Marketing and Research Fellow
at Saath Charitable Trust
My role involved creating international marketing strategies for the local social enterprise R-Weaves and developing a survey for the local microentrepreneurs to self-assess their market strengths. This experience truly underscored the significance of international social innovation, demonstrating how innovation and entrepreneurship can empower local communities towards self-sufficiency. However, it also brought to light the potential pitfalls of outsider intervention and the importance of being empathetic and culturally conscious partners in social innovation endeavors.
Saath Livelihoods, a nonprofit that aims to develop innovative and sustainable business models to increase livelihood options for the vulnerable sections of the community, is established under the NGO Saath in Ahmedabad, India. R-Weaves is a social enterprise launched by Saath Livelihoods to revive the dying arts of Tangaliya and Patola that involves working with weavers (who themselves are microentrepreneurs) from the Surendranagar District of Gujarat in India and providing opportunities for further training, fair trading, and other financial support to artisans.
The project I was in charge of for Saath Livelihoods included two parts: increasing international awareness of specifically R-Weaves and creating a survey to measure the market strength of microentrepreneurs in Ahmedabad. I chose this project to understand how entrepreneurship is used to advance the social impact and local, and environmental factors that can affect enterprises. The experience was both innovative and entrepreneurial as I was challenged to come up with creative marketing solutions and a novel market strength evaluation system—a process that also uniquely allowed me to be in the shoes of local microentrepreneurs.
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For the R-Weaves international marketing project, my responsibilities included creating social media marketing strategies to increase the international visibility of the social enterprise, a global fundraising project, strategies to build coherence in R-Weaves' virtual presence, and an introductory handbook for new international customers.
Figure 1 (on the left). Handbook for R-Weaves
For the microentrepreneur survey project, my responsibilities included researching how different countries measure and assess the performance of microenterprises, establishing indicators of microenterprises' market strength and ways to measure each of the indicators, creating survey questions, making a scoring system for each of the survey questions with Excel to quantify anticipated survey responses, creating flyers and Google Form to promote and conduct a field survey in Korea, and analyzing survey results.
Figure 2. Final presentation including social media marketing for R-Weaves and process and deliverables for the microentrepreneur survey assignment
Through this experience, I learned marketing for a social enterprise and appropriate ways to interact with a local community whose culture and environment are unfamiliar to me. It is difficult to measure my achievements in these objectives especially since my experience was virtual. However, I believe I was able to fulfill my original learning objectives through multiple check-ins with my mentor/supervisor Bella Joshi which allowed me to understand how to distinguish between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation in my work. Being hyper-aware of how each step of my work represents the local community and proactively engaging in conversations with clients supported my learning objectives as well.
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This experience truly highlighted what it means to engage in international social innovation work. Working with R-Weaves and Saath, I realized how innovation and entrepreneurship can be used to empower the local community with self-sufficiency. However, for an outsider like myself, it is easy to define the community's "needs" and become an intruder into the community. Thus, the experience allowed me to recognize the importance of being an empathetic and conscious partner for the community in social innovation work.
Special thanks to the following mentors:
Bella Joshi​
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Project Head of Saath
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Project Manager of R-Weaves
Abid Hira
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Associate Director of Saath