Creative Agency Secrets

Just read a very insightful post from Atanu Dey on the shortcomings of officialdom on economic development and technology in India.

[Sidebar - I am reading up on India because one of my clients, Buffalo, works on outsourcing and that’s where a lot of business both in and out of Europe is coming for the outsourcing marketplace.] 

Now, way back, I worked with the AKRSP (Aga Khan Rural Support Programme) in northern Pakistan doing what was then called ‘bottom-up’ economic development in village communities.  Their work and some recent reading I did into Ernesto Sirolli’s  vision of  Enterprise Facilitation  aligns so closely to my personal view that the best way to enable people to improve the economic value of their lives (earn more, buy a house, feed your children, education etc) is to use the building block of small business as a lever.  I delight in the fact that my academic studies were about the economy and third world development (as it was then called) and now I have the skills to align and correlate my interests in both fields and, moreover, to actually help people to achieve this for themselves through my work as a consultant.  I love it!

Here’s the comment I put onto Atanu Dey’s post

This is fantastic stuff.
One resource you might want to look at in the context of ‘village information centres’ is the Sirolli Institute http://www.sirolli.co.uk/

I worked in mid 80s for AKRSP (Aga Khan Rural Support Programme) in northern Gilgit and the principles we worked to there are closely aligned with Ernesto Sirolli’s ideas. 

Now I’m a business consultant but the principles of using enterprise as a tool for economic development is the most rational I have ever seen.  And it works - in the first, second and third world!

Rebecca

And, as an aside, in browsing the Sirolli Instistute’s website, I find that they visited Cambridge in September 2006 and I missed the talk - darn.

Still, I signed up to their blog… which is more than many others have done.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 10:24 am and is filed under Economic development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.