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[Sid] 

Hi.

Welcome to The exChange Podcast, where we discuss stories of System Orchestrators and the journey of exponential change.

Today I have with me Lakshmi, who handles FO at C4EC, and Sriram Bharatam, the founder of Kuza and me, Sid, your host.

Sri. Hi. Welcome to our podcast.

Thank you. Sid.

If you could just dive into a little bit of your journey as Sriram, not as the founder of Kuza, and let everybody know what your origins are and where you came from. 

[Sriram]

Coming from a very small town in the state of Andhra Pradesh, did my schooling and became an engineer. But I was very clear, as I was doing my mechanical engineering, I realised that I’m better with people than with machines. So it was a deliberate choice that the career option that I opted for, then landed, in a very good job at HCL group way back and had the opportunity of working with Shiv Nadar and his team, and that’s where I started understanding how large enterprises work. Had an experience of going around doing all of that. Yeah. So that’s really where I’m coming from.

[Sid]

So before I move into the next part of the conversation, I have a small kind of game. This is a game that we’ve played before. This is Pictionary. I’m not sure if you have played that before, but what I’m going to do is give you one chit. You’re going to draw what the word is. These are words from the work that you do. These are not random words that we picked. These are words from the vocabulary that we use. 

[All speakers]

Let’s hope I get this right. Some people have very little. Some people have a lot more. Abundance. Perfect. Well done. This is challenging, man. Oh, I can take a shot at it. Yeah. So we can jointly draw it, and we can make Sid guess. Yes. Okay. We should make the host do some work. Right? Exactly. Okay. Knowledge Transfer. School. Okay, let’s try and break it down. I was talking about knowledge transfer and learning. Or why do kids go to school? To learn. And then I was going to do the opposite of that. Unlearn. Unlearn! Yes. That’s the one. That’s what I was going for. Okay.

[Lakshmi]

Sri, so you were at HCL, working at a tech giant in India, working with one of the top industry leaders. But today you are based in Nairobi, in Kenya and working with farmers and youth from rural areas. And that’s a long distance to travel, both in terms of problem areas and distance.

What is the problem you wanted to solve? What did you see? What brought you to Nairobi? What did you observe that made you make this big transition? And if there were some pit stops on the way, please do walk us through where all you stopped to have chai or coffee and finally get to Nairobi.

[Sriram]

Yeah, that’s a good one, Lakshmi. Thank you.

I think a lot of what I do, how I do today is coming from the upbringing, from a smaller town where you kind of are looking for resources and trying to do a large enterprise where it was entrepreneurial. It’s actually a very entrepreneurial organisation.

So I had like six passports, and I kept them so safe somewhere that I lost them. I lost my passport. And I was back in Hyderabad, where I come from. And that was like October, late October. And I never took a leave for 4-5 years. So busy running around doing energetically, doing all of that stuff. So, running around the passport office, I had nothing to do. And on 30th October 1999, there was a cyclone or hurricane, for some of you not from India, in the state of

Orissa, one of the eastern states. And at about 3 a.m., I woke up and I was telling my wife, Bharathi, that, you know, I have an idea. What if each Indian can contribute 50p or $0.01, we can raise enough money to support a cause. And she’s a trained CPA, chartered accountant. And she said, “How?”

Oh, that means you believe in the idea. It’s about how. So let’s figure it out. So we did some scribbles like this, and by I think noon next day, we said, yeah, why do we need to go begging everybody for one cent? Is there a way we can make people donate by not paying? And that’s the birth of an idea called Cause and effect.

It’s called causeaneffect.org. The imagination is “Let’s create a website.” Not that we knew how to make websites. This is the pre-Google era, when we used to do dial-up internet connection, and we put together a website called causeandeffect and said anybody going to the website will click a button called Save A Life. A page opens with 18 brands showcasing their identity, and each brand would pay the website one cent or 50 paisa. So one click by you, Sid, and it generates $0.18. 

Thanks to the corporate training and all, we managed to put out a press release and reached out to all the media folks. And there was no big political news that day, so all of them showed up. I gave them some chai and a biscuit, and told the story, and they published it. It was on Doordarshan Prime Time in India and Star News. It became a global phenomenon. Cut a long story short, in less than 45 days, we managed to create a global community of 18 million people who worked towards this cause and raised over $1.5 million.

So I call this the first divine intervention in my life: losing a passport. And that led to our entrepreneurial journey.

So me and Bharathi, we kind of gained our experience and knowledge and insights and confidence, most importantly, that yes, we can do something different.

