[SOUND] Now, the other thing I want to talk about very briefly is the kind of marketplace that exists in these contexts, in subsistence context. And I often use this example of a poor women in a city who has the option of buying from two different stores, a neighborhood retail store and a large reseller. And she often goes to the neighborhood retailer because there is a relationship there. Even though it costs more, that person will give money, will sell things on credit, and so on, and will even secure money safely for her. So here's this woman who borrows from this neighborhood retailer and buys from there, who once told me that she doesn't check prices. And I said, why not? And she said, imagine how the shop owner would feel. And it really stunned me at that time. Because as somebody from the outside, I may think that all she has to do is go to the large reseller at the beginning of the month and stock up. And that's all she needs to do, and she'll save money. But the problem is that I may be an expert on certain things, I'm sure some of the people watching this are experts on post-harvest loss prevention. But she is an expert on survival. And she knows certain things by having lived through it, right. So if we believe in the power of roleplay, imagine the power of having lived through, and having lived their entire life in a certain setting. So she is an expert too. And the problem with my solution for her is that she doesn't have monthly income. I just assumed it, because I take it for granted. Similarly, she cannot stock up because eating is not her priority sometimes. It's more maybe emergency medical bills, or her children's school fees, and so on. And finally, if she were to go and buy over here, she has now lost a relationship with the neighborhood retailer. What happens when she has her next crisis? Who is she going to go to? So even though she's [INAUDIBLE] concrete in her thinking, pictographic in her thinking, she has to think beyond the immediate and build these medium-term relationships. The key thing I want to point out there is to have a mutual learning mindset when you go in. First, to suspend your preconceptions and truly sit down and learn from people. And by that I mean watching them work, watching them at home, and also sitting down and having in-depth conversations with people at the bottom of society. That is very important to truly take this bottom-up approach. Don't assume you know, don't dismiss solutions. First understand, and then think about solutions. And I'm not saying that you are going to learn things that I always new. But I am saying that you go in, suspend your beliefs, suspend your preconceptions, and just have a face of learning. And then you can come back and think about designing solutions as well. I want to expand on mutual learning mindsets, by talking about myself. I've never been poor and I have had the best possible education. So what do I know about poverty and illiteracy? I started this work in 1997, and I'm going to give you an experience from then that illustrates this mutual learning mindset. I remember the first time I took a group of students from adult education centers with very low literacy to a shop. And I gave them about $60, I believe, and ask them to buy five or six things. As they went through the store and took a lot of effort for the most basic things that I wouldn't pay attention to, I realized the things that I take for granted. So to me, that experience has remained all these years, the things that I take for granted. And so if I want to unlearn and create a mutual learning experience, I have to realize these certainties and the things that I take for granted don't apply to the people for whom I'm designing a solution. That, to me, is the most fundamental learning. Let me give you an example. Today, I'm here at this recording at the studio, and I did a number of things before getting here. And everything worked. And I'm not saying everything works every day. But I drove here, I got something to drink, I had lunch. But my car worked, the roads worked, my communication worked. If I didn't have a cell phone for some reason, or forgot it, I have other options in most situations. So what I'm describing is a set of certainties and cushions to fall back on. What is poverty, described by someone who has never experienced it? Take away all the certainty and take away all the cushion, and you have poverty. So you really can't take for granted your next meal, the quality of the staple for your next meal, the quality of the water, whether you're going to have an energy source to cook the meal, and so on. That is poverty. And you don't have the cushion to fall back on as well. So you don't have a margin for error. So that to me is one example of a mutual learning mindset that keeps me very humble. I remember asking a woman in a village, a very poor woman, whether she plans. Remember my mindset going in, planning is good, right. She told me, why should I plan? Why should I plan when I don't have income for my next meal? And think about her rationality. It makes a lot of sense now. But for me, planning is a good thing going in. And what has happened is that by going into these settings, all of my preconceptions have become scrambled now. And I'm willing to allow for the fact that somebody who's very different from me has a very different way of approaching life, and it actually makes sense. So this is what I mean by a mutual learning