Social Entrepreneur Profile: Tanvi Surti, Chachii

How time flies! I'm more than half-way done with my VilCap internship in Mumbai and I'm excited to report that I've made considerable progress. My main mandate for the summer was to generate a pipeline of interested social enterprises that fit our upcoming VilCap business accelerator programs. Despite this extremely broad and challenging goal, I have fully embraced my entrepreneurial spirit by speaking with more than 100 people, 75% of those are entrepreneurs while the others are associated with institutions  supporting entrepreneurs like incubators.

The sector focus for the entrepreneurs I've spoken to range from energy access and education to health and handicrafts. Each one of them has no shortage of passion and dedication to advance their enterprise while positively impacting millions. Supporting these entrepreneurs is why I am pursuing a career in impact investing in emerging markets.

Every entrepreneur is amazing in his or her own right so I have decided to showcase a few social entrepreneurs for my remaining blog posts. The first entrepreneur is Tanvi Surti with Chachii.

What is Chachii? Chachii is a SMS and online-based platform that connects laborers such as maids and drivers to people who need short-term, temporary help. Tanvi Surti, a recent graduate at Bryn Mawr College, is one of the co-founders of Chachii. After completing college, she decided to move back to India to start Chachii in Mumbai, India.

How does Chachii work? Individuals post tasks online or by phone and Chachii selects a laborer that can complete the task. After receiving information about the laborer, the individual sits back while his or her task is completed. After the task is completed, the laborer pays the pre-determined amount (no haggling!) to the individual while Chachii takes a small cut of the payment. Although e-commerce is still fairly new in India, Chachii is paving the way by encouraging online transactions and payments with online pre-paid credits.

Why is Chachii important? In Mumbai and across India, hiring help like a driver for your car and a maid for your flat is extremely common especially for people in the middle class and higher. Given that Mumbaikars are more liberal and progressive, more bachelor(ette)s in Mumbai live on their own compared to those in other more traditional cities. Although hiring a driver or maid is still common for these customers, they usually cannot afford a full-time driver or live-in maid. Hiring short-term, temporary help is much more appealing. Finding good-quality, reliable, and trustworthy help is difficult though as most people use personal networks and references. Much like Angie's List and Task Rabbit based in the states, Chachii fills this gap by connecting laborers while encouraging customer feedback to increase transparency and drive repeat users.

What is Chachii's impact on society? In India, most laborers come from lower-income groups usually those at the upper edge of the Base of the Pyramid. Chachii connects people from these groups as well as college students looking for extra income. By joining the Chachii network, laborers have the potential to make a sizable monthly income in addition to their full-time work.

What is Chachii's vision? Besides expanding the range of services offered, Chachii hopes to expand to all major metropolitan cities in India and reach an estimated 60 million laborers in the unskilled and informal labor market across India. With its current focus on Mumbai, the most populous city in India, Chachii has its work cut out for them!

To learn more about Chachii, you can view an interview with Tanvi and check out the site.

Three environmentalists walk into a bar...

Sometime in the early 1970s, three environmentalists were deep in debate about how to measure the impact humans have on the planet. One of the three, Barry Commoner, argued that the impact was purely a result of technological innovation following WWII. The other two, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, argued that the most important aspects of our impact were population growth and our increasing affluence. As all good environmentalists would they created an equation with which to codify this debate. The result was the IPAT equation. For the uninitiated, IPAT is an accounting equation (I = P x A x T) which states that human impact (I) is a product of our population (P) multiplied by our affluence (A) multiplied by our technology (T). Affluence represents our consumption and technology represents how resource intensive our affluence is to produce. I admit that I'm over-simplifying here. For a much more detailed analysis of the equation, its many adaptations, and its limitations, simply google "IPAT equation."

Just a few months ago this was nothing more than a theoretical concept to me. At the time, I argued that the most important factor fueling our impact was population. If you have fewer people, then OF COURSE! you will have a lower impact. My time in India has only cemented that idea. Despite our technological innovations and growing affluence, I believe more than ever that our main problem is population. For example, the city where I'm living this summer (Bangalore) has grown 200% in the past decade compared to the 3% growth rate of New York over the same time period. As I wrote in my last blog post, this growth has led to a number of problems: traffic, air and water pollution, low power quality, decaying infrastructure, homelessness, etc., etc. all of which has had a negative impact on the environment. Ehrlich and Holdren were right! It's population!

Or is it? What do you think? How has your WDI experience informed your perspective on this issue? If it is population, how do we deal with it? If it's not population, then what is it? And how do we deal with it?

Bombay/Mumbai | Mumbai/Bombay

I found a great quote today: “A businessman might go to Mumbai to hold a meeting, but he would go to Bombay to hold a lover.” That’s the best explanation I’ve found for the difference in the semantic choices of overly conscientious foreigners and comfortable locals.

Bombay is a city of stepped levels: intermittent skyscrapers; endless highrises atop rolling hills; groves of flowering trees block the street view. Seas of slums like boxes stacked on boxes; a haphazard adobe of blue tarps, brick, and corrugated metals held together through sheer will. Minute shops line the streets, hawking cell minutes and soda, cloth, furniture, samosas, haircuts. Chaiwallas and bananawallas and pantswallas and all the other wallas cart their wares. Below it all, the fish women and flower women squat with their baskets. The ocean is brown with refuse and feces; the mangroves impossibly tangled with colorful garbage. The roads are filthy and the thought of monsoon flooding terrifies me. Everywhere hoards of people toil, eat, honk, laugh, chat, sleep, shit, buy, and sell. It’s a lot like New York. But the magnitude of the income and education gap is constantly palpable, caste system remnants visible always, a potential deadweight to India’s rapid ascent.

water source for street food vendors

Until August, I am lucky enough to be a guest member of a powerhouse social enterprise team bent on improving the lives of India’s rural and peri-urban poor through access to clean water. Wello’s innovative tool, the WaterWheel, is in its third cocreated design iteration and ready for production. My project involves evaluating end user impact to fully develop Wello’s value proposition, as well as financial scenario planning to define the business model. Our office space is entirely covered in Post-Its. 

