people ask why did you move from microcredit to social business

I try to explain I I habent moved; I have always thought microedit is a SB

So we want to add more things in social business apart form microcredit

I got into many other issues – health problems, education problems, growth problemsTto me it became almost natural that every tine I see a problem I create a business to solve that problem –its my habit, over time this is what I did

In the early years Grameen cane up with something called 16 decisions with the borrowers. In the process of implementing these decsions, I tried to come up with a business solution to each

Firsr one we faced was problem of night blindness: I see children in the family who cant see anything after sunset, so I worried about it, talked to the doctors they said it is vitamin a deficiency, so we tried to find out way to address – there are 2 option either you can give vitamin tablets or make people eat more vegetables – we chose the option of vegetables, so we started encouraging our borrowers to grow vegetable, eat more vegetable, feed more vegetable to the children, and they complained we don’t know have the seed, we don’t know ho to do that, so we said of we’ll make a solution for that so we created a business selling seeds, make seed available to everyone in tiny little packets with 1 taka worth of seeds, very good quality seeds, people loved kit , they started growing fresh vegetables round their house and a result we became the largest seed seller in the country- we sold so  much seed in  the rural areas- and gradually night blindness disappeared- not that grameen bank alone did this now everyone became conscious of the fact that if you have vitamin a there will be no night blindness in the country

Next one we concentrated on the toilets because people don’t have the toilet habits just go out and do it in open, so we made a rule in grameen, if you want to join grameen bank you have to dig a hole, and use it as a a latrine, and in the beginning there was tremendous reluctance, but we were so insistent that if you want to join grameen bank this is the only way you can do it, you have to show us before you can even talk to us that you have a hole you can use as a latrine, so it became obligatory for borrowers and then we said if you want to go to the next step. We will give you a loan to build a sanitary latrine, again it became a business, give loans, sell sanitary latrine, and we started a separate unit just to build sanitary latrines, and sell it to borrowers so grameen bank became synonymous that every family in grameen bank should have a sanitary latrine, and we have that

Then we started looking at other things lie electricity, there is no electricity in the country 70% on bangladeshis don’t have electricity, so we created a company called grameen energy to start bringing solar energy  to the country , and it’s a solar home system, buy it , install it, and you get electricity in your home – at first very difficult to convince people- to sell 5 solar systems a month was difficult but today it is so popular that we sell more than 1000 solar systems per day and by end of december we will be reaching our millionth solar system; it took us 15 years to get to selling one million but it will take one year (2012) to double that number form 1 million to 2 million because once you have built up the speed it goes very fast; then we started selling cooking stove because fume of cooking stove creates respiratory diseases- one of the top killer sin bangladesh and many other countries for women is cooking- by cooking they kill themselves by respiratory disease, not only themselves but their kids because children are always around the mother when she is cooking and they all inhale this fume – so we are selling improved cooking store simple to install immediate to use, cheap,- so it became another business – again to address the problem of coking stove is not only respiratory disease  also cutting of the trees- you are continuously cutting trees to cook – so we said we can reduce amount of wood you need by 50%, so you have 50% less trees killed because of this – so now we are selling 1000 cooking stoves per day- and we’ll soon be selling 2000, then 3000 a day because people appreciate- the more people get it the more people know about it –the point I wanted to make all these companies,, all these programs we built in a business way we had no intention of making money out of it; I don’t own a single share of any company I created, I have created more than 50 companies, but I don’t any single share, it never crossed my mind that I needed to own a share, only reason I did that to solve problem this is the most efficient way to solve problem, then I started thinking why does whole world runs business to make money, why cant they do this to solve problems, this is such an efficient way of solving problems

Then I started creating other companies – we call it Social Business – a nursing college : we need lots of nurses so we created a nursing college to bring the young girls from grameen families to become nurses- world class nurses to boot,

Its all covered by the cost and everything

Then we started eye care hospitals, which takes care of cataract operations we do cataract operations even for the poorest within token cost as we make money at the top for high income people and cross-subsidise – so the whole eye care hospital runs with its own money – then we did it the first one, kit worked beautifully, it reached breakeven point so we opened another one, now we are creating 4 of them because they are all self-sustaining, I started calling them social business this is a non-loss non-dividend company – them comes franck riboud, we had a discussion  in paris, neither of us knew each other, suddenly I said why not start grameen danone in Bangladesh, he said yes stood up shaked hands with me and said I agree, I said I haven’t finished yet, he said what else, I said it will be a Social Business . He said: what is a Social Businsss? So I gave the whole speech on SB, he stood up and shook hands I agree, then I realised he didn’t understand my bangladeshi english because a businessman isn’t supposed to agree so quickly, then on the way back I write him a long email explaining what I said and what he had agreed, I said if you want to change anything please feel free if I misunderstood you, he wrote back : I understood every word of what you said, agree with what you said, lets get going, lets move .. he comes to Bangladesh to start the whole thing, he declares a date I want this plant to be here one year from now,. I want to come back to launch this, his whole team worked very hard to keep that date and that’s the grameen danone story, now there are many more companies coming forward its an enormous response we are getting; and if we can open up – companies like danone, adidas, uniqlo, basf have enormous technological capacity if we can channel this capacity  to solve problems of the world , these problems will disappear . we can do it through channel of Social Business that’s why I feel is so important –and these companies that I named and many more like Intel – they have lots of patents in their control, and I keep arguing you use very little of the patents, some are way gone, you don’t use it at all,  why don’t you use it for Social Business, or give it to a pool we can call it patent bank or patent pool which can be used by anyone who would like to use it for social business , there is enormous intellectual capacity lying idle, it doesn’t do good to anyone just because company owns it nobody can touch it, there is so remarkable ideas and competences lying in these patents. And many companies now have agreed to put these patents in a common pool for social business use – so lots of things can be done , we can change the world around if you focus on the SB idea. And each one of us has the capacity to create at least one SB, it doesn’t need to be big it can be very small, and once you have created the seed we can create a whole plantation the way we did with microcredit