Second row: Boris & Jess, Jimmy, Korak, Supriyo, Josh, Matheesha
Third row Tao, Lauren, Charlotte, Ida and Renée
I know it's been a long time since my last post, but I have a good excuse: on the 29th of July the first Kolkata Pollinate Fellowship started! Nine amazing international Fellows and 6 super amazing Indian Fellows met in Kolkata to help us give a kick start to our business. Debjani and Debasish (our Operations and Sales Manager) started with us at the same time, which is also very exciting!
What to say about these 4 weeks except that it was an amazing experience that I will never forget, very intense, full of emotions and great achievements, and above all so much fun! As some of you might wonder what we do during the Fellowships exactly, here's what a typical day looks like:
- 10 am: Namaskar, good morning!
The morning briefing would then start at 10.30. We would talk about the events of the previous day and plan the day to come. For example, every morning everyone would share their highs and their lows of the previous day, which is a good way to get these thoughts out there, talk about it together, support each other and address any issue if needed.
- 11 am: Working bee projects
- One group was in charge of Mapping, i.e. screening the google satellite images of Kolkata looking for potential communities, and dropping a pin whenever they think they found one. This is a tough job! Can you tell the difference between these three? I'll give you a clue, two of these are communities, one isn't... The Mapping team was also in charge of Logistics, deciding who goes where in the afternoon community visits.
- The other group was responsible for Recruitment, as we need Pollinators to start selling lights! They started by working on job flyers and job descriptions in English and Bengali, translating the video to Bengali, while also contacting a bunch of NGO's active in slum communities in Kolkata, or MicroFinance Institutions to see whether we could collaborate and if they could help us recruit Pollinators. On top of all the marketing material we now have, we will also have a Pollinate job fair with two NGO's during the month of August!
- 3 pm to 7-8 pm: Community visits
Thanks to the fellows' efforts we now have a much better understanding of the market in Kolkata. Here are some of our results:
- We have mapped 343 communities, representing 71.400 households.
- Of these 343 communities, 214 (62%) are fully electrified, 76 (22%) are partially electrified and 53 (15%) are not electrified. It may seem that the percentage of electrification is high, the numbers should actually be looked at in terms of absolute number of houses, since Kolkata's population is much larger than Bangalore or Hyderabad. Of these 71.400 houses, 51.600 (72%) are fully electrified, 13.400 (19%) are "partially electrified" and 6.300 (9%) are not electrified.
- Although my feeling is that we have only mapped half of the city, our market size (number of non electrified houses) is already larger than Bangalore or Hyderabad! This is a nice confirmation that the market in Kolkata is viable for Pollinate.
- The communities in Kolkata are much more established than in Hyderabad or Bangalore, and it's not uncommon to meet people that were born in the communities and have been living there for 30, 40 years...
- The demand of other products such as water filters and cooking stoves seems to be quite high as well, which is a good sign for the future.
Here are a couple of photos the Fellows took in the communities, enjoy!