How to GAME the job crisis- build a massive army of small and medium entrepreneurs

[This article is by Debleena Majumdar based on a conversation with me. a version appeared in the Economic Times]

 As election fever peaks across India, one recurrent question that keeps coming up is “JOBS.” The lack of them. And the persistent lack of real answers across successive government regimes about how our nation can find enough jobs for its citizens.

 Three people - Ravi Venkatesan, Madan Padaki and Mekin Maheshwari, no strangers to India’s startup ecosystem, and co-founders of Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) believe they might have found the answer. Part of it, at least.

 The missing middle in entrepreneurship-led job creation:

 The idea behind it is simple: mass flourishing (as imagined by Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps), which involves creating conditions where anyone with an idea feels empowered to build it and tinker with it. But, what does that really mean?

 Ravi believes that Entrepreneurship is a trojan horse for leadership and change making. But, first and foremost, our education system is not gearing us up for it. And second, our real crisis is that not enough people are solving for the issues around them, in their local communities: be it in education, water, climate change, healthcare, civic change and more.

“When I graduated from IIT Mumbai in 1985, 80% of my batchmates graduated to the US. And even within the country, the focus was on farm to city migration. On finding jobs. Entrepreneurship can be a great lever for job creation, but the focus in the last decade has been either on necessity driven, self-employed, individual entrepreneurs or, on highly celebrated and funded urban-tech-enabled start-ups. Neither, create enough jobs.” Ravi shares.

 India has 75 million necessity driven entrepreneurs. They are forced to make their own way as their aspirational jobs, often, government jobs, fail to materialize. While government schemes, MFIs and livelihood programs have helped them set up shop, and this segment will continue to grow, most of them may not create jobs and often operate as individuals. Some, might in fact, be cases of hidden unemployment. Meanwhile, the so-called high-growth technology-led startups of India have attracted much love from media and funding from investors over the last few years, but in terms of job creation, they are nowhere close to the demand our country has.

 In our obsession with formalizing our economy, as the formal sector is starting to fail to provide enough new jobs and even existing ones are getting threatened by automation, jobs seem to be as fleeting as lives snapped out by Thanos, in the recent blockbuster, Avengers Endgame. The missing middle in entrepreneurship is never more apparent than today.

 Edmund Phelps ["mass Flourishing" Nobel Prize 2006] imagines job creation and innovation are driven by millions of empowered people, in their local communities. We might call them small and medium enterprises, a sector severely underweight in India, compared with our global peers.

  Graph 1:

Source: ILO Statistics

 They neither receive the support, nor the capital that so-called high growth “start-ups” receive. But they can be sustainable. They can drive growth. And jobs. So, can they define the mass entrepreneurship movement in India? Do the founders have the entrepreneurial mindset?  An entrepreneurial mindset according to the GAME team includes:

·       Agency: Someone who feels empowered to take charge of their idea

·       Problem solving: People who can apply creativity to solve problems

·       Grit: Tenacity to weather the tough times

·       Resourcefulness: learning by doing

 But these are not mere words. They are attributes most of us lack as we seek the safe harbour of jobs that provide the monthly pay-check. So how can GAME even begin to make it real? They are looking for people between 14-29 years old, over 10 million of them by 2030, 50% of them being women, who can employ over 50 million people and serve a local community while solving a local problem. They could be local enterprises, small exporters, famer, artisan collectives and the like. With our labor force participation rate of women dropping to less than 26% today, a really low number compared to other countries, this could be especially critical for bringing up the number of women entrepreneurs.

 This challenge will not be solved just by skilling people. It will not be solved just by providing capital. It will not be solved just by philanthropy. GAME imagines 5 pillars of work to make the change real.

 The GAME Plan:

 And they had started work on this, individually, much before GAME brought it all together. Seeding the entrepreneurial mindset and making it aspirational, not through impossible role models, but through relatable people from their own communities, has to start early. And co-founder Mekin Maheshwari’s Udhyam initiative had already been working with children, through activity-based interventions that change their mindset and build agency and problem-solving skills. The solutions may be as simple fixing a menu for a chaiwalla stand and adding buttermilk for the summer months. In fact, recently, Delhi Government introduced entrepreneurship in the government school curriculum, a way to bring the agency and problem-solving mindset through our existing educational system. Mekin has been involved in rolling this out. We spoke about it here. That’s the start point for GAME.

 Meanwhile, converting job seekers to entrepreneurs and growing the business of these entrepreneurs, including those led by women, requires on-ground support at multiple levels. Enabling wide spread access to incubator hubs where entrepreneurs get early support for their ideas and access to capital for scaling up are all part of the puzzle. Madan Padaki, former Co-Founder Meritrack, and Senior Advisor Tata Trusts, Advisor had been working on it through his initiatives, Head Held High and 1Bridge (helping rural youth become entrepreneurs). With GAME, the plan is not to just find local hubs of support for the youth who have entrepreneurial ideas so that they can tinker and learn, but also bring large-scale counselling for them, which is often missing today.

