India and Needs
This article will be the fourth in the series based on social entrepreneurship.
One of the first concepts taught in management is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The theory is used to find out what kind of need a product satisfies. There are five stages of need-
- Physiological needs
- safety needs
- Love and belonging
- Esteem
- Self-actualisation.
Instead of using the theory to find the need for a product, I will use it to see what people need based on what they already have.
First, let us look at people working towards obtaining physiological needs( air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing and reproduction). Some people are working towards fulfilling their physiological needs every day, and they do not have the energy, time or resources to focus on the other needs. Some examples are — a vegetable vendor trying to sell his stock to feed his family at night, a beggar who struggles to find shelter and sometimes sleeps on a railway station platform, and many other such examples. Even if these people are more hard-working and driven than you and me, it is very likely that they will not make any significant achievement for themselves or society. On the other side, there is you and me, we are educated, we have access to many resources and finance, and if we work hard, we can create an impact on the world or at least for ourselves. Thus it becomes crucial for us to work on problems that help others achieve their physiological needs. The social enterprises, Ngo’s, government organisations working on solving problems like- clean water, access to nutrition, shelter for the homeless can have a massive impact on society. If these organisations successfully achieve their goals, they can give people the time and resources through which people can work toward needs like esteem. One example of impact can be -An organisation that has made healthy food and clean water affordable and readily available for all the school children in a village. Now students don’t have to go far away to fetch water and indulge in labour to feed themselves. Now they will be able to utilise their time to educate themselves, which will be beneficial for society because the society will get a more skilled workforce.
Working on these kind of problems is difficult, especially when everything is to be done on a minimal budget. This is the reason why we need the best minds in the country working on social enterprises.
