The Bottom of the Base

Of all of the poverty that I’ve seen over the past few years, nothing is as destitute or heart-breaking as the poverty of the street-dwelling migrant families in India. They’ve left their homes (“because there is nothing to eat,” as my colleague explained matter-of-factly) in search of labor – often in construction– and have essentially become homeless in the process. Living on concrete sidewalks, under bridges, in open fields, on dusty roadsides – any uninhabited space is turned into an open-air “home,” with the occasional blue tarp covering in the rain. Whatever meager income obtained, if any, is not enough to break out of this homeless, migrant trap.

The other day, while stopped in traffic in an auto, I saw one such family at an extreme. The mother, disheveled with messy hair and visibly soiled clothing, was tending to her baby, who sat bare-bottomed on the roadside, one foot away from traffic. Moving slowly and with a dejected air, she wet a rag to wipe the baby’s face then hung it on an adjacent road sign, as if it were a hook in a wall, and the open air was her home, and she and her family were not surrounded by Hyderabadi pollution, dust and traffic.

In much of the world, sparsely populated rural areas often lack adequate transport, health and sanitation infrastructure; increased urbanization has led to overcrowded slums and, at least in China, a “floating” migrant population of second-class citizens. Yet all of these groups have access to a basic human need that the street-dwellers in India lack - shelter: a roof, however rudimentary, above their heads and a space, however small, to call their own. These street-dwellers are truly at the bottom of the Base.

The Base of the Pyramid (BoP) is diverse group and measurable by different metrics – income, living conditions, affordability. Collectively, they comprise a significant portion of the world’s population; “1 billion living on $2/day” is a commonly cited figure.

The appeal of social ventures that serve the BoP in clean water, energy, microfinance, health is the increased sustainability and scalability of market