Determining Scope

Besides diffusing knowledge, the SELCO Foundation faced challenges with the limits of their method in livelihood promotion when transferred to other settings. SF’s ecosystem approach emphasized aligning organizations and individuals. The Foundation acted as a designer and general contractor for existing organizations and individuals on the ground. SF staffers became expert in diagnosing the gaps in the ecosystem and finding mechanisms to incentivize cooperation to support the community organizations and technical enterprises that in turn served the local artisans and farmers. SF, then, supervised an iterative process to test and adjust interventions, providing feedback to its partner organizations.

SF hoped to inspire other development organizations to take their approach to DRE interventions. However, SF discovered as it moved from its home base in Karnataka to the more impoverished regions of the Northeast that civil sector organizations and technical enterprises were far and few between. This required SF to take a more proactive role in nurturing organizations to become active elements of a given ecosystem. For example, the Foundation established an incubator for technical innovators to create devices and launch their businesses. This enlarged the scope of SF’s remit for a given intervention, requiring them to support and even build subsidiary organizations before the Foundation could play its general contractor role.

In line with the organizational landscape, the depth and range of human resources in developing areas were also a continual challenge that could affect the scope of a project. Many ambitious local individuals who had talent to build on the ecosystem approach were drawn to more developed parts of the country. Conversely, less determined artisans were often content with modest gains and uninterested in expanding their roles or further developing a given ecosystem.

Limited by the existing environment of human and organizational resources, SF, sometimes, drew boundaries to limit scope. For example, the market for a microenterprise’s goods often needed to extend beyond a local group of villages. In Karnataka, there was a healthy system of farmer producer organizations (FPOs) and co-ops to help microenterprises get their goods to urban markets. In contrast, the Northeast did not have an extensive array of organizations to market goods. In response, SF focused on interventions that provided public goods for a microenterprise’s immediate area. They only intervened in intermediation with more distant markets when an existing co-op needed help. Nurturing intermediation organizations was beyond the Foundation’s scope and would pose unmanageable risks.

As SF sought to diffuse its livelihood promotion approach to other organizations, the question of scope would only become more acute - especially in regions outside India. For all of its needs, India had amassed an array of resources that could be deployed to aid in development. The country had a large technical workforce, a relatively stable financial system, and a growing cadre of individuals trained in social work. Other parts of the developing world were not as fortunate (or as farsighted). How could a fledgling development organization looking to emulate SF’s approach in a less developed social and market environment undertake this type of development work? What elements of the ecosystem approach were necessary and had to be developed before an intervention would succeed and what elements could come later? What roles needed to be handled by market enterprises, what tasks were best left to civil society organizations, and what did governments need to do? How would a designer of an intervention decide what was within scope and what stood outside?