And yeah, we became entrepreneurs. 2000 started well, the first, you know, full cycle digital consulting agency. And we were very clear that we would use the power of digital technologies. ISB very closely worked with Pramath Sinha and team, founding days of ISB. So we picked up some institutions. We worked with Pradhan, different development partners and, 5-6 industries. Everything was going okay until then. We work very closely with NASSCOM. NASSCOM was my customer. So we put together a strategy for small companies. And Som Mittal, the then president of NASSCOM, said, “Hey, we are going to Africa for the first time. And I don’t see your name on the list. Why are you not joining us?” I said, “What will I do?” Som said, “No, no, come, come.” So, I ended up travelling to Africa for the first time late 2010 and took Kenya Airways. We were going to Nigeria and thanks to Kenya Airways, my flight got delayed and ended up spending a day Nairobi and you land on the continent for the first time not knowing anybody, and then we also had like 5 or 6 other passengers and part of the delegation. We said, “What do we do?” So we hired a local, it’s called a matatu, which is basically a small minivan. We went to safari.

I saw the in-flight magazine had safari and interesting things. So, I said, “Let’s go there.” And that’s where I started seeing something called M-PESA. And a common person is able to now transact and do all of that. Then, I saw 3G on my iPhone in 2010 and they thought this was fake 3G. It was conditioning, that you know, Africa is poor. And that’s the kind of conditioning we were brought up with.

So, again, thanks to the second divine intervention, I ended up spending a day in Nairobi, met a few people, and moved around all in a day. I usually think with my heart, my brain always tells me, and I don’t listen to that because if I start listening to it, I don’t think I would have. So yeah, long story short, I called my wife and daughter. Then I said, “Okay, you know what? Let me come back in a week’s time.” And this is the fifteenth year I’ve lived in Kenya. That’s how a week became 15 years.

[Lakshmi]

You were there for a day and a week, and now many, many years. But what made you pick the problem of smallholder farmers, rural livelihoods? What did you see on the ground that catalysed your thinking and actions?

[Sriram]

I think as I was, I mean, going on a new continent, meeting new people, on average, I used to meet like five, six people every day. And the beauty of Kenya is like the day starts very early, by 7:30/8 AM. And I also realise that you can reach out to anybody and call them for a breakfast meeting or lunch, and you get an audience. That was very refreshing for me, but meeting a lot of people and then moving around locally, I saw there’s a good entrepreneurial energy in the country. Then, my good friend the late Bob Collymore (Robert William Collymore), who used to be the CEO of Safaricom, one of the largest companies in East Africa. He also got into the country at the same time.

So we went socially, and we started looking at […] So look at two people coming into the country and then looking around. And then I think that’s where the curiosity in me and in fact, yesterday I was sharing with somebody, I actually went through a journey of unlearning and I could live that life but couldn’t draw that, you know? But the point is that I think I probably unlearn that, you know, to draw. Right? 

So the conditioning and the mindset shift started happening when I started learning on the ground, looking at what the challenges are. We became an innovation partner for Safaricom, a teleco and the largest company, then KCB, the largest East African bank, and then Google. So between these three giants, I saw, you can actually become an Intel Inside or bring in the concept of open innovation, bringing three giants together and trying to solve a problem, so… I had no idea what the problem we’re solving was. But as I started looking at it, I realised that there are small businesses, two people, three people, four people companies, and then I did my own little research and I realised that, you know, a country like Thailand with a similar kind of population, the SME sector was not really contributing to the GDP of the country. The fundamental question is, why are they not able to do that? 

And then I heard this word called ‘capacity building’ for the first time. Nairobi has the second largest UN base after New York. And then, you have a lot of international development partners. All of them are doing capacity building, which seems to be the common theme in many of the development sector partners. What is capacity building? 

So as I was kind of trying to understand, this is when we also co-created and put together a public health solution for tuberculosis. Nobody called us. Nobody asked us. So we said, is there a way we can start looking at something where we can make a difference? And it’s called “tibu”. Tibu in Swahili means cure. So with Safaricom and my then company called Iridium Interactive, we kind of started putting into the solution, and my ambition was relatively coming from India. And I said okay, the population of over 40, 45 million, probably the size of one of the states in India. 

I felt somehow confident internally that, you know, I think we should just roll this nationally. And then there was a lot of friction from people in power and the ministry. I couldn’t really understand why they were hesitating to do this. But then I really understood that for us to be able to roll out a solution like this nationally, we had to i.e. the ministry had to train close to 5-6,000 people, community health workers or frontline people. And there was no budget for anything like that. But that’s when I heard the word ‘capacity building’ and then looking at digital skills. And what if we are able to do that, do that using some of the video-based rather than bringing everybody into a room or a common place and do that? The budget was like insane: to train over 10,000 people for a week, somebody said it cost $5000 – $6000. And nobody had that kind of money to train all of them. 

