Hi, I'm Madhu Viswanathan from the College of Business of the University of Illinois. I have to tell you that I'm not an expert in agriculture. Nor am I an expert on post-harvest loss, but as you will see. Our work on subsistence marketplaces as a lot of relevance for designing solutions. I'm going to give you an overview of who we are, and I'm going to give you some insights from our unique bottom-up approach to subsistence marketplaces. We have created a unique space of equity called subsistence marketplaces. We take a bottom-up approach to the intersection of poverty and marketplaces. We deliberately call it subsistence marketplaces. By the word subsistence, I don't mean subsistence economies and subsistence farmers. What I mean is people in the range of low income. All the way from survival to subsistence to perhaps thriving and slowly moving into lower middle class as well. So that is what I mean, people who are barely making ends meet. And in the range of low income, whether it's rural, urban, tribal, semi-urban and so on. The reason I use the word marketplaces is to emphasize that these are preexisting market places. That we have to learn from in order to design solutions for them. That is why I try to avoid using the word markets, which suggests that we already have solutions. Over the last 17, almost 18 years now we have done a lot of research in this space in the US, India, Tanzania, and Argentina. So we have deep engagement in these four places around the world. We have created a lot of different courses reaching about 1,000 students at the University of Illinois. Creating a web portal for educators and students around the world, and through Coursera reaching many thousands of students around the world. We have also learned by doing. We have learned and failed by running a social enterprise on marketplace literacy. Today I'm happy to say after more than a decade of effort, we have reached almost 20,000 women. In teaching them marketplace literacy, which is more than what to buy and what to sell. It is also how to buy and sell, and most importantly, why. They should do the things that lead to being a better customer and a better entrepreneur. So we've learned by doing. So this is really an academic entity with a symbiotic relationship with a social enterprise on the ground. Here are some images of our work. We started, at the top left, right here at Illinois at the Adult Education Center that is here locally. On the top right is a tribal lady in India. The bottom right is a place in South India, and the bottom left is with the Maasai tribe in Tanzania. This journey has taken us through so many places. You see an image of people in a village that was hit by a tsunami. You see me teaching marketplace literacy to women in Tanzania. You also see me with Maasai Ute, and this was one evening in the forest about a year and a half ago. And it was very moving to learn about the level of poverty that they live in. And you also see me with groups of women here, and these are groups women who are part of self-help groups. So my social enterprise forms self-help groups of women in the fourth largest city in India as well. Now let me stop and talk about what these unique insights are that we learn from subsistence marketplaces. What is it about our bottom-up approach? First of all, living in poverty means more than just material constraints. It also means cognitive constraints, or constraints in thinking, and sometimes emotional constraints as well. So, if I'm poor and I'm living in the here and now. I have to think about my next meal and survival. I have to think about my family. But in addition, because of lack of exposure and education. I tend to think in the here and now as well, due to my difficulty in drawing abstractions. And that's one of the things about thinking in subsistence market places. We call it concrete thinking. For example, if I'm going to a store I may buy the cheapest because I find it very difficult to abstract between price and size. I recall a Tanzanian woman who has to walk 20 miles to the marketplace and she says I buy the biggest. Why? Because it'll last longer. Even if she is better off buying two of the same things. She buys the biggest. So this is an example of concrete thinking. This arises due to difficulty with abstractions. A Russian psychologist in the 1920s named Luria studied low-literate peasants in central Asia. And he would show them a hammer, a saw, and an ax and ask them the word for it. And they would come back and say well, if I have a tree I can chop it down with the ax. I can collect the wood, and I can burn it, and keep my family warm. So instead of coming up with the abstract concept called tools. They would come up with ways to use things. And so, this is one of the things about concrete thinking. Because I have difficulty abstracting due to a lack of education and lack of exposure. I tend to live in the immediate, visual graphic world of here and now. So that's one thing to think about. The other thing to think about is pictographic thinking, which is really depending on my senses and a notion of what I see is what I get. Rather than thinking about the actual meaning of something. So this may mean essentially looking at bus numbers and numerals as shapes, rather than as numbers to read. It may mean adding, in ingenious ways, by picturing current symbols. Rather than going through, and doing the abstract task of adding or subtracting. And it may even mean visualizing how much to buy other than looking at units of measurement. So this is something else that people do. So for people a brand name is not necessarily a word. It's just something to remember. It's almost like what some have called sight reading. So it's really an imaginary scene, and so people just look at that and so on. So what does this mean? What has this got to do with agriculture and post-harvest loss? Well it means abstracting across time and space is difficult. It means agricultural yield rates are abstraction. The amount of post-harvest loss is an abstraction. How do I put it in perspective? In terms of what my overall yield is and so on. It means that information has to be made concrete and pictographic. It means that education is very central. People can send certain things, but you have to educate them about crop yields and post harvest loss and so on, and you have to find a way to visualize. It means short-term benefits are important. Don't ask me to abstract across time, and say that I'll start receiving benefits two years from now. I don't have two years to wait, and so short term benefits are very important. And this applies to low income suppliers, entrepreneurs, employees, farmers and so on.
