Saturday, January 05, 2008

From Beggars to Entrepreneur

Maddy pointed me out to this Video of Mohammad Yousuf which was posted on ngopost. This is really inspiring and here is the little excerpt from it.

"
I always insist that all human beings are entrepreneurs, without exception. it is part of human being, you cannot take it out, it is built in to him/her. Simply we could not build the society where we could unleash that potential, it remains dormant, because society never gave that idea, we do not talk about that in class room, in education system. Educations system encourages you to get good grades, and we say that if you get good grades you get good job. And it does not encourage entrepreneurship.

So this time we wanted to demonstrate that all of us are entrepreneurs, so the idea we came up with was that, lets have special program for beggars, our idea was you cannot be poorer than beggars,because that is last stage of survival, so if you can make entrepreneur out of beggar then there is nothing like it.

So we went to beggars and started talking to them, and we wanted to know at what point in time in life they started begging, what pushed them to beg and why they continues. Always the story was that I never thought that I will continue, when I started I could not find any other alternative, I thought next month I will stop but I did not have any solution and so I continued to be beggar.

So we suggested them as you go from house to house for begging, would you like to carry some merchandiser with you such as biscuits, cookies, candies, toys. etc, So that you can give a choice to the family, if they want to give you charity or they want to buy something from you, or they want to do both. So you are giving them choices. And you are going from house to house anyway, this is something you can add to your activity. And they liked it, and our thought was that we will have couple of thousand beggars in that the program and see how it goes and learn lot from them. It became such a popular program, today there are more than 100 thousand beggars in the program and more than 10 thousand of them have stopped begging completely, they are sales person, door to door sales person"

This and lots more, I have become a fan of this guy.

3 comments:

Alistair D'souza said...

that crescent thing posted on my blog too :-)

anyways... liked the idea too... reminding/showing them how to fish...

Pavitra said...

YEAH...loved it too! Maddy has excellent research skills! :)

Oh wrote another story...do check it out! :)

Parul Gupta said...

Nice article, Goli. I also like the title & profile quotes "If you want something .. " and "If I try ..". That should be the spirit!!