So that’s when we introduced for the first time: micro learning. I mean, we started calling that micro learning, which is bite-sized learning. Rather than teaching everybody, can we slice it down and then kind of put it together? And the technology and innovation, again, we had to do was completely tablet-based, cloud-based, the very early days of cloud. And that’s when we went to the rural areas and then realised what were the things [that were] going on. So one thing led to the other, and working with small businesses and also working on the public health solution is when we realised that, okay, there seems to be a gap here and Kuza was born and registered in 2012. 

So, but literally we started working only from 2013-2014 timeframe. Kuza Biashara. Kuza in Swahili means ‘grow’. Biashara is a business. Literally, we said, let’s create opportunities for small business owners to learn, connect and grow. So the first phase of Kuza was when we started doing a lot of programming. That’s when we started working with private foundations, development partners, NGOs and all of them. And the programming took us to like 11 countries on the continent. We worked with a little over 1,50,000+ small businesses, but we could see there is something going on when you open up, when most people don’t know what they don’t know, but when they see a different way of doing it, they were quickly able to adopt digital, not because they loved digital, because it was helping them to solve a problem. 

Just to give a small instance, most business people were carrying a small flash drive with their data and keeping it in their wallet. It was so easy for us to say, “Hey, why don’t you get onto something like a Google Cloud?” And then email. So very basic solutions, but kind of hand-hold them and guide them. 

What we learned is simplicity scales. And the narrative for a business owner or a small business owner as to what is the problem I’m solving for them and what is it that they can quickly get – the instant gratification is what was the mantra. So, along this line is when we saw 60-70% of the people, the businesses that were working with (small businesses) were dependent on agriculture directly or indirectly. 

That got us thinking, saying, “Okay, so if that is the space and then, our big audacious goal in

2012 when we started is let’s impact a million people.” And then we had to put a date. We said, “By 2018.” And I remember, we won the Kenya Vision 2013 Innovation Award within the first year. And Larry Madowo was interviewing me on live television, and he asked me, “What’s the vision?” I said, “1 million people/businesses by 2018.” He said, “How are you so sure about it?” I said, “My gut feeling is telling me that we can do that.” And by the way, we achieved that by 2016. 

That gave us the confidence that, you know, let’s add a few more zeros to it. So currently we are going after a billion people, in this lifetime, and we are close to putting a day to it, 2035 maybe, we want to impact a billion lives. And then we started looking around and if 60-70% of the population is dependent on agri and food systems, why not zoom into that?

[Sid]

You’ve spoken about unlearning, you’ve spoken about scale and you’ve spoken about reimagining briefly. And one thing I think I learned when I was listening to your Ted Talk is you spoke of unlearning to scale.

And that’s something very interesting from both Sri as a leader and Sri as the entrepreneur because every entrepreneur wants to scale. So, when you say unlearning to scale, could you just explain that a little deeply?

[Sriram]

When we started looking it from the lens of a societal angle, we said, “What is the definition of scale?” If I am doing in one geography and if I take it to 100 geographies, is that scale? Is geography a function or is it a multi-sectoral? At least we didn’t have that kind of wisdom to kind of intellectually answer it, but we said let’s reimagine it differently. 

The first question we asked ourselves was, “What is available in abundance in the rural areas?” Lots and lots of smallholder farmers, a lot of youth, unemployed, rural youth, to be precise. And there are a lot of community spaces. So we looked at all of this and then said, “Okay, so usually the tendency is that I need to go to school to learn. And if I am really talking about farmers and others, the training and capacity building means, if I go to school and learn.” So I remember this quote by Alvin Toffler. Somewhere, it was working in my subconscious. And I said, “What did he really mean?”

So the basic assumptions that, you know, you have to go to school to learn, we said, “Let’s unbundle that. Why do I need to go to a place for learning? Can the learning not come to my doorstep?”

[Lakshmi]

When you speak about the learner here, in this case, not you the learner, but the learner from the community, can you paint a picture of who the member of the community is? Who is the student here?

[Sriram]

Thanks for calling that out. Let me paint. Let me present the context of the situation. So I’m talking of rural areas where an average Kenyan farmer, to just share some statistics, is a little over 60 years. And an average Kenyan is about 18. The median age is over 18/19 years. And this mama farmer, who is 60 plus, never went to school, she’s got one to two acres of farm. 

Most of the time growing something like maize and the myth is, “Let me grow my maize so that I don’t go hungry.” So she would have some small livestock. That’s about 10-15 chicks.

Sometimes 1 or 2 cows. Not necessarily, but it’s possible. And that’s her asset. And an average family size would be about 6 to 7 people. 

[Lakshmi]

And the women farmers would be the main primary breadwinners? 

[Sriram]

I would say 60-70% of them would be women farmers. So that’s the context in which we are operating. Her son or daughter would already be in some big city. And most of the time, because it’s so expensive to have a family, their kids would be back with the grandmother because it’s so much more easier going to school and all. 

