fragile? You know, if we
Speaker 1: go into it with a degree of innocence thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: I paid you fifty that whatever, we give you a
Speaker 1: loan of fifty thousand rupees. By now you should have X,
Speaker 1: y Z, But we don't realize that they are. They're
Speaker 1: facing headwinds from really everywhere. So in that case of
Speaker 1: the woman with the root stand, what did you do next?
Speaker 1: We continue to lend and she's doing well. Now someone
Speaker 1: like her who's been running a fruit card for so long,
Speaker 1: I would think she should now have a shop. She
Speaker 1: should be able to render shop and have a shop.
Speaker 1: So that taking that next step out of poverty is
Speaker 1: just a huge step, just because of all the headwinds
Speaker 1: that they face. Too. Finals one is give me a
Speaker 1: sense of what a typical day looks like for you,
Speaker 1: Either me or my father will personally meet an interview
Speaker 1: everyone who comes for a loan. So usually they come
Speaker 1: to our office, but by the same token we do
Speaker 1: go out on the field just to see what are
Speaker 1: they up to these days. I've been researching a ways
Speaker 1: picking communities. So I go to the garbage landfill of
Speaker 1: Bombay at least every week, climb up, try to see
Speaker 1: what people are picking, what are they buying, what are
Speaker 1: they eating in their house? Because even to understand their
Speaker 1: household finances it's not necessarily written neatly on a firm.
Speaker 1: It's also by knowing what did you have for dinner
Speaker 1: last night? What did you do for a festival? How
Speaker 1: did you celebrate a festival? Could you buy clothes for
Speaker 1: the festival? Or your medical expenses how are you meeting
Speaker 1: those medical expenses? And that often helps to strengthen communities
Speaker 1: rather than just pouring cash in that community. So we
Speaker 1: do run a few after school classes, I clinics, so
Speaker 1: based on the feedback that we get from them, we
Speaker 1: do try to resolve their problems in non financial ways
Speaker 1: as well. Are the things that ordinary people can do
Speaker 1: to help. They can do a lot to help. First
Speaker 1: of all, I think that I myself and I think
Speaker 1: anybody hearing about these women, they can be inspired by
Speaker 1: these women. And then yes, they can get involved in
Speaker 1: any way they like, whether it is by teaching, by
Speaker 1: donating money, by just spreading the world around all of them.
Speaker 1: The great writer Jonathan Swift said that a wise person
Speaker 1: should have money in their head, but not in their heart,
Speaker 1: and that's what kept coming through for me when I
Speaker 1: listened to that interview. Also handy, of course, is money
Speaker 1: in your pocket and the transformative power of investing in
Speaker 1: people For the first time, that sounded so real and
Speaker 1: incredibly empowering. India remains one of the fastest growing major
Speaker 1: economies in the world, and it's impossible not to watch
Speaker 1: in awe as the country surges toward a brighter future
Speaker 1: with digitization, globalization and favorable demographics. But poverty is hard
Speaker 1: to shake and many people will stay stuck there unless
Speaker 1: financial opportunities are inclusive and fair. India has a chance
Speaker 1: to refuse to repeat the mistakes of other countries. Today's
Speaker 1: Solvable the work Zamia and her dad do at the
Speaker 1: Vandana Foundation providing financial opportunities while la can help everybody
Speaker 1: to win. Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and
Speaker 1: the Rockefella Foundation, with production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant,
Speaker 1: Laura Sheeter, and Ruth Barnes from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's
Speaker 1: executive producer is Nia LaBelle. Research by Sheer, Vincent Engineering
Speaker 1: by Jason Gambrel and the great folks at GSI Studios.
Speaker 1: Original music composed by Pascal Wise and special thanks to
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine, Julia Barton, Carly Mgliori, Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn more about solving today's
Speaker 1: biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot org slash salvable. I'm
Speaker 1: Mave Higgins. Now go solve it.