The past few months have been another eventful period for Saathi!
Field engineer Grace Kane finished up work in Hubli in February, after doing surveys and user testing with local women, establishing some great Indian contacts and doing a test manufacturing run of some prototype machine parts with local manufacturers.
We’re now in the testing and evaluation stage of the design, and we’re going to spend the next few months fine-tuning the machine and creating a final prototype. Saathi co-founder Amrita Saigal has just arrived in Mumbai where we are collaborating with the Indian Institute of Technology to do this testing and evaluation over the next few months. Our first large-scale pilot of the pads and distribution system is also happening this July. We’re on the lookout for more partner NGOs and customers for our pilot, so if you are interested please contact us!
In the next few weeks we’re starting off our drive for funds to complete the machine on Kickstarter – watch this blog for links to our project page.
Saathi in India
It’s been an exciting few months for Saathi! Since October 2011, I’ve been working as Saathi’s field engineer in India, developing the first on-the-ground prototype of the Saathi machine.
I’ve been working closely with the Deshpande Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship based in Hubli, Karnataka, to take the project forwards. Details below!
Collaborations with local NGOs
Since coming to Hubli, we have been working with the Bhoruka Charitable Trust (http://www.bctngo.org/), an established NGO who have had a huge impact in rural economic and social development across India. In the Hubli area they work closely with rural women through their foster-mother schemes, where local women look after children orphaned to HIV/AIDS. I have been fortunate enough to be able to work with these remarkable women to do initial user surveys and customer research in rural areas around Hubli.
With our research, we are building up a picture of the needs of our users – rural Indian women – and exactly the design, price and distribution that would suit them
Working with Banana Farmers
Saathi has also been establishing a relationship with banana farmers in Northern Karnaka. We’ve made contacts with KVKs (agricultural research centres that provide education and resources to local farmers) and are working with some of these centres to set up banana fiber extraction machines can be rented out to local farmers. These extraction units can provide additional income to banana farmers and provide Saathi with fibre for our pilot.
Building a machine!
We’re very close to having a first “India prototype” of the machine built – we’ve been using only fabricators based in and around the Hubli area, and have been working with Indian engineers to ensure the design is feasible and scalable for mass-manufacture in India. Once this is up and running, we hope to start testing the pads it produces with local focus groups.
Saathi: Where We Are Today
It’s been a while since we’ve posted, and things have been so volatile in the past few months we thought it would be good to give a reset-style update, so you can see in one burst where exactly Saathi stands today going forward. With this in mind, enjoy the following written by our CEO Amrita Saigal!
Overview
Every year, roughly 210 million women of menstruating age living in rural India are precluded from contributing to their communities simply because they lack access to affordable sanitary protection. The implications are real – every year, many of these rural girls and women miss up to 50 days of school and work respectively. Many of these school-aged girls either fall behind or drop out of school entirely. Additionally, India loses close to USD 15 billion in productivity because working-aged women stay home during the duration of their periods. Along with socio-economic challenges, cultural stigmas prevent many rural women from easily accessing proper feminine hygiene products. More alarmingly, many of these women resort to unsafe alternatives such as rags, which can lead to serious infections.
To address this pressing healthcare issue, Saathi has developed a small scale manufacturing process to make affordable sanitary pads from waste banana tree fiber. Saathi pads will be manufactured and distributed by local entrepreneurial women in rural India, where the pad market is estimated to be USD 940 million annually. The need for affordable and accessible sanitary protection is not limited to India. Saathi’s business model is easily scalable and depending on local availability, different materials such as bamboo or papyrus could replace the pad’s banana fiber filling.
Business Model
Saathi is a for-profit social enterprise that will launch in the state of Tamil Nadu located in southern India. Saathi has two revenue sources: selling Saathi machines and selling packages of raw materials to produce pads. Local entrepreneurial women will manufacture and sell Saathi pads for Rs.2/pad. Working with groups of local women will enable Saathi to build on the trust that these women have already cultivated with their local communities to produce and distribute sanitary pads. The pads can be sold either through door-to-door distribution or sales at local markets, depending on which is the most effective channel for each village.
Competitive Advantage
- Innovation to address an unmet need: Saathi targets the rural poor, a group that has yet to be reached by any large pad manufacturing or distribution company. Additionally, the Saathi small-scale manufacturing machine is a low cost, modular, and locally made system that requires just two female workers to produce pads quickly, providing them with full time employment.
- Sensitivity to cultural barriers: Saathi’s distribution model through local entrepreneurial women’s groups will cater to rural women by using the power of social networks to educate and encourage the adoption of inexpensive sanitary napkins.
- Efficient cost structure: Saathi pads are inexpensive because the filling material is harvested from waste banana fiber at a low cost and transformed into an absorbent pad filling material using a proprietary process.
- Social impact: Saathi is the Hindi word for “friend”. At the heart of the company is the desire to collaborate with women in rural communities and be the friend who will help them achieve their full potential. Saathi has the goal of providing employment over 500 women, while creating access to sanitary pads to 320,000 women in rural India in the first 5 years of operation.