And so it’s kind of an ecosystem where it’s a harsh environment out there. And then you have so many of the vagaries of weather, drought and climate, and it’s all rain-fed irrigation. So that’s the context that we are talking about. So, bringing the economic dimension to this, on average, this mama farmer would be earning $3 to $4 per day. It was roughly about $1,000 per annum. That’s the economic situation. And even to double-click on that, KYC as we call it, Know Your Customer, nobody knows this mama farmer. Yes, she’s in the census as a farmer living in this location. But really, what is she growing? What kind of seeds and fertilisers is she using for her farm? And is she using any kind of mechanisation? How is she storing the grains? How much is she losing for post-harvest? 

Just to give a statistic, about 30 to 40% of the produce is lost towards post-harvest. That means they produce, however, with all the difficulties. But they’re going away because [of] the moisture absorption or whatever has happened and [because] she has no access to markets, and at the end of the day, she ends up selling it to a local broker who gives her money immediately. So that’s what it is. So that’s the context. When we looked at all of this, we said, “Okay, let’s see how we can make a difference.”

So the government should be doing the job, right? So the government has something called Agricultural Extension Officers, like in health. For every 400 farmers.UNFAO recommends that you need to have one government extension officer. The reality is, on average in Kenya, one for every 5000 farmers. So now we know that support is not sufficient and she needs more and we couldn’t figure it out. I don‘t remember the page number, but the first time I flipped it, I found this: And reflecting, because I just saw [the book] ‘Think Scale’ I thought that’s kind of the thinking with which we went on this said, what if we are able to create a new cadre of quasi-like, we can’t bring doctors or scientists into the rural village, but like a paramedic equivalent, can we get some para agriculture coordinators? Like how in health, we have health workers. 

So we brought the rural youth together, and then we started thinking, let’s get them ready, ready to start thinking agribusiness. And that’s one of our solutions. We call it Rural Entrepreneur Development Incubators. And as we are experimenting and doing this, this is when Covid happened. The positive side effect of Covid is that we managed to scale almost 20x the world because the way we kind of conceptualised the whole thing is we looked at, we broke this entire complex thing into a few basic bite-sized things. 

Number one is agronomy science. We said, what would it take for us to demystify science, and codify in such a way that a mama farmer would understand in her local language? And this is where taking a digital-first approach helped us. We took about 40 different crops and livestock, like dairy, poultry, sheep, goats, and grains and vegetables. And some method to the madness, we figured out what are the priority ones and took all the good agronomy practices and created bite-sized video content on each of these agronomy practices. Step number one. 

But then these farmers don’t have smartphones. They can’t afford the internet. The internet is not available everywhere. Then we had to again go back to the drawing board and start thinking, okay, what if we can take the internet to them? So we came out with these backpacks where we had these micro projectors. We are self-powered. You don’t need a battery. I mean, it is battery-operated, so you don’t need electricity. The video content is sitting in a device, and that device is the one that’s going in a backpack on the shoulders of this rural youth. 

So one, demystifying agronomy practice. The second is having a micro distribution mechanism. Third, creating this new cadre, which we now call agripreneurs, agricultural entrepreneurs, those are rural youth. They have to mandatorily be from that village and have to be living there. That’s a precondition. Educational qualification is something that we really do not give too much importance to. 

So for every 20-25 agripreneurs, we will have a Kuza mentor who would provide the emotional, functional and technical support to them. The emotional support is something that they need. They need to really get the confidence, like going back to 2000, between me and Bharathi, we became entrepreneurs because there’s nobody in our family who is coming from an entrepreneur background or business background. That experience and exposure of causeaneffect, seeing that, yes, gave us the confidence that, yes, we can do it. So everybody needs that kind of support system. My support system is Bharathi, and her support system, hopefully, is me. Yeah.

[Lakshmi]

But this kind of a mindset of unlearning and relearning or even the approach of looking at abundance, what is available in plenty, as opposed to looking at what is missing, or you know, classically, when we’re faced with social problems, a lot of the scarcity and the lack of facilities, really jumps out at us. And that’s what many people working in the sector tend to think about. Did you always come in with the abundance and ‘let’s look for what is available’ mindset or is that something that you trained yourself to do or built the capacity to do? How did this come about? Because it’s a very different way of thinking.

[Sriram]

Honestly, I don’t know. I wish I have a formula that I can put out, but I think it’s also about the upbringing and the way we grew up. And I really, I have deep gratitude to my parents and my grandparents and the community a lot. I mean, community is where we grew up in a smaller town where we never had the resources that we need. Because I think growing up in India, we have enough challenges. 

