Sujatha Ramani On Empowering Female Community Leaders To Distribute Climate Technology

Sujatha Ramani has driven global leadership assignments in her corporate career in multinational tech companies in India before becoming an entrepreneur creating companies in education and hospitality.

Becoming a Director for The National Entrepreneur Network, a new initiative to help startups grow and scale their business, fuelled Sujatha’s motivation and drive to support emerging enterprises that create new employment.

For the last 3 and half years, Sujatha has been the CEO of the non for profit Pollinate Group. Founded by 6 Australians in 2012, the Pollinate Group’s impact model is committed to solving the global energy crisis by providing access to life-improving, clean energy products, empowering women and creating micro-entrepreneurs by addressing poverty in India and Nepal. To date, this groundbreaking program has reduced carbon emissions by 1.5 million tCO2e, empowered 1822 women, and impacted 697,000 people in these communities. Plus, distributed over 239,000 clean energy products which have helped these communities save over AUD 31 million with a significant positive impact.

Sujatha discusses how women in marginalised communities are positioned to accelerate both the social enterprise movement and adoption of climate friendly technology globally.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion for social enterprise?

[Sujatha Ramani] - I grew up as a singular girl amongst five boys: one brother of my own and four cousins. As is normal, I grew up in a large joint family set up. Right from childhood, I've had to find space for myself as one girl amongst so many boys. My grandmother was always extra lenient and supported me in my childhood. The rest of the brothers would say, "we are going to play a game of cricket; we'll just bowl one ball over for you and then you can go and sit while we play a serious game of cricket." My grandmother would turn around and say, "no, you need to bowl for her until you get her out." She was such an influence in my life, by being that person who would ask for my space amongst all the boys I grew up with.

Today, in the position I’m in, I have learned how to create space, and I'm glad I'm able to do that for the many marginalised women who have no voice or ability to speak for themselves. As a child growing up, I would always walk around the house and switch off the lights or fan that were on in the room no people were sitting in. Energy was very precious (from an economic point of view) as we grew up. I also felt it was not something we own, but something nature was giving us and which we should treat with a lot more respect by using it carefully. As a child, I would go around and help the children of women that would come home and help our mothers and aunts prepare meals and keep our homes clean. I felt children were never given the opportunity of education because of their economic status. I would ask my mum and aunt why these children don't get to go to school? Even if sometimes they would go to school, with the least possible disruption they would then be stopped from going to school.

I would sit with these children and help them with their education as I was doing my own homework at home. These were simple incidences that helped me be a lot more empathetic and aware of my surroundings. Today I'm so thankful I've made that my full-time occupation.

Pollinate has helped me blend gender, clean energy, and access to a very dignified livelihood through meaningful entrepreneurship education, that can lift people out of poverty and create a cleaner and healthier environment.

As CEO of Pollinate, tell us a little bit more about the projects you are involved in?

Pollinate was started by six Australians who wanted to provide energy access to the most marginalised people living completely off the grid. When you say ‘off the grid’ in India and Nepal, it means they don't have access to electricity, water, sewage, or even sanitation. It means their living conditions are extremely unspeakable. Through access to clean energy products, it immediately removed the need for using kerosene, plastic and other bioproducts for cooking and lighting. Come sunset, kerosene lamps filled peoples tents with toxic fumes and the women would cook using the wood and plastic which easily available. It immediately polluted the environment to the point where statistics said a kerosene lamp lit for an hour was equivalent to smoking eight cigarettes. That's the amount of pollution this was creating for people inside these tents, and the community was filled with toxic air.

Pollinate's objective was to eliminate this and provide access to clean energy products such as solar lights, solar fans, clean cooking appliances, water filters, and so on, immediately transforming the living conditions of everyone in the community. We moved to a women centric model because we found it was the women saving up the money to buy these products. Women held the fundamental responsibility of providing for the family, although it was the men that went out to earn a daily wage through labour-intensive work, their income was not spent on the family.

The women would work on all jobs around communities and provide for basic food, education, and other amenities required to run a family of five or six (a typical number of family members). We also merged with an organisation called Empower Generation which worked in Nepal through a women centric model. From 2019 onwards, we moved to a model of identifying women in communities, women with a deep sense of motivation to pull themselves out of poverty. They were identified without a filter of education or arithmetic, because these women were all married off in their early teens, had no access to education and moved from rural to urban towns in search of livelihoods with their families. Pollinate would invest in these women with entrepreneurship skills and provide clean energy product inventories thwy would sell within the communities, to create a much cleaner, safer, and healthier environment. This was while they built micro businesses and has access to a very dignified source of income. We work in about seven states in India and three districts in Nepal.

