Rambo's Blog

This is about an article regarding rural business hub. This article describes how they are planning to implement this in India as pilot project and extending other countries in Asia, South America …etc.

What is rural business Hub?

Vibrant Centres of Commerce in rural areas with the right conditions to accelerate grassroots entrepreneurship as well as to encourage the expansion of businesses that have traditionally operated in urban markets into rural markets. This is also referenced as Grassroots Trading Network (GTN).

Mission:

The mission of this project is to connect poor producers globally to wider markets, providing support for the development marketing and distributions of products. They also involved in facilitating collaboration between different groups, mentoring the whole process and improving the efficiency by bringing in the best practices from the commercial sector.

Critical Issues:

The rural population is little exposed to marketing and distribution. They are more concentrated towards the production. Another issue is with the infrastructure, the distributions network should allow flow of products and services out of rural markets as well as into rural markets. Presently, lack of knowledge, data and experience inhibit success of rural population.

Model:

This program aims at identifying the needs/benefits for involved partners to ensure a win-win (benefit to both producer and buyer) situation. With Globalisation, economies of scale is critical If we can tap the production strength of this large rural population with its small scale enterprises, consolidate it and provide larger players with their requirements - we have an answer projects in agriculture demonstrate the model. Also being extended to handicrafts/handlooms/textiles

Creating a rural distribution

Bring affordable, hygienic and quality goods to rural consumers who are often cheated on weight and quality Economically empower underprivileged rural women through employment and income generation activities. Improve overall realization of small and marginal farmers by establishing an alternate to middlemen Create consciousness of a weight to price relationship. This concept is being used by companies like HLL (Hindustan Lever Limited) to successfully market their products to rural population, please refer Clare's blog post for more details.

My views on this:

I have grown up in farming community in rural India, familiar with the circumstances there. In my opinion the main problem with rural population is education and awareness, most People are not aware of marketing and distribution of products they produce this is mainly being done by middlemen. Current system is more beneficial to middle men, farmers face more risk and less benefit where as for middle men opposite is the case. Though most people in the current generation are educated still lacks knowledge about these things. The change can be acheived at much faster phase by organized groups/project like this. This kind of projects will be beneficial in bringing the positive social change among the rural population.

Similar concept has been used in establishing co-operative (these are owned and managed by farmers) unions. One of the popular success stories is AMUL, which started by group of famers and ultimately triggered the white(milk) revolution in India.

In conclusion in opinion this program would be of great help for rural population in developing countries. The success of the program depends the available options, education, training and mentoring.