mindset. Now, don't sell yourself short. For example, I tell my students that because they go in with an open mind, they are the ones who can create the magic and create solutions as well. Very often, people living right next door are very dismissive of solutions. They really can't see the big picture. Whereas it's you who goes in with an open mind, who can really connect the dots in ways that perhaps I cannot connect. So keep that in mind as well. Now it's very interesting to see how entrepreneurs, including farmers, move their resources around. And so for example, if you take a typical entrepreneur, she has to balance family, customers and suppliers. And so she makes sure the customers get the products they want. She may give them credit. She has to pay up her suppliers and so on, and the family suffers. And that's what the family is there for. And this is not at all different from many small farms where the entire family may pitch in as well. Now, what happens once in awhile is there comes an emergency. And so she then has to go now and say to the supplier and the customer that, look, my cushion is gone now. My family really needs the money. And so she has to make the customer pay up, or she has to ask the supplier for credit, and so on. The interesting thing here is how money moves around these different domains. It is very fungible. And this is important because this is where the bottom-up approach really is illustrated. A lot of micro-financing companies give loans for the purpose of starting a business. And they don't like the idea of something like this being used for consumption. But that's not the nature of resources in subsistence marketplaces. The resources are fungible. And so there isn't a separate compartment called business, and a separate compartment that's called consumption, and so on. To have compartments, mental or physical, you need resources. I have compartments in my life. I have my personal, I have my professional. I have physical space. I have my den, I have my bedroom, I have my living room, that needs resources. I have mental compartments, I have the luxury of mental compartments. All of these different things get blurred in subsistence contexts. And so that is something to keep in mind as well. So if you take this bottom-up approach, then you gain these very unique insights about how people live and work and survive. Which help you to design your solution. So when we think about the marketplace in terms of exchange, we have buyers-sellers responsiveness. We have very fluid transactions, and we have this constant demand for customization. So all of these things have to be kept in mind. Just to give you an example, here is the seller and she makes pickle. But she has a lot of demands. Some of the people whom she meets will say, well, you're not giving me enough pickle. Because I am a seller myself, and I sell to people who only eat one meal a day. And so she has to adjust to them. But she has to be careful, she can't give everybody a special deal. The transactions are fluid as well. And so people buy, and sell, and argue, and bargain. And the waiting can be different, and the amounts can be different, and so on, and people may not pay for installments. So these are all aspects of the exchange. In terms of relationships, relationships matter a lot. There are enduring relationships where small farmers, small buyers, and small sellers, and small suppliers, they multiply the value they have to each other by buying from the same person over time. And also there is interactional empathy. And what I mean by that is not that this is a rosy picture by any means, but just that people share adversity. So basically they often bargain and argue based on more having to survive and having to make a living, and so on. And so there are norms. For example, if I start a shop right outside a temple, and somebody else starts a shop right next to me that sells the same thing, I may have a fight with them. But if it's 25, 50 feet away, I may say well, they have to make a living as well. So there are these norms that people have, rather than infrastructure and institutional mechanisms. And that is what they often go by. They are not engaging in the marketplace for some ideological reason, or for some abstract notion of competition and free enterprise. It is about survival. The human and the economic is blurred, and that is something to keep in mind as well. And finally, all of this is happening in the broad context of pervasive interdependence and a lot of oral communication, whether it is face to face, or these days, through cell phone as well. So what does this mean? What does the marketplace mean to you? Social relationships mean everything. You can have the best solution in the world in a lab created at the University of Illinois, but if you don't understand this context, then it's going to be very difficult to implement the solution. Can I trust you? That's another very important thing. Will you be fair to me? These are some of the things to keep in mind as well. The human and the economic are intertwined. I can have separate compartments because I have resources, but people are really living in a world where everything is mixed in there. Can the social be leveraged to educate, create partnerships, deliver solutions? That's something to keep in mind. And once again, it applies to farmers, it applies to suppliers. It applies to customers, entrepreneurs, and so on. [SOUND]
