Don’t Teach Fishing…

By Dr. Gordon Adomdza

The proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and he will feed himself for a lifetime” is particularly relevant to social enterprise. An extension of it goes “help a man set up a fishing business and he will support a local economy around him in tremendous ways”. These proverbial images of encouraging acts of support for social impact are what confronted us in South Africa this summer during the design–thinking projects, except that it had nothing to do with fish at all.                                  

One of our clients for the projects on the South Africa field study was Little Green Number (LGN) which was based in Johannesburg, but was interested in replicating in Cape Town if we could show that such replication was feasible and was in the best interest of the organization.

LGN was born when its founder acquired Waste to Wow  and decided to find a sustainable way of empowering women sewers to make ipad and computer bags, wine cases, and other products made from the vinyl from discontinued advertising billboard campaigns. 

LGN’s trajectory fits the fish proverb. The organization wanted to help the women start micro sewing businesses (fishing businesses), which would include training in sewing, business development and acquisition of industrial sewing machines (fishing gear) so that the women could sew independently at home. Clearly, the team could have just given fish or just built a factory that employed trained sewers so they could ‘feed themselves for a lifetime’ from their wages, but they wanted to train, equip and set up small businesses for these women.

Before long, LGN was running a pilot in the Johannesburg area selling to a few local shops and courting corporate support. As interest grew, LGN soon had a backlog of orders and the pressure was on. The sewer training and business development program could not keep pace with the demand, a problem rooted in South Africa’s dreadful legacies of Apartheid.  During this era, blacks were denied education and therefore many basic skills required for business development were absent. Further, the prospect of women sewers sewing from home was not that straightforward as initially thought.

It turns out that there is a parallel to LGN’s predicament in the conceptualization of how to help the poor at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). In 2005, C.K. Prahalad proposed  that the BOP needed miniaturized versions of stuff they could afford as consumers. To keep the fishing proverb alive, let’s call this ‘giving fish’.Prahlad’s colleague, Aneel Karnarni, slammed that notion and proposed we perceive the BOP as producers instead. This notion could be ‘teaching fishing and providing fishing gear on micro loans’. It didn’t end there. Erik Simanis of Cornell University developed the “BOP Protocol” which argued that everyone wins if we perceive the BOP as innovators with whom we co-created business models, and for whom we provided resources for venture creation. While the LGN team’s thinking more closely aligned with Simanis’ perspective, mixed results of a trial at Kibera, a Kenyan slum, indicated that LGN faced an uphill battle to make innovators. 

After briefings from LGN, it was clear to the students that the innovator perception/fishing business/women micro sewer business option was the ideal model for social impact. A group of 5 business students spent 10 days studying LGN operations from the sourcing of vinyl to the finished products. Their research included primary and secondary data gathering, analogical examples to learn from, interviewing of potential sewers in Cape Town, and visiting sewing training centers for observations. After all the research, the team used a set of analysis frameworks to extract a point of view that they focused on to create potential solutions. Their point of view, which was a long statement[1], in the context of the fish metaphor, translated to “don’t teach fishing!”

It turns out, that because of the dire need for employment opportunities, there were very capable support organizations, such as Learn to Earn, which trained women in sewing and business development. Learn to Earn also had the capacity to provide periodic training and support. There were microfinance organizations that could finance  industrial sewing machines, but more importantly provide a filter for screening potential entrepreneurs through due diligence in the selection process for the loans. The team proposed that LGN partner with Learn to Earn and a local microfinance organization in Cape Town to gain easy access to trained and resource-equipped sewers. So, LGN didn’t need to tie resources and time into ‘teach fishing’ and ‘providing fishing gear’ in order to meet their orders because these partners could do that.

The lesson is that in the world of social impact, there is always tremendous value in collaboration. If you are a social enterprise that provides multiple value propositions, one can argue that, the more value you provide to beneficiaries of the enterprise, the higher the need to collaborate with other social enterprises to achieve success. Understandably, social enterprises want to focus on their own organizational impact and not on ecosystem impact. However, there are often enough potential partners to create synergy and impact the eco-system in tremendous ways. Another way to put it using our guiding metaphor is, as you move from giving fish to the poor as consumers, to teaching fishing to producers, to helping your beneficiaries establish fishing businesses as innovators, the more intentional you should be about collaborating with others to provide supplementary value to enable you succeed. In fact, you may realize your goals, more efficiently if you avoided ‘teaching fishing’ and focused on empowering already ‘trained fisherwomen’.