Acumen Fund

Rural Last-mile Distribution Network

Drishtee is providing a range of needed services in rural India through its extensive network of locally-owned, franchised kiosks.

One in eight people on this planet live in an Indian village. The country's 638,000 villages are home to more than 775 million people, nearly half of whom survive on less than $1 a day.
Surveys have found that the average villager earns $90 a year and spends 80% of that income on subsistence items like healthcare, housing, and food. Health is a particular challenge and falling sick often destroys what limited welfare and dignity a poor family has. More than 25% of those hospitalized fall below the poverty line in order to pay for care.

Drishtee, set up originally as a rural "Information and Communications Technology" (ICT) network orchestrator, has transcended into a last-mile distribution network that supports a vast number of rural entrepreneurs who provide a variety of products and services to villagers for a fee. Current service offerings include computer education, English education, e-governance, health check-ups, and a wide range of fast-moving consumer goods (including groceries, cosmetics, and mobile phone recharge coupons), and rechargeable torches and batteries.
With Acumen Fund's investment, Drishtee is expanding its entrepreneur programs to include a variety of health-related services such as health information and medical check-ups. Drishtee will also significantly increase the overall number of entrepreneurs and their geographic reach.
Structured loans made to Drishtee Foundation, a non-profit trust, are now helping Drishtee to focus on supporting rural entrepreneurs (including several women) by providing them with micro credit.

Over the course of 2008, Drishtee is estimated to have served more than 500,000 people through last-mile delivery of products and services ranging from fast moving consumer goods and computer education to micro finance and health check-ups.
Drishtee added close to 2,000 new entrepreneurs (of different formats) to its distribution network in 2008 and plans to add more than 10,000 rural entrepreneurs over the next three years..
Drishtee Foundation has provided micro credit to over 2,800 women entrepreneurs out of Acumen Fund's loans. An additional 2,100 micro-credit loans have been made to Drishtee’s male entrepreneurs.
Drishtee is also partnering with another Acumen Fund investee, VisionSpring, to offer Drishtee Health Franchisees the opportunity to become Vision Entrepreneurs and to sell VisionSpring reading glasses.