Fighting Poverty With Profits



CEIBS MBA 2007 students join peers from Harvard, MIT, IIMA and more to participate in Enterprise Solutions to Poverty.


By Charmaine N. Clarke



CEIBS ESP Teams
Products and Services Team: Andres Martin Buldu, Joseph Ding, Kim Wei and Jason Li. Faculty Advisor: Prof. Bala Ramasamy.
Agribusiness Team: Antoni Casas, Rachel Jiang, Walker Tu, Teresa Zhou. Faculty Advisor: Prof Bala Ramasamy.
Enterprise Team: Jorge Amirola Sanz, Darren Deng, Xin Gong, Gauray Mishra. Faculty Advisor: Prof. Velamuri Ramakrishna.
Distribution Team: Amy Cheung, Leo Hu, Victor Lim, Rohan Menon. Faculty Advisor: Prof. Per Jenster.



Just a few years back, the unspoken-but-clear thinking at many top business schools - including CEIBS - was that participation in “social responsibility” was limited to class work for one or two required courses on business ethics or CSR. Actual involvement in programmes addressing social welfare could wait until after graduation.

Not now. During the past three years, CEIBS students have proven increasingly interested - and active- in social welfare initiatives. The CEIBS-initiated Being Globally Responsible Conference, now in its third year, and the Green Campus movement launched in 2007, are cases in point.

In the latest of such moves, in early January 2008, 16 MBA students joined their peers from more than a half-dozen top international schools to work with companies from China, India, Columbia and Mexico to find ways to turn a profit in these developing countries while helping the poor. The Enterprise Solutions to Poverty (ESP) brings together 140 students from CEIBS, Harvard Business School, Harvard KSG, MIT Sloan, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, EGADE (Mexico), plus University de los Andes and EAFIT (both of Columbia).

Launched in September 2006 by former President and CEO of the U.S.-based Women’s World Banking Nancy Barry, ESP offers MBA students a way to act socially responsible right now, rather than merely listening to classroom lectures on the topic. "The idea of ESP is to showcase companies that believe the poor are not a burden to be borne but rather that the poor can be assisted through creatively involving them in, for example, increasing production or improving your marketing,” explains CEIBS Professor of Economics Bala Ramasamy, who is the school’s ESP faculty coordinator. Thanks to funding from JP Morgan China, CEIBS students involved in the project will travel to such remote places as the villages surrounding Beijing and the townships of Shaanxi Province. There, they will meet with representatives from 15 companies participating in ESP for a first-hand look at ESP in action, and a chance to use their b-school skills to improve the project. Alibaba, Amway, GE Healthcare, Fosun, HSBC, Hengxing, Shaanxi Bee, Mengniu Dairy, New Hope, New Oriental, China Mobile, Suntech, Rural Credit and China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation are among the companies with which CEIBS students will collaborate.

STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Inner Mongolian dairy products giant Mengniu is often cited as an example of ESP at its best. The company provides dairy farmers in Western China with opportunities to reap financial benefits, and therefore raise their standard of living, by transforming them from simple cattle farmers to entrepreneurs. Meanwhile in India, mobile phone service provider Reliance attacks poverty through ESP by identifying poverty stricken villages, then nominating one person per village as the company’s sales agent for phone cards. "You are not eradicating poverty of the entire village, but certainly you have brought one family out of poverty. And if you have 500,000 villages in India, 500,000 families are being brought out of poverty,” says Prof. Ramasamy. “We’re not talking about eradicating the poverty of a country in one go, but as long as you bring one family after another out of poverty, that is a step in the right direction.”

The programme will send CEIBS students, in teams of four, to work with high-level company executives and key government entities across China. Companies fall into four broad ESP categories: agribusiness, distribution systems, products that build income and assets, and enterprise networks. The CEIBS teams will work alongside their peers from Boston to research and write live case studies on China-based companies that either are using or are potential candidates for using ESP. The aim is for companies who have used ESP to inspire others to get involved.

At the end of March, the four CEIBS teams will report their findings to ESP’s "innovation groups” in Beijing. Each participating country in the programme - including China - will form four innovation groups made up of industry leaders who will work closely with the local MBA team. In addition to the live case studies, the CEIBS MBA teams must also source industry data needed to carry out detailed analysis of the major issues and opportunities within their areas of focus, a vital component on which they will base their recommendations.

CEIBS Overall ESP Coordinator Aleksandra Krainski describes ESP as a way to "make a difference in the lives of millions of poor people.” She adds that the programme benefits both those in poverty and those volunteering to assist them. “But on top of that, [ESP] made us realize that helping the poor is not merely an act of charity. Large enterprises have the capacity to connect with low income people as suppliers, distributors - in addition to consumers of products - and so help them build income and assets on a for-profit basis. This way of thinking will certainly stay with the project members as they become business leaders in the future.”

 This spring, the CEIBS team members will work with Krainski and faculty advisors professors Ramasamy, Velamuri Ramakrishna and Per Jenster to complete their assignments (and earn a single credit). The final task will be a May 31 compilation of all 140 students’ PowerPoint presentations and teams’ final reports (in CD format).

 “With ESP, the students are actually working on these projects; they’re actually participating in projects and seeing the effects. So it really raises their understanding,” explains Academic Director of CEIBS MBA Programme Professor Lydia Price. Look to the summer 2008 edition of The LINK for full coverage of the programme.

Many of these initiatives were launched independently of each other but have, over the last few years, created a now noticeable trend at CEIBS. Prof. Ramasamy explains this shift as a movement toward, not emphasizing social responsibility on its own, per se, but incorporating the concept into other study topics.  “What we are developing is a new type of a model where responsible leadership, sustainable development and so on, are happening throughout the curriculum,” he says. “I’m not teaching you that you should be responsible. Instead, you have a lot of opportunity - during the activities of the school - which help you realize that responsible leadership is necessary. So rather than teaching people, we create opportunities for the students to participate as they go through this 18-month programme.”

Prof. Price agrees that CEIBS students and faculty alike are becoming increasingly aware of, and active in, CSR. The ESP project has presented a golden opportunity, as it coincides with an ongoing curriculum review aimed at examining issues of sustainability, responsible leadership and soft management skills. Best of all, she stresses with tangible enthusiasm, the project provides an opportunity to get involved, now: “This is something we can go ahead and get started with. We can move forward on this.”