Mandakini Gogoi (Mandakini), founder of 7WEAVES Social Pvt Ltd. (7WEAVES), was thinking about how to refine the 7WEAVES model. She had cofounded the social venture along with her friend Uma Madhavan (Uma) and husband Rituraj Dewan (Rituraj) in June 2017. 7WEAVES was set up as an integrated textile-garment manufacturing facility in partnership with local communities dependent on the forests in Assam’s Loharghat Forest Range. It was a for-profit company focused on Eri silk. Its stated aim was to set up a sustainable textile and garment company in Assam by providing livelihood to forest-dependent families through the integration of their village economy with the global ethical fashion market. By January 2019, 7WEAVES was able to provide guaranteed work to people in 36 households. Mandakini wanted to bring this number up to 150 households by the end of 2019. Would Mandakini be able to convince the global fashion brands to buy their produce at a higher price that would help them support their model and also scale up?     more »

This case focuses on Anshu Gupta (Anshu) and his social entrepreneurial venture Goonj. Goonj whose mission was “to address the most basic, but ignored need of clothing and the multifaceted role it plays in villages across India” started off distributing clothes collected from urban households to the needy in the rural areas. Goonj collected not only clothes but also other items like utensils, papers, furniture, etc. and distributed them to the needy. The case describes several such programs started by Goonj to help the poor and volunteer activities it started to help those taking chairty maintain dignity. In the process, Goonj created employment opportunities for women from poor communties. As the activities of Goonj grew, several volunteers joined Anshu. It got widespread recognition from several international agencies like Ashoka Foundation, Schwab Foundation, Ramon Magsaysay Foundation, NASA, Deutsche Bank, etc. As Anshu moved ahead to bridge the gap between rural poverty and urban prosperity, he faced several challenges—increasing operational costs, reaching the hinterlands, and coming up with a framework to replicate Goonj’s model.

Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, is home to millions of smallholder farmers who, due to low economies of scale, have some of the lowest yields in the world, making subsistence farming unsustainable for them. This has led to large-scale unemployment, especially among the youth. Poverty, unemployment, and a rapidly growing population have made Nigeria a breeding ground for extremist organizations like the Boko Haram. Kola Masha through his for-profit social enterprise, Babban Gona, is taking this challenge head-on by creating an innovative agricultural franchise model which provides professional management and investment for grassroots level farmer groups. Babban Gona’s holistic end-to-end service delivery model has resulted in farmers reducing their input costs, increasing their yields, realizing a higher price for their produce, and more than tripling their incomes. Babban Gona also embeds into its model, a risk-mitigating model, which helps to reduce risks and increases the confidence of its financiers. The organization has the audacious vision of transforming the lives of 1 million farmers by 2025. But, does the model support such levels of scalability?

Reviewed by
Jitesh Nair    more »