My experience of working on a social enterprise for two years

I worked on a social enterprise called project Trishna for two years. I was the project lead for one year. The purpose of Project Trishna was to provide access to clean drinking water in rural areas. I worked on this project while I was in my third and fourth year of pursuing an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. The product was an earthen pot made out of mud, clay, sawdust, and other inexpensive materials manufactured to have filtration quality comparable to RO filters. We partnered with a potter community from a village near Chennai to manufacture these pots. Our team visited this potter community to teach them the manufacturing process for these filters. We visited the homes of some of these potters and saw that they had a big brick oven in the middle of their home, which was the size of a small car. These ovens were for baking the pots after the potters handcrafted them. These ovens worked on all kids of unclean fuels like wood and coal. The problem here was that all this was happening in the middle of the potter’s homes, and when we asked them about it, the typical response was -” This smoke has become a part of daily routine now, and it doesn’t bother us anymore. This smoke comes along with the profession of being a potter.” Many of the issues like this one can be solved, especially in rural regions, and that is why social enterprises are essential.

Anyways my task was about clean drinking water. The Trishna filter was worth 400 Rs. It took about 350 Rs. to manufacture these pots, even at a price range of 400, which is significantly less than other water filters in the market we faced a lot of resistance to buying from the villagers. They were unaware of all the consequences of drinking unfiltered water, so my new task was about raising awareness in the village about the importance of clean drinking water. For this task, we invited an expert to talk at the monthly village meeting. Some of the people who were very welcoming of our product were families with little children.

Some Insights on social entrepreneurship based on my experience-

1. It is challenging to generate profits in a social enterprise because it involves working with marginalized communities and would generally involve lower margins.
2. Alternate methods to generate revenue might be a good idea for some social enterprises because that is how the business can become scalable. Some of the methods can be -grants, selling the product to non-marginalized populations or corporations. ( I received business ethics grant worth 50,000 from KPMG)
3. Most social enterprises encounter the task of educating their customers along with the job of making a product that solves a critical social issue.
4. Some social issues become part of marginalized communities, and changing their mindset about specific topics is a challenging task.

My team with students from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, who were our partners for project Trishna, along with the potter