We will spend June here in Mumbai, engaging with partners, coordinating logistics, and studying urban water use habits. The entrepreneurial atmosphere ensures fresh questions and challenges on a daily basis, something I missed during my brief foray into corporate life last summer. Risk is allowed, creativity is encouraged, MBA lessons are put to good use. And my daily breakfast consists of papaya, pineapple, mango, watermelon, pomegranate, banana, and yogurt, keeping a smile on my face. Lunch is panipuri, paneer, strangely addictive jeera crackers, and all the fresh juice I could ask for.


In July we head to Rajasthan to work in the field, connecting with our target market and gathering baseline data. While I look forward to lake palaces, camels, and riotously dyed saris, I am not entirely ready to abandon my cityscape. Three weeks ago, I came to Mumbai. I’m still discovering Bombay.

Impact Investing: Crazy or Not?

My name is Patrick Huang and I am a WDI Fellow interning for Village Capital in Mumbai, India for the summer. A relatively young organization in the impact investing industry, Village Capital supports growing social entrepreneurs around the world. Before I get into the amazing work that Village Capital does, I wanted to share what I learned about the industry after attending the Impact Investing in Action conference in Atlanta and the Frontier Market Scouts training program in California.

For those unfamiliar with social enterprises and impact investing, I am defining a "social enterprise" as a for-profit enterprise seeking to achieve returns beyond financial such as positive social and environmental impact while "impact investing" as an industry seeking to finance these social enterprise through debt (loans), equity (ownership), and anything in between. Traditionally, non-profits have pursued social and environmental impact while corporations have focused on financial returns. With social entrepreneurship officially recognized by Bill Drayton from Ashoka, more market-based (see: revenue generation) approaches have flourished partly in response to the unsustainable, grant-funded programs that address poverty. Although this shift may sound appealing, the challenges for social entrepreneurs are staggering.

First, most Base ofthe Pyramid business models generate lower margins and take longer to reach scale, i.e. impact thousands - much less millions - of people. Simply stripping down a product offered in the developed world and selling this in developing countries has proven to be ineffective.  Just like those in developed markets, BoP business models require multiple iterations to refine the product or service for customers' needs.

For entrepreneurs, the nascent impact investing ecosystem offers little support for the more than 85% of start-ups that fail. First off, social entrepreneurs - whether they identify themselves as such - have difficulty finding financing. On one end of the spectrum, traditional investors typically expect a much higher return while non-profit foundations (with a few exceptions like Calvert Foundation) are usually wary of giving grants to for-profit entities. For example, a speaker during the conference mentioned the disconnect between a philanthropic heart and an investor mind: when considering funding to a social enterprise, his board was more willing to give $50K in grants with no opportunity for return rather than a $50K convertible note (essentially debt with the option to convert to part ownership of a start-up) with 2% interest. In addition, social entrepreneurs oftentimes don't even know what a "social enterprise" is or wouldn't naturally associate themselves as such leading to a sense of isolation with little support.

The challenges continue to the investor side. Investors in the US typically invest in multiple start-ups with the hope that one of them generates huge returns by going public or getting acquired by a larger company thereby returning around 100 times the initial investment. For impact investors, however, the return is usually closer to 1X the initial investment leading to a higher risk per investment. In addition, financing options are usually limited as debt is not as viable since the revenue generated by these enterprises is too low to pay for monthly interest payments. Furthermore, the economics of financing these deals are not as compelling as the transaction costs, e.g. due diligence , are just as high for a $300K deal compared to a $1-3M deal.

Despite these challenges, hope prevails; the impact investing industry has taken steps to address them such as GIIRS and IRIS's effort to standardize social metrics and B Corp's certification that allows for-profit enterprises to legally pursue returns beyond financial. In addition, the conference is a good example of industry leaders coming together to discuss these issues and how to overcome them. This conference also demonstrates one of the distinguishing factors for the impact investing industry: collaboration. Impact investors understand that addressing poverty alleviation is multi-faceted and complex; co-investment in enterprises has become common to share risk while validating deals.

Additional support, such as incubators (Hub Ventures) and accelerators, is also increasing especially for earlier-stage enterprises. Village Capital's unique accelerator programs brings cohorts of entrepreneurs together around the world. Besides providing training such as improving business models and learning how to think like investors, entrepreneurs conduct peer reviews to make themselves better. At the end, each entrepreneur ranks everyone (minus themselves, of course) and the top ranked receive funding. With pre-committed capital from investors, Village Capital changes the power dynamic altogether. With 14 programs worldwide, Village Capital continues to accelerate both the industry and entrepreneurs seeking to make a positive impact in the world.

To be fair, critics around impact investing present valid points. Despite these criticisms, impact investing is growing with large institutional support such as JP Morgan and Citibank and will continue to evolve. In my mind, the only question for me is whether I want to stay on the sidelines and wait to see what happens or join and contribute to the exciting and innovative approaches to address poverty. As a speaker during the conference aptly noted: "There are things that are crazy to do. There are things that you would be crazy not to do." Impact investing is one of those things that I would be crazy not to do.