At the core of the Shell Foundation’s enterprise solutions to poverty lies the belief that if you treat the poor as consumers and deliver the goods that the consumer wants, you are more likely to deliver sustainable and scalable solutions. After all, for any set of solutions to development issues, the alternative is to have an inexhaustible source of funds that will support it.
This basic philosophy was outlined in an interview of Chris West, Director, Shell Foundation to Sukalp Sharma of the Financial Express during his recent visit to India. According to Chris, Shell Foundation acts like an angel investor at a very early stage for social entrepreneurs. However, he believes that is more than money that counts in this stage of development of the enterprises.
According to Chris West,
“What we are trying to do with this enterprise approach is to show that working like a business in tackling development issues is a more scalable and sustainable approach to solve problems of energy access. The conventional model has been one of ease on both sides. It's easy for people to write a cheque and it's easy for people to ask for only money.We need more people playing that high-risk angel investor role to crack these problems.”
Chris also believes that Shell Foundation stays close to Shell’s core activities by tackling global development challenges related to industry as it can leverage resources of Shell in the areas of its domain expertise.
Read the full interview in the Financial Express.
Read the full interview in the Financial Express.