 And, Ravi, former Chairman, Bank of Baroda and Microsoft India, Special Representative for Young People and Innovation at UNICEF and Trustee Rockefeller Foundation has been at the forefront of ideating and implementing the solutions that work, for young people, across countries, and for encouraging entrepreneurship in multiple capacities.

 Can their combined focus and skills pull off their most audacious goal yet? What opportunities and challenges lie ahead?

 A massive collaborative effort:

 The GAME team needs multi-stakeholder partners across business, government, field study, academia, industry, foundations and civil society to build a dream of this scale. While Stand Up India, Mudra Yojna, have been already in place, more state-level, on ground initiatives are needed. The team is already working on Transforming Rural India initiative in Jharkhand and on scaling up women entrepreneurs in Maharashtra and are in talks with the Meghalaya government among other states.

 The infrastructure needed to unlock such large-scale impact would need both digital access and physical presence. “Common Service Centres which already exist across small towns and villages in India can play a great role, on the ground, in building presence and access.” shares Ravi, who has been involved with their rollouts since 2005. Meanwhile, the digital trio of India stack, low mobile costs and high mobile penetration, make mobiles more optimal now to provide products and services which were impossible to imagine earlier, online.

 The corporate sector has no less a role to play in this massive plan. The GAME team believes that the CSR allocation by corporates should be used, at least partly, for creating entrepreneurship opportunities, providing vocational skilling and real apprenticeships. Some companies have already started on this journey. Their recent announced partnership with Facebook is another step in helping scale up local businesses in the country.

 Meanwhile, academic institutions also need to play a key role. If they are not able to build employable graduates, the future is not very far, according to Ravi, where the sub-par college degree could be dead even as people find opportunities for continued learning through other, maybe online sources, that can also help them build skills and find jobs. We wrote about it here. 

Finding advisors who are renowned leaders across the industry, selecting the right partners, building their own team, the GAME is afoot, as Sherlock Holmes, once famously said, to unlock scale in jobs, through mass entrepreneurship. Not just in India, the team is also finding interest from countries in Africa and South East Asia which face similar challenges as we do.

 “Not all ideas can find scale by linear growth. We are finding possibilities of scale through replication in the future. For us, learning is the key metric for the first 18 months. After that, scaling is the key metric.” shares Ravi.

 Funding and finding the right partners are the twin challenges the GAME team needs to solve for, now. While the team has defined two clear strategic phases of learning and scaling, their plan is to create an open resource platform where knowledge can be leveraged, across resources, voices of youth can be heard, best practices from partner organizations can be enabled and relevant public data, toolkits and thought leadership can be aggregated. It’s too early to tell, how much of this will be achieved as is, and which new pathways which will evolve from their early learnings. But what’s clear is that the problem is too large to find one uni-directional solution. All 5 pillars need to work, to make it work.

 The real future:

 Over the next few decades, our country will house one of the world’s largest group of young people. Irrespective of who wins the election, we need to find a possible solution to the jobs and wages crisis our country faces. Universal basic income has already been suggested as one alternative. But, as the example of Brazil has shown, incurring such high social costs, before the economy has matured, can become a costly price to pay.

 On the other hand, countries such as United States have grown on the back of small businesses. Everyone may not be cut out to create a Unicorn firm. But given, the right ingredients, can more and more people, find meaningful and gainful employment, within their community or create sustainable, local businesses? That’s the real dream of GAME.

 It can address two related issues: help people stay in their local communities and not be forced to migrate for jobs in an age where technology can create hubs, irrespective of a place being a major city or not. And it can empower people to solve local issues, efficiently, instead of harping on “innovativeness” and “uniqueness” of copy-cat ideas, as every investor pitch asks every startup to do, today, sometimes, to their detriment.

 The other growing issue is the creeping irrelevance and potential joblessness of the not-so-young in our country. These could be 40+ year olds who have some experience, some savings but are increasingly finding themselves at the mercy of frequent job-cuts announced by companies, especially if the roles they lead are routine or technology-led. The idea of mass entrepreneurship and the GAME interventions could also help them use their experience and skills to solve local issues and build small, sustainable enterprises, with dignity.  

 An even larger impact could be the inculcation of life skills and learning agility for everyone, no matter what we choose to do or find ourselves doing. “We want everyone flourishing in their own way in society. Take charge of what’s happening, not just to them, but around them. Even it is not to create a company, but to create active civic communities. That, in itself, is building an entrepreneurial mindset which our country needs, more than ever, today.” Ravi concludes.