Yogavelli Nambiar On Why Accessibility In Entrepreneurship Is Essential For Uplifting Disadvantaged Communities

Yogavelli is a social change strategist and impact entrepreneur. She founded Niara Advisory to conceptualise, design, and implement interventions that create sustainable socio-economic impact; build leadership and business model resilience in non-profits and social enterprises; and develop strategic collaborations across the social change ecosystem.

Her SDG focus areas are reducing inequality, promoting gender equality, and ensuring decent work with an emphasis on entrepreneurship development for women, youth, and social entrepreneurs.

Yogi serves on the boards of Aspen Institute Global South Africa, the Aspen Network for Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), the Uhambo Foundation (part of Shonaquip Social Enterprise), and the Africa regional board of YPO (Young Presidents Organisation). She is a Fellow of the African Leadership Initiative and the Aspen Global Leadership Network, and a former TEDx speaker. She is also the founder of the award-winning Entrepreneurship Development Academy at the Gordon Institute of Business Science in the University of Pretoria.

Yogavelli discusses why democratising access to an entrepreneurial education helps disadvantaged communities develop sustainably and how she is advocating for greater diversity, innovation and inclusion across the continent of Africa.

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

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in social entrepreneurship?

[Yogavelli Nambiar] - I was born in a township specifically for people of Indian origin in apartheid South Africa. I was living in this community where I had a sheltered upbringing. People who looked like me were on the same level, and I almost didn't realise what I didn't have. A few years after we got freedom, I was working for a multinational corporation. I was on the fast track to becoming an executive and I went to India on a short holiday. What struck me there was the massive inequality between the rich and the poor. If you've been to India, you will see that you can have a five-star hotel next to a huge slum or informal settlement. It was an inequality I hadn't quite seen or understood in the same way back home, even though I was experiencing inequality there. I came back, resigned from my job, sold my car and other belongings at the time, and moved to India.

In my young mind, I was going to sort it all out; I thought that was going to take me a year! Obviously, these other older adults hadn't yet figured it out, and I was going to fix all the poverty and inequality issues in India! I started off thinking it would take me a year, but I ended up staying about seven or eight years working in women's rights and the disability sector. I didn't sort out anything, but I got quite a healthy dose of reality! It helped me understand my purpose, which is to make the lives of those who are less fortunate better. That's my overriding mission in life, to find ways to specifically help those who have been disadvantaged to access the economy, and entrepreneurship became an answer to that.

As a passionate proponent of democratising entrepreneurship, can you tell us more about your work and the impact it's generating?

My work in democratisation started while I was working in a women's rights organisation; we worked with women who had been trafficked into prostitution. When they were rescued and needed to be mainstreamed into society, they obviously couldn't get jobs for a variety of reasons like stigma or a lack of experience.

Entrepreneurship became a way to access the economy and have a sense of agency. They were able to resolve a problem and create value, which is essentially what entrepreneurship is; if you're not creating value for others, you're not going to make money and your solutions won't be sustainable.

That agency and confidence which comes with adding value to society is something I saw expressed in these women, and I’ve worked in various organisations and initiatives to help bring entrepreneurship education and training to various marginalised groups, such as young people, women, and township entrepreneurs in South Africa. Some of those organisations and initiatives become a bit exclusive; only if you got into a program, you would be able to access training. I wondered how we could ensure entrepreneurship education became the great equaliser. Irrespective of whether you went to a private or public school, had the right circumstances or family, that you would still be able to access this education and achieve some level of equality by understanding how to create value in society through an entrepreneurial lens.

One of the programs which taught me a lot was being country director for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Initiative. This is a global entrepreneurship program giving women who would not ordinarily be able to access a business school education the ability to learn about the entrepreneurial mindset. They would then be able to learn the process of entrepreneurship, going from finding a problem or opportunity to thinking up ways in which to address that issue. This experience taught me a lot, and what I am doing now is building a pan African platform initiative equalising that opportunity as well. This platform will bring this opportunity to young people across the continent who would be able to access entrepreneurship education, because it’s essentially a lens for the world.

Entrepreneurship is about looking at the world, identifying a problem, and solving it with an idea while adding your value to it. When you begin to look at the world in this way, you become less helpless and able to find opportunities amid the chaos.

This program is very early stage. I have had a lot of interest from about four countries to roll this out. We're busy with the technical side of putting the components together, and I think we'll be ready to formally launch by the end of this year. It's looking very positive, and I think what garnering interest is that it is a platform for everyone. It's an initiative bringing together people who wouldn't ordinarily be able to access such programs. It doesn't matter if you're not an A student or don’t meet any criteria. If you are somebody who has any idea of how to respond to a social challenge, you're welcome in this initiative. I can't say too much more because we're at this early stage, but I have had a lot of interest from foundations and philanthropists to get involved and bring in people to work with on it.

How is diverse thinking a pathway for new possibilities and what techniques can help people reimagine what’s possible?

First, start with oneself when looking to make a change. I think the questions we can ask will be around our own thinking. What am I missing in my thinking when I'm looking at a social challenge? When I'm looking at an issue or my solution, what am I missing? What would somebody who had a completely different life circumstance to me think? What would they need? What questions would they ask the people who are most affected by the issue? What are their thoughts on this? What questions are they asking? What are my biases whether they are conscious or unconscious? How is that showing up in how I think things should be done?

We should start by questioning ourselves, and then secondly by questioning the environment in which the problem or solution sits. Take the time to research what questions others are asking, because you can only know so much with your level of knowledge and exposure to the issue.