Awards & Recognitions
- MIT IDEAS Winner – Spring 2010 One of top 20 technology projects in the country chosen to present at the USAID science expo, September 2010
- MIT Executive Summary Competition – Emerging Track Runner Up – Winter 2011
- Tufts 100K Entrepreneurship Competition Runner-Up – Spring 2011
- MIT 100K Semifinalist – Spring 2011
- MassChallenge Semifinalist – Spring 2011
- Accepted into Deshpande Foundation for Social Enterprise Entrepreneur-in-Residence Program – Fall 2011
MassChallenge, MIT100K Finale, and more…
Greetings all, it’s been awhile since our last post, but we had lots going on so we saved it all for a juicy update which you are about to read! Here it is in bullet form (to limit my rambling!):
- MassChallenge: Saathi was selected into the second round of MassChallenge Entrepreneurship Competition judging! Friday morning we will pitch to a panel of judges. The next step in the competition if we advance would be a summer-long program called the MassChallenge “accelerator,” where we could further develop our business model thanks to access to more mentoring and other resources. The MassChallenge competition is a $1M startup competiton open to anyone in the world. Check our http://masschallenge.org/accelerator/2011 for more info.
- MIT$100K Results: Last night was the Finale show of the 2011 MIT$100K competition. Unfortunately Saathi did not win any prizes this time, but we still are extremely thankful for all we gained in the Semi-Final round, especially getting connected with our two amazing mentors, Luba Greenwood and Matt Shakhovskoy. Without their support, we would not be nearly as ready for our upcoming pilots as we are today!
- YouPitch Results: Thank you for all who voted for us!!! We didn’t quite make the cut here either, but we consider it a victory solely on the fact that it lit a fire under our social media campaign, helping spread the word about Saathi’s mission!
- Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship (DCSE): Back on a happier path, Saathi was selected to participate in DCSE’s Entrepreneurs in Residence program! The center will fund us in support of our pilots upcoming in the next few months.
Those are the highlights, but probably the most exciting item we have on our plate at the moment is our upcoming pilots. So exciting in fact that they deserve their own post – we’re working on that now. Check back soon!
Hey folks! This afternoon Saathi entered into a new competition, and we need your help!
The competition is called YouPitch and it is run by the MIT100k. it is essentially an elevator pitch contest run entirely through YouTube.
Where we need your help: “Like” our video on YouTube! The 3 videos with the most “Likes” by May 1 make it into the finals! You can “like” our video by visiting it here, then logging into YouTube and clicking “Like.”
Note: you need to be logged into a YouTube account to “like” it.
Thanks for your help, and tell your friends!
Well, we might have been quiet recently, but the Saathi team has been busy, and we’ve got proof! Yesterday afternoon, Saathi went to the Tufts Business Plan competition where we were one of five finalists in the Social Enterprise Competition. Powered by an amazing pitch given by Joyce, Saathi took second! We won $7,500 cash, $20,000 worth of office space rent from Cummings Properties, and a scholarship for our team to attend a VentureLab from NCIIA.
We’re so excited to put these new-found resources to good use! Thank you to the Tufts Competition, particularly Professor Pamela Goldberg, Cummings Properties, and NCIIA.
Now back to the grindstone to flesh out the rest of our business model for the MIT $100K, writing our next business plan and planning our upcoming pilot!
Check out this article for more info on the results of the competition.
Last Thursday night marked another exciting achievement for the Saathi team – we were named one of 25 semi-finalists for the 2011 MIT 100k Business Plan Competition! There were 260 entries this year (entries consisted of a 2-page executive summary and a 12 slide deck), so we are very excited and thank the judges very much for their support this far!
Saathi will be competing as one of 5 finalists in the Emerging Markets track (the other tracks are Mobile, Products & Services, Life Sciences, and Web/IT). The next step is taking part in the MIT100K Mentorship program and then submitting a full-up business plan later this spring. Check back later for more!
You can watch the whole Semi-Finalist Announcement Webcast here. Congratulations to the other Semi-Finalists as well!
Welcome to SaathiPads.com!
Well hello there! Welcome you to the new face of Saathi: SaathiPads.com!
Some of you might have never heard of us, and have no idea who we are here at Saathi or what we are doing. If this sounds like you, check out the pages across the site’s navigation bar, in particular the page What is Saathi?
Some of you might know us from our prior name: Komera. If you came here looking for Komera, you’ve found us! We have changed our name to Saathi to match the change in our target pilot region–from Rwanda to the Perambalur district of Tamil Nadu, India.
Some of you might know exactly who we are, and welcome to you as well!
Regardless of what category you fall into, this site will be your central source of updates going forward. Bookmark us, subscribe to our RSS feed, or just check back here often for updates on Saathi’s progress. We’re also on Twitter! Currently we’re aiming to pilot our program this summer, so stay tuned, we will have a lot to keep you updated on in the coming months!