So for everything you need to have a plan A, B, C. I mean, the way I used to think is, okay, if that’s not happening, then I always think there are 26 more [letters in the] alphabet. Now, if plan B fails they have 24 more options. That’s the kind of mentality. So if this is not happening look at that. Look at that. Look at that. I think more and more with the exposure and kind of… One of the things that I also built is this habit, I don’t know about 15 years ago, is the habit of journalling. So we heard a lot of our friends within the C4EC ecosystem saying mindfulness etc. but my way of coping with this is, by the way, it’s a lonely place out there as an entrepreneur. 

And as a social entrepreneur, it’s hard. You’re neither an entrepreneur. So it’s like between the heart and what do you call it, being a rock and a hard place. So being in these situations and I always felt like… During Covid time, we had our first UN contract from UN World Food Program. We won a tender and we were to do like 150 agripreneurs. Everything was set. We started with a pilot with 15 and 10x growth, 15 to 150 going into like 13/14 counties in Kenya. And then Covid happens. 

We were like, “What do we do?” We then went back to UN World Food Program and proposed that, “What if we have a plan B?” Trashed. “How about plan C?” Trashed. “How about plan D?” Because our intent is to solve the problem. And again, sitting with the WFP team, we actually put a roadmap saying 2021, we do this 2022, we do this 2023, we do this 2024, we do this. And whatever we designed for 23, 24 we actually had to do this in 2020, like 2019-20. 

Again, to get the long story short, and that mindset of ‘resources are in abundance’, it’s just that it requires a different pair of eyes to look at it in a different mindset. I’m so sorry, Sid. I wish I knew this formula that I can replicate and gift to everybody, but I think it’s a combination of many factors. But at least we are trying to codify most of it. That’s what we drive, by the way, the program we do with these young entrepreneurs. Yeah, we call it the Kuza Leadership Academy. And what I realised is leadership is not taught. I’m yet to find a school that is teaching leadership. And leadership, in my view, is an attitude.

[Sid and Lakshmi]

I think it’s a bunch of soft skills and other skills that you can combine to build a leader, but there’s no particular like you said, there’s no code for it. You can’t bottle it and sell it. It’s very hard to kind of make a course out of it and say, okay, this can be. 

[Sid]

Speaking of, we were speaking to Aniket very recently from Haqdarshak. The two parallels that I see, and you spoke of Covid, not that I want to remember that time, but, he also mentioned that Haqdarshak also rew during Covid. And from what you say, you also grew 20x. Why do you think that is? 

[Sriram]

For the last 20+ years, 25 years, to be precise, most people that I spoke to never understood what I said. They said, “You speak at a meta level.” I think that was the time when I received a few hundred calls from people I met 15 years ago, 18 years ago, 10 years ago, calling, saying, “You remember we spoke, we met so-and-so, we spoke about it, something digital you were saying, can we do something?” 

I think people also had time to slow down, reflect, accept that this is the new normal, and now, the only other option left is digital. So the belief system that yes, this is the way forward, and having the courage to stand and be bold enough to stick to that path. There are so many distractions every day, and sticking to the path and believing that is the true path. Because why do we exist? I mean, it all goes back to why we do what we do. 

What gives me the confidence that we can impact a billion people by 2035? And by the way, I’m making it up now, right? I’m putting a year right now. That means I’m holding myself to that. That means next time I see you, you say, “Hey Sri. What happened? You only have like, so many years left.” But that’s the kind of accountability (that you’re building for yourself).

I’m building for myself. I’m adding more pressure to myself. The more I am committing when I say, we as my team, well, so we actually are committing towards an action. So we have a huge bias for action and we don’t need to have all the answers. That’s again a belief system. Like  causeaneffect taught us so many things So it’s that’s a kind of a thing. And we can keep waiting till the cows come home. But somebody somewhere has to put up their hand and take action.

[Sid]

And the other bit that was interesting is when you speak of leadership and setting up a school for leadership, how do you design for, ensuring that you are building leaders, and what kind of leaders are you building? Two, how much of your own journey is a part of that course, so to speak?

[Sriram]

So this other dimension of me which I had not shared. So there is this international group called Entrepreneurs Organisation. It’s for entrepreneurs only. You’ve got to be in the driving seat. And I’ve been a member from 2003, for around 22+ years. So what Entrepreneurs Organisation taught me is entrepreneurs are lonely people at the top. There are times when you can’t discuss this with your family. There are things that you can’t discuss with the rest of the board members. And how do you go about this? So you need a safe space. So EO has actually taught me quite a bit about how you can kind of get into a forum with peer-to-peer [spaces] and then learn from each other’s experience, hold each other accountable. And so this is something I’ve been practising month on, month on month on month.

