Drishtee – India, US & Japan

Short description social enterprise

Drishtee is a social organization working in villages towards sustainability and shared prosperity for over 25 years. It works with farming families and local entrepreneurs to ensure the availability of services and the development of livelihood within the village. Drishtee helps develop rural and urban linkage through a value chain approach in the field of microenterprises development for livelihood and through a franchisee model for provisioning of services. The organization stands on the principles of sustainability, value creation, and entrepreneurship. Broad activities are related to community engagement, livelihood generation, and providing essential services.

Drishtee is working in over 6,000 villages in India supporting and promoting rural entrepreneurship through its reach, services, capacity, market linkage, and know-how of sustainable rural enterprise development.

Drishtee follows a holistic approach, known as the 4C approach, which focuses on community, capacity, capital, and channel. Through our Swavlamban* approach, we establish an interconnected hyper local micro- ecosystem within village clusters. This unique model brings together entrepreneurs, producers, women’s groups, and a well-designed supply chain. By fostering collaboration and empowerment, we pave the way towards a sustainable path of prosperity. Drishtee has enrolled more than 600,000 rural producers under this approach.

Our model thrives on community engagement and ownership. By actively involving and empowering communities, we create sustainable solutions that are driven by the needs and aspirations of the people we serve.

Short description solution/tool

·      Community Development:  Drishtee starts by bringing the community together as a community group (Swavalamban Samiti). While creating this village group Drishtee engages with the community and carries out Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) approach to map the local resources, challenges and community priorities. It also helps in strong community engagement. Drishtee uses its own developed process (add link to process graphs – to your own website ) to create community group/Swavalamban Samiti (SWSM)

·      Capacity Building:

Drishtee has developed various skills training programs in various value chains such as agriculture, handicrafts, dairy, and more. Through these programs, individuals and groups in the community acquire valuable skills, enhancing their capacity to engage in income-generating activities within their respective sectors. The market for the products are both local as well as outside market. Some of the training programs are stitching, soap making, poultry, goatry, mushroom cultivation, etc.

·      Barter

Drishtee facilitates barter transactions in Drishtee Barter Points, where villagers can exchange their domestic produce within themselves or for essential commodities such as oil, salt, etc. This system fosters local economic resilience, supports self-sufficiency, and promotes sustainable consumption patterns within the community. Drishtee has developed an IT application to facilitate the same. When the exchange happens at the local level and the women received feedback from the local community- the feedback is more ‘understandable’ and the quality of the products improve. This barter model is replicable to other languages & country contexts. The barter model includes a tool to discover the right /local pricing, which is an incredible added value too.

·      Supply Chain

Supply Chain is critical for products to get out of the village or essential services to get into the village. Drishtee has developed an efficient and cost effective supply chain system to meet the requirement.

·      MIRI Market

An online marketplace for making rural producers product available to a larger market both rural as well as urban markets.

Where to find more

·      https://www.ashoka.org/en-in/fellow/satyan-mishra

·      www.drishtee.in

·      https://drishtee.mirimarket.in/

Similar tools (different tools, different organization, different region & language)

·      More on Participatory Rural Appraisal – video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q1dzchtJDM

·      More on Participatory Rural Appraisal – papers: https://evaluationobservatory.org/knowledge-banks/participatory-rural-appraisal-pra

Who’s best to contact

·      Swapna Mishra, partnership lead

·      Nitin Gachhayat, co-founder


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