Drishtee is providing a range of needed services in rural India, including water for consumption and livelihoods.
The Challenge
- One in eight people on this planet lives 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 health, 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 to pay for care.
The Innovation
- Drishtee is a rural "Information and Communications Technology" (ICT) network orchestrator that helps local entrepreneurs to set up kiosks that provide a variety of services to villagers for a fee – current service offerings include computer education, English education, e-governance, health camps (pilot stage), as well as wide ranging products such as mobile phone recharge coupons, insurance policies and rechargeable flashlights.
- With our investment, Drishtee is expanding the kiosk programs to include a variety of health-related services such as health information and medical check-ups, with plans to offer hospitalization insurance and quality medicine going ahead – and to increase significantly the number of kiosks and their geographic reach.
The Impact
- In 2007, Drishtee and Quiver served more than 400,000 people through products and services ranging from mobile phone recharge coupons to Computer Education and health check-up camps.
- Drishtee added 1,300 new entrepreneurs to its distribution network in 2007, and plans to scale to 10,000 kiosks over the next three years.
- Drishtee Foundation has funded 300 women entrepreneurs out of Acumen Fund's loan, enabling them to establish their own Drishtee kiosks.
- Quiver has rolled out a test pilot to experiment with providing irrigation and drinking water to Saurath village, with the aim of scaling up to reach 759 farmers and 100 households over the next four years.
- Drishtee is also partnering with another Acumen Fund investee, Scojo, to offer Drishtee franchisees the opportunity to become Vision Entrepreneurs and to sell Scojo reading glasses at their kiosks.