Sharing lessons with ‘hard to reach' audiences
With projects on the ground across Asia and Africa, BIF and IAP are in a unique position to share real insights about the nuts and bolts of inclusive business models and how companies make them work. Capturing and sharing these lessons learned is a core part of the two programmes, as Caroline Ashley explores in a recent blog on what drives our knowledge exchange. Coming to the end of our three year pilots, we have also learned a few lessons about how knowledge exchange works, and what the specific challenges of reaching inclusive business practitioners are.
From the beginning, our overall approach to knowledge exchange has been practical and based on the assumption that the biggest question entrepreneurs are asking is not ‘what?’, but ‘how’? How do you reach remote consumers in rural areas without basic infrastructure? How do you ensure quality supply from farmers in your supply chain? How do you get BoP consumers to adopt your product? Through in-country events, publications, webinars and the online Practitioner Hub, we've aimed to connect practitioners and collect experience from specific businesses to share in the public domain. Word of mouth is another key channel and in the Business Innovation Facility, our Country Managers have been essential ‘connectors’, linking people and sharing resources. Alongside our goal of making tangible knowledge directly accessible to practitioners, we also aim for maximum reach. A wide reaching knowledge network can leverage the lessons we learn on the ground, catalyse change and amplify the impact of the programmes as a whole.
But delivering this kind of impact is not without its challenges. Physical distance and varying country/sector contexts are just two of the barriers to really effective knowledge exchange. But not unlike the last mile challenge that many of the companies we work with face when distributing products to the BoP, the biggest challenge we (the knowledge exchange team) face in trying to facilitate knowledge exchange is reach.
Practitioners are spread across different countries and sectors, with varying access to the internet and operating in different languages and cultural contexts. They are often implementing inclusive ventures embedded in an industry or business sector without necessarily being connected to the wider inclusive business community. Identifying what tools and resources they need, and then ensuring that they have access to them is hard to achieve and hard to measure.
Yet the positive feedback from people who have accessed the Hub and used its resources and the arguable value at which knowledge exchange is delivered are concrete evidence of impact. For me, one of the best indicators of our expanding reach is the fact that the Practitioner Hub is visited by people in 119 countries, most of which are not target countries of either BIF or IAP. More than that, some of our most positive feedback has come, unsolicited, from practitioners in countries and regions outside the scope of BIF and IAP. In the sometimes intangible world of knowledge exchange, where we strive to create 'buzz' and replicate the effect of a face-to-face conversation, this seems like some concrete evidence of impact.