I've talked in a previous post about the struggles of delivering a service rather than a product in a rural/BoP environment, but I feel compelled to expand on the tension this choice continues to create -

For starters, I believe that a product-oriented enterprise *could* be considered far more efficient and manageable - operations are contained to think things you do, you develop a product (hopefully with your users/customers in mind), you manufacture/produce that product, you supply that product and hopefully collect payments at the time of supplying it to someone who might supply it forward (and may take some of the risk).   This is a particularly powerful approach to impact when your product is electronic, and leverages something else people have (such as computers in the case of a web product/service, or and SMS-based service on people's phones). 

In our case, sometimes I wonder what it would be like if we simply made cheaper water-filtration machines and usable dispensing technology, had people pay for them, and ensured that we did what we could to get them out there.  We could spend our energy on creating the tools that make low-cost water possible, and then help the people who could best use them find us.  We could become the middlemen of the get-water-to-people business.

Hmmm.  Then I wouldn't have to be so concerned about finding the right franchisees, feeling responsible when the machines are having major issues, ensuring that our business development people are assisting them month after month,  that people are actually drinking water, worrying about whether or not we will be able to collect payments this month, and more importantly worrying about what happens if a franchisee goes rogue and decides to defy our (due-to-the-state-of-the-country unenforceable) contract and we have to repossess our machine (which works without our permission, and is the franchisees possession).

Every person who has critiqued our model cites the risk of putting assets in the hands of other who haven't paid, and cannot be compelled to pay - in the difficulty of finding village entrepreneurs you can trust/will abide by our terms - the impossibility of enforcing contracts on relatively small amounts when courts and recourse are far more expensive than what you stand to lose.

Therein lies the challenge; to me, that makes this a social enterprise.

There continues to be major tension b/w what is effective, and what is in tune with the purpose we are trying to serve.   By building a business model that is dependent on trustable village entrepreneurs, we are attempting to illustrate that the right sort sort of structure can not only make clean water accessible to people, it can renew faith in the possibility of running a people/service-oriented business on the right values in a place where few are willing to try.

The cost?  Lots of operational details.  Because our own success, and ability to pay for our model, is linked to how many people drink clean water every day, we are inextricably vested in making each entrepreneur's business work.   Instead of supplying machines, we are helping find customers, generating awareness about the benefits of hygiene and water, intalling and repairing machines in the middle of nowhere, navigating local politics, dealing with happy and angry franchisees (our risk-sharing partners), figuring out how not to get ripped off in regular transactions, attempting to change the attitudes of our own people on what it takes to get things done in the places where we make clean water accessible.

This tension - b/w building something effeciently and effectively that does what we want to do, and building something that makes us part of ensuring that it is done the way we want it to - is a matter of believing that there is far more possible than just getting water to villages.