We are very eager to empower as many women as we can because we realise entrepreneurship as a skill has a deep-rooted long-term impact on climate change, which is expected to dislocate people further in the next few years. We believe women are well equipped to build their lives wherever they are displaced through access to clean energy products and entrepreneurship, helping them to continue to support their families.

As a speaker at the Social Enterprise World Forum in Amsterdam this year, what is it you are most looking forward to most about the Forum?

I’m excited to be part of such a wonderful fraternity of people participating in the Social Enterprise World Forum. We did have a meagre participation last time; I couldn't go to the Forum in Australia. But I'm so excited to meet people and exchange ideas, learnings and fundamentally build a voice for advocacy of social entrepreneurs and enterprise organisations all around the world. We are on the cusp of driving business models to solve social problems, and I think we need a lot of advocacies and a voice for ourselves.

I firmly believe the blending of purpose with business is a solid way to have a future which is poverty and hunger free, as well a world hugely empowered and enabled. Unless there is a business built around solving social problems, it is difficult to solve problems philanthropy or any other giving means.

There must be a sense of ownership as well as an objective that can be sustained with little dependency on philanthropy or support from donors. It must generate enough income to keep solving social problems. At the forum, I'll be on the lookout for people who have created templates and models we can learn from and keep building a robust and scalable enterprise model.

What are your observations on the social enterprise landscape in India and where are opportunities to grow this business for good movement globally?

That's an interesting question, primarily because when I discuss the Pollinate model with anyone who asks me what I do, I find them extremely excited and curious about how we've come about creating such a model. Our integrated business model empowers a woman who then run a business on their own with little dependency on us. I'm keen to understand how people have configured many more business models such as this, and I think it's very important to create such models and start experimenting with them to see what works and doesn't work. Every time we speak about what we do helps to create interest and investment from people, not necessarily in dollars, but in terms of their ability and problem-solving capabilities. I think this is equally valuable for the work we do. While dollars are certainly one resource, time and talent are crucial to solving these problems.

What advice would you be giving to impact led entrepreneurs who are looking to start or grow their enterprises?

I firmly believe people closest to the problem will have the sharpest clues to solving that problem. I always talk to my team working closely with our women entrepreneurs. I listen to what they have to say about their experiences. For example, this morning we had a weekly meeting and then we met a woman entrepreneur in a remote community beyond Kolkata and West Bengal India. She was saying, “I'd like to have products which are fast moving as an incentive for me, because then I know I will get three-four more times more than what I do if I achieve slab rates.” It was such wonderful feedback she gave us, because it helps her bring down her time to order those products because she knows she will get it as a part of her incentives. As a fast-moving product, she would be able to sell it and grow her micro business.

We always want to keep our ears close to the ground and make it effortless for our women to grow and scale fast. My mantra to creating more effective models is to stay as close to the people working closely to solving these problems.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently which are creating a positive social change?

I think the world is still not fully open to the role of enterprise in solving social problems; people still believe it has got to be driven with philanthropy. Philanthropy makes us a little weak and dependent, while if you're creating an enterprise and business model, you're able to stand on your own feet, sustain and scale it to a level where you’re creating an impact. One thing I am excited to listen in on is the young rich people who are wanting to participate in the space. I think they will come not just with empathy or dollars, but with the ability to solve the problem in a differentiated manner. Right now, I'm trying to work by creating a forum of young people who have made their money and are wanting to invest in solving social problems, not necessarily by just giving, but by participating. I'd like to learn more about how to do that, but I've just started thinking about it a little more now.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

Books deeply affect the way I have conducted my professional activities. One is the book Nothing Gets Done If It Doesn't Get Measured [The Tyranny of Metrics]. That's an excellent book for everyone to understand the importance of data, creating milestones and timelines so you know either yes, your idea is working, or no, you need to drop it and go do the next thing. It's so important to be able to let go, but you should have a definitive timeline to do that. If you ask me what I'm reading now, it's an excellent book called The Upside of Uncertainty, which is so timely. We've just come out of a very uncertain time with the pandemic, and we're also staring at climate change, which is going to be something we all must deal with. This book is going to teach me how to navigate uncertainty with a very positive outlook, which is who I am. I've always dealt with eventuality using a positive mindset, because you just need to come out of it and look at what you can do in the most positive way. This book is going to teach me to be that person who can look uncertainty in the eye and figure out how to come out of it.