You don’t need to be insulated, as you know. Yeah. So do I really have a board? Yes, I have a board. But if I really need to speak heart to heart, I know who to call. My forum is literally my go-to…  your sounding board. And also, I learned somewhere along that you are the average of the 5 people you spend time with. When you surround yourself with positivity, all you’re hearing is positivity.

[Lakshmi]

Just to follow up on that, so are you looking at creating a forum of this kind for your agripreneurs as well, or is there one already in place which allows them to connect with their peers, learn from their peers, get mentoring, support? Because the kind of entrepreneurial journey they have might be very different from the kind of entrepreneurial journey that large businesses have.

[Sriram]

I do a lot of experiments. Again, Think Scale. So we looked at scale: This is a philosophy at Kuza for scale. As much as we are working with one and a half million farmers, seven countries, two continents, our team is not more than 40. Our ambition is also not to grow more than 100. That is what again the Centre for Exponential Change is helping us to kind of reimagine how we can start thinking about scale and orchestration. 

But going back to that Lakshmi, one of the experimentations that happened as a member leader within the Entrepreneurs Organisation, we said, yes, we are all $1 million+ businesses, great, our needs and challenges are different. But what about those who are in about $100,000? I mean, I guess that’s where we are coming from. So we actually created an offering within the Entrepreneurs Organisation. It is a member-led organisation. So again championed and then brought a big institution to come out with something for those 100,000 on. But then we also realised that there are still a lot of them who are not there. 

So within a year we also have something called Global Student Entrepreneurs, under recognition called the Award GSEA. While doing all of this, and again, that’s why my gratitude to EO, because a lot of this experimentation I could do with some of the entrepreneurs across 90 countries. The secret I’m sharing for the first time is that if that is, and I realised that if you are a $1 billion entrepreneur, or a $100 million entrepreneur, or $1 million or $100,000 or even $1,000, that’s just a number. Only the zeroes are varying, but the challenges are the same. 

So the inspiration for us to do the Kuza Leadership Academy is coming from the fact that I’ve done this for over 20+ years and, we kind of curated and designed this in such a way that the first activity we help our entrepreneurs do is to help them discover their mindset. The moment we bring the perspective between, do you have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset: you put that into perspective, people understand. They relate them. So, oh, you know, this is where I was stuck. Once people acknowledge that you’re stuck, the rest is easy. 

So then again, we help them set up a goal. So based on our data working with hundreds and thousands of them, we realised that if you have a goal and the goal is in your head –  oh, I would love to lose weight this year –  most people said that kind of a New Year’s resolution, there is a 1% chance you would achieve it. The same goal, if you just write it down as a basic structure, there’s a 26% chance you would achieve it. But if you are clever like Lakshmi and you have an accountability partner, there’s a 76% chance you would achieve that. Congratulations, Lakshmi, you achieved 100% of that. But that’s it. 

So when we kind of set up these networks at a grassroots level, what we always do is to see who can be your accountability partner, such that you kind of now create those bonds. And the challenge that we see in most of the countries is people don’t trust each other. So then we had to come out with tools. So we use something called SITA. This is something that one of my co-founders in one of the nonprofit boards that I sit on, he’s the one who taught us this. This tool helps you to discover your strengths, interests, talents, and aspirations. So, as we make entrepreneurs discover themselves, is more like one of the diagnostic tool. And once you do that, we say, “Hey, you are a great community builder, but you are a great orchestrator. I’m a great marketer and someone is a great financer.” And so we start bringing people based on… So we needed some frame by which we kind of help people to start trusting each other. The rest of it, our mentors will kind of hold them together and then guide them. So it’s kind of evolving that way.

[Lakshmi]

Sid, I want to push this conversation a little bit further from entrepreneurship, because I think, there’s a stage that one moves to beyond being just an entrepreneur. And it’s not easy being one. So just an entrepreneur does not mean to discount all the hard work that goes into being a successful entrepreneur. But I think, we look at you as a System Orchestrator. 

What does it take to go from being an entrepreneur who is thinking about their business or social enterprise, growing that, and making it a successful one, maybe, I don’t know, delivering impact directly, saying that you’re able to directly impact the lives of so many people or as a business, and you’re saying, you know, you’ve been able to raise money or valuation or revenues or whatever those metrics, but they’re all linked to one organisation. 

But as a System Orchestrator, you’re shifting the focus from your organisation to the problem. And that essentially means you need to bring a lot more people to the table, and create a shared vision. And these could be very different types of actors in the ecosystem. It could be government partners, it could be corporate partners, it could be community-based

Organisations, it could be the media. It could be many different types of people. Can you talk to us about how you are now a System Orchestrator and what are some of the challenges that you face as a System Orchestrator.

So one thing Africa taught me is there’s an African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” On our journey within Kuza, we realised this very early on that we are taking a mission, which is maybe there’s a new series called Mission Impossible. That’s what it is. Because the current ecosystem, the way the setup is, the societal structure is, it is not moving the needle. 

