It's been 6 months already, I can't believe it, it's gone by so fast. Earlier this month, Pollinate organised an all-staff retreat (photo below), the perfect time to reflect on what has happened and to shape Pollinate's future (more on that in a later post, we are still working on it :-) ). So in this post I'll focus on what our successes and our challenges have been here in the City of Joy, and then I'll follow with some pictures I've gathered around the theme: "It's all about da game".
Let's start with the successes
- Finding a Hive after visiting more than 60 places (which were all terrible) AND setting it up in time for the first program, sounds like nothing but I can tell you it was a huge challenge!
- Mapping over 70,000 households in the first program, surveying more than 350 people.
- Hiring and training 5 amazing Pollinators to where they are today. This is probably my personal fave, they are really a great group of people and it's so rewarding to see them grow and get really good at their job! And as of this week we just hired and are ready to train the second batch of 4 (yay)!
- Hiring and training 3 just-as-amazing local managers. Debjani, our Operations Manager, is moving to Malaysia soon and, although we are all really sad about this, we're also really excited that we found Tabrez, a perfect replacement for her, alongside with Debjyoti, a just-as-perfect Sales Manager!
- We are on track, and although it is still early days, we have already sold more than 100 solar lights in just 3 months! Sales are also growing fast as the Pollinators get better at their job and start building trust within the communities (to "crack a community" typically takes anywhere from 3 to sometimes 10 visits!).
And of course it wouldn't be as exciting without the challenges
- The electrification status: As you can see in the graph below, and as already explained in a previous post, more than 70% of the communities we have mapped in KOL are fully electrified, and the rest is rapidly electrifying. There are elections coming up, so the government is trying to electrify a lot of communities. We knew this, and it's not a problem per se (it's actually good news for all these people :-)), but of course it makes it tougher for our Pollinators to sell solar lights, and we have to adapt to the market and provide new products. Because people might now have electricity, but they also might still cook with kerosene (which is even worse than using kerosene for lighting), and they might still drink very dirty water for example.
- The income: This is another challenge we are facing while selling the lights (again, see graph below). Our unelectrified communities in Kolkata are on average 3 times poorer than the communities in Bangalore. Again, we are adapting to this market reality and are currently trialling different payment plans but also cheaper products.
- Registrations, the key to get new products in the door: In order to do all this, we need to get the proper registrations in place. This is one that has taken a lot of my time, and we are not even close to be done. Dealing with the Indian bureaucracy is a lot of fun!
- Training Pollinators, and getting them to reach their targets: This was also a success, but training a growing team of Pollinators requires a lot of time and follow-up, and we've made mistakes, which means we've learned A LOT and we're ready to train our next batch!