How do you push those levels by bringing in people who don't just echo what you already think and who ask their own questions?

What are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities you see in the work you do?

There are so many challenges that we can sometimes get a stuck in those weeds. I was thinking that probably the challenges are from three levels. The individual level is how people think about social change and impact. I've found over the years people still are enticed and attracted by the sexiness of quick results; they think about how they can quickly put a layer of paint on this issue so it looks better, and the relevant photographs can be taken. They want to feel good, because obviously from a social change perspective they get a hit from saying what impact they’ve created.

The challenge here is people are short-changing the results they could create and the sustainability of outcomes.

When this falls apart, we're left dissatisfied by the initiative and believing it didn’t work. However, we didn't put enough thinking into it from the beginning to understand the context, customise how the program rolls out, and think about in the long term what has been done for a person's life to be changed? How have you enabled any change to happen?

It’s not that you have the power and are now in all your altruism giving to somebody else, but how did you create an enabling environment for change to happen? If you're not looking at this critically and not working out what is important together with the people involved, you won't get very far. Organisationally, social change work is somehow seen as inferior or not worth as much investment as business or commercial activities. I'm still seeing organisationally it's something on the periphery. Don't get me wrong, there's been huge movement in the past decade or two in terms of interest and the time and effort dedicated for funding applied to this, but I am still surprised that in 2024 I find people asking, "can I just do this small thing and then people will know we care about society?" What they’re really asking is how can they do the minimum possible? That for me is worrying, because when you set up with this mindset it means you won’t apply yourself to the complexity this work requires. From a systemic view, there's not enough thinking with regards to the issue people are trying to resolve or address. The issue feeds and is fed by the system, so how do can we understand how these things work together to create a coherent response? It’s important right now to meet certain short-term needs, but how does that feed the system as I mentioned, and how can I collaborate with others who are resolving something else in the system? Collaboration is one of those cliches in this social impact space; everyone talks about collaboration. But if I just sent you one email, and then next thing I'm telling people that I collaborate with you, you would think that's not proper collaboration! I don't really think I need to say this to people who are entrenched in this social impact space.

Collaboration requires deep thought, planning and effort. It means there is something being fundamentally changed or created through that relationship which wouldn't have existed prior. The whole must be more than the sum of its parts, so while we could have worked separately within the system, working together ensures something will change.

A collaboration is not just about giving me money; that's not enough of a collaboration. It's about how we are working together using that funding to fundamentally change what we're trying to address. I don't want to sound too gloomy, but I think the challenges are vast; policies don't meet action or vice versa. In South Africa, we have policies for days and are great at things on paper. However, we are not as great in terms of actioning these policies. This being said, there is plenty of valuable work going on which keeps hope alive in this space, and people are doing wonderful things.

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

It's always difficult to pick a couple because there are various social change leaders across the world I talk with. I'm constantly inspired by what people are doing, but if I think about more recently, in the education space Vickers Porter from T4 Education (based in London) is putting a spotlight on schools, teachers and innovative teaching methodologies using a prize mechanism. He's got the World's Best School and the Africa Education Medal, and he recently launched the Best School to Work With award. Looking at schools and the infrastructure of how they operate, there's lots of great work happening with teaching and learning. He's looking at schools as this operating system and highlighting it using these prize mechanisms. Some of the impact is that in the various countries of the finalists and winners of those prizes, the government has become involved and enhanced policy based on the prize recipients. In healthcare, AMP Health is the collaboration created by the Aspen Institute. I was recently chatting to them and had an article written in a publication about it, and they’re training government workers who people normally don't want to touch (because the government is usually so full of bureaucracy) to make healthcare work in their country.

In climate change, there’s Solar Sister working with female entrepreneurs to come up with clean energy solutions in last mile communities, communities that just don't get touched by these types of initiatives. They're U.S. based, but recently I came back from Rwanda where I visited Zipline, an amazing social innovation out of Africa. They deliver 300-400 packages of medicine to public and private hospitals by drone every single day. These drones look like mini airplanes, and they hold the packages for delivery. Basically, Zipline holds a central repository for medicines in Rwanda which they fly out every day. This means these hospitals don't have to keep the medicine in storage or worry about how much stock to have. They don't have to worry about access to let's say antivenom, because it all comes from Zipline in the form of these deliveries. It's amazing to see how when mothers are giving birth and need lifesaving blood supplies, they are getting it via Zipline in minutes. If there's anything you need to feel inspired by, I’m sure Zipline can help.

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

There are many interesting books I've come across. The one I referr to quite a bit is Lean Impact by Ann Mei Chang, which is about how you apply the lean start-up process to creating a social change initiative. The Systems Work of Social Change supports what I've been talking about and helps with understanding the complexity of social change systems and not just creating change within a vacuum. This book was written by François Bonnici, who I've worked with before; a lovely, stalwart figure in the social change space. It looks at the context behind how you create connections within a social change system. Another book I found motivating was Rajiv Shah's Big Bets, because I'm a big proponent for doing small things incrementally in communities so that we can change things at scale. Rajiv's book Big Bets is about how you can make a big exponential change by pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.

One example of a big bet is when you want to reach somebody at a higher level to you to include in your project or get advice from. Reach out to them, take a big bet on yourself by seeking support from people you wouldn't think you're able to access, maybe the answer will be yes.

The World economic Forum’s articles are always interesting and edX produce great resources for learning more about emerging markets and working in the social impact space.