Yeah, Covid taught us a few things, but we all came back to our comfort zone and we are doing this. So 2019 is when we realised and said let’s change the gears. Now we seem to have some product market fit. We seem to be solving some problem somewhere. We see some evidence of early outputs coming in and outcomes in a few places. But then, so this is something that was kind of going in our head. So how did we go about doing it? 

So we brought Kuza as an initiative from Africa to India. And we started experimenting with this in the Indian context. So we worked with Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, Tata Trust, Transform Rural India Foundation and some of these anchor institutions who were already doing something. And then we introduced this concept and we started sort of seeing that, you know, this is all happening. And then we said, okay, so let’s go deeper- for us to go deeper beyond, so for Kuza, there are three core pillars. Learn, connect and grow. So learning part of it I think we have more or less there, and we can only fine-tune and bring more in dimensions there. The connect. Who are we connecting to whom?

So for us, our hero is our Agripreneur. This young woman or person on the ground is connecting to farmers and connecting to markets. So when we started looking at that from a landscape, we saw this entire landscape has a lot of input companies like seeds, fertilisers and more importantly, government custody of policy and all of that. Then we have a lot of development partners at international NGOs, UN kind of organisations, multilateral and then community-based organisations. Then you have the entire private sector as an industry for multiple functions, the market, credit and all of that. 

So we kind of put our imagination together and said, “What if we are able to bring the ecosystem together?” Again, naivety. Beginner’s mind. Well, nothing is stopping us. This is no tax to imagination. So we were like, “Okay, let’s do it.” You go to the whiteboard and then start doing it. And we would put together the way we kind of present it. I said, “Okay, there’s an agripreneur. An agripreneur can play this role, this role, this role.” And then I need to admit we failed successfully.

You bring all the actors together, they come, they say a lot of things, and then they all go back into their comfort zone. Nothing happens. So with the relationship we had with the World Bank in India, working in Jeevika in Bihar, and UMED in Maharashtra (another rural livelihood mission), we went to the World Bank and then started socialising. Dr Parmesh Shah from the World Bank was one of our mentors and kind of who guided us through this journey too. He said, “What would it take for us to bring this ecosystem together?”

And then quite some experience we have done. So, the World Bank in Kenya launched an initiative called the One Million Farmer Platform. It also happened like this over a coffee we are discussing, and then, let’s create this. And all the AgTechs were brought together to disrupt agriculture and technology. Why I’m highlighting this is for us to change the narrative, we needed a different language and a different way of addressing the problem. I can’t directly go on to say I have a solution. We don’t have a solution. We have to co-create. 

So the co-creation journey started happening thanks to the World Bank as an anchor partner who believed this and then said, okay, we have some small resources we’ll put there, but then we have to bring the entire local governments on board. So that’s how we started looking at all of this. As this was happening, the bank team was saying, “Are you in the advisory, are you in the inputs, are you in the data, are you in the markets? If you are one of these AgTechs, please come participate.” That was the campaign.

But we realised as much as we were co-creating and contributing, we realised we don’t do it like this. We are horizontal. An agriprenuer is the one who kind of anchors. So we actually had to say no to this innovation grant from the World Bank. A very polite way of saying, “Hey, we cut across all of this” and then we said, “Let’s co-host it.” So one thing led to the other, and then we hosted the first ecosystem… and we called it UnConference. It was a 2-day conference that was designed and then we requested World Bank that we will host an UnCnference.Again, same thinking, right?

So anybody who’s coming to the conference is somebody who has some experience, and only a few people get to talk with the rest of the audience. We said, “Why don’t we create?” So we’ve done quite some experiments around this, bringing ecosystem actors together. And then we realised that you need an honest broker to bring everybody together. And, my key learning, they said, is that we need to… we had to let go of our logo and ego, to be able to play that role. Because a lot of times people see a logo and then say, “Oh, but you have your own selfish interests”, and it’s very hard for people to appreciate and accept that you are doing without selfish interest. Every time I go into a meeting, they say, “What is in it for you?” No, no no, we are doing this. It’s hard until they see things. So I would say it was an overnight success that took 20 years.

[Sid]

Those are bits that I always find interesting. That is how you, as an entrepreneur, push yourself to be able to kind of look at, shifting your own mindset like what Lakshmi was pointing out. We at C4EC essentially look at everybody who’s an actor within the network as System Orchestrators. 

And when we look at that, we want to see how your mindset shifts to look at the problem vis-à-vis looking at the organisation. So you also have to look at the organisation and look at the problem. So you have to keep shifting your perception of where you are based on how you want to kind of deal with it. So that’s interesting. I just find that to be absolutely mind-boggling myself. But I want to understand from you, how are you able to do that, plus kind of galvanise your own team to be able to look at and shift perspectives whenever you need to be able to Kuza looking at the problem versus Kuza looking at itself and saying, how are we doing versus what the problem is doing?

