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Story of Bimala Makhal

Dec 28, 2021
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The following post was written by our one of our fundraiser champion, Adhiraj Saxena who raised Rs. 57,000 during our Diwali campaign. To see the impact, Adhiraj decided to fly down from Singapore to meet the borrowers in Dakshin Barasat, West Bengal and learn about measuring social impact from our field partner, DCBS.

This is my first article in the series I like to call ‘Measuring Social Impact’. It’s a lot to do with Simplicity. In my observation, we need to do a better job of Measuring Success in the sector of social impact. Who are ‘we’? –- ‘We’ includes a social entrepreneur business person who may be measured on how quickly he/she can raise capital instead of how efficiently she uses limited capital.- ‘We’ includes a community service centre that flashes on the front page of its website how it raised X thousand dollars in its fundraising drive, instead of describing how its work reduces the burden on social security financed by tax payers.‘We’ also includes you, who looks up to the CEO of a nutrition-deprived soda drink company flying in a private jet, but judges the morality of a social impact organization executive driving a swanky sedan.I have no interest to write about why the measurement of social impact and efficiency is currently problematic. I rather use our short attention span to (attempt to) write about HOW to logically measure it and define success. That’s my motivation and the challenge I’ve given myself to keep the discourse and its outcome simple. Not simplistic, but simple.My first lesson in measuring social impact was in Dhosa village, which is about a four hour taxi ride to south of Kolkata city (it’s the 3rd largest city in India in terms of GDP). The trip was hosted by DCBS (Dhosa Chandaneswar Bratyajana Samity), which is in the business of providing loans to the village women of Dhosa. It operates less like a commercial bank by putting more than 50% of its staff as ‘foot-soldiers’ to monitor the progress of their borrowers. And DCBS, is one of Milaap’s partner organizations.I’ll spend less time talking about Milaap – they are credible and popular enough to capture your interest without my help. DCBS is the focus of this piece and I have learnt some lessons on measurement and application of social impact business from them.Before I jump into the technicalities of measuring social impact, let me tell you why I am specifically interested to learn about this particular field partner’s impact only. Last October during Diwali, 18 of us (mostly from Singapore) raised loans worth about Rs. 57,000 to Dhosa village women who wanted to purchase solar-powered lamps for their families. You can see my campaign page here. That amount benefited about 30 families for a solar lamp with a lifespan of 5 years. You can see my campaign page here. That same amount is what 1 fresh IT graduate could get after working for 2 months in a big city like Bangalore. Since I was the one who lobbied these 18 folks to lend money for this specific cause, my credibility was on the line. I figured, the only way I could demonstrate the worth (or waste) of our loans to these village women, who had no established measure of their credit-worthiness, was to go down there and report what I saw for real.

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