[Sriram]

So I need to give credit to my team. At least my entire leadership team.  We’ve been together for 23 years now. Our CTO, Chief Design Officer, my Co-founder, we all believe that we are here. The reason why we exist is to solve this problem. So we kept the problem at the core, and then acknowledged that we only have… we can only do so much. I think that’s the first biggest win. One is getting the buy-in of my own leadership team. 

Then all of us put our energies together, we are not afraid of failing. And by the way, I mean, as much as you see some numbers, so-called our contribution, but that’s only 2% of our success. We failed 98 attempts out of 100. But that’s what it takes for you to be resilient and try and fail and try and fail and iteratively build it, build it so till you get there. But I believe, once you have that internal buy-in, you can fight any battle. 

And now that we started looking at it, it’s not just us. It’s not about ‘I’, meaning myself. When I say I mean myself, it’s not just Kuza’s thing, right? There are lots of point solutions that exist. Billions of dollars have been raised by AgTechs. They all have some amazing innovative technologies, but what they don’t have is access to customers. 

So as we started doing this reimagination of the ecosystem is when we realised that, okay, what if you are able to bring them together and get them access? So it has to be a win-win-win proposition, right? For everybody. Only then the incentives would be aligned. So we are on the journey towards trying to see what would it take for us to replicate what we learned and achieved on other continents, in other countries, working with a set of other mission-aligned partners, and thanks to the Centre for Exponential Change for bringing in and curating like-minded partners. 

And again, as part of the Leadership Lab, this journey has been amazing, you know, at least we are able to now reach out, have a set of mentors and at least we are able to discuss our challenges and feel confident that we are not alone here.

[Sid]

It was designed as a safe space for discussions like that. Sri, thank you so much for doing this. 

[Sid and Lakshmi]

But before we end, another thing, that small thing that we are going to do, the Podcast Poker, that’s what I call it. We do not have an official name for it. We’re trying various things. So, Lakshmi, if you could shuffle the cards. And what am I supposed to do?

Just shuffle? Yeah. Just shuffle. You can pick five cards, and I’ll let you know what each… 

[Sriram and Sid]

Five cards? Yeah, pick five. Just five.

[Sid]

So each suite represents something. Hearts represent emotions and feelings. Diamonds, aspirations and ideal outcomes. Clubs, leadership and strategy. And spades, challenges and obstacles. So if you could just show what you’ve got. What did you draw, Sri?

[Sid and Sriram]

So three out of the five is spades, which is leadership. Spades is challenges and obstacles. Challenges and obstacles, that we have many. Then I have one which is a Diamond. It is aspirations and ideal outcomes. 

[Sid]

And seven (of clubs) is leadership and strategy, which is interesting because I think, in the journey that you’ve been on, with C4EC as well, and for your own self, I think it’s so much of stuff that you’ve done has been about challenges and obstacles and, it’s been great to see that every podcast has had this very interesting dynamic of how people have kind of just picked up stuff, which is very internal to them.

And I think the general mood of this podcast, I would kind of determine as you spoke, you’re an organisation that’s focused on challenges and obstacles and how you want to overcome them, and you are very problem-centric, and you kind of want to solve for that, which is, I think, very evident from the conversation that we’ve had A few questions that I have, based on and what we’ve drawn is, in terms of systemic obstacles that contribute to this challenge, what do you think are the biggest ones that you kind of faced as a leader?

[Sriram]

Mindset. People holding to their positions on their chairs. And not taking bold decisions at every stage. So everybody needs an assurance. Everybody wants to play safe. But that’s where I think this is leadership. Yeah that’s leadership. I think the power of one leader, you can see there are three obstacles. So there are more. There are more cards. But I picked… there is a reason why these came to me. Because this is a power of one. If one Sri and one organisation can do so much, collectively, between all of those, that’s the power of the collective.

[Sid]

Lakshmi, any reflections? 

[Lakshmi]

 I was gonna add that probably another important skill, along with perseverance and commitment, is probably agility. To shift gears very, very quickly, to recognise an obstacle as it comes at you, to actually acknowledge that there is an obstacle because sometimes we can just be really (stubborn) not wanting to see it, but I think and it’s also, I think a big credit to you as a leader that, not just you being agile, but you also have a team that’s very agile, able to adapt to, you know, new technologies, prototypes, see what works, keep experimenting to discover what is the best way forward. So yeah, I just wanted to add, I don’t have any questions, but I think this has been my experience of working with you over the last few months. And that’s been a very enjoyable journey as well. 

[Sriram]

Thank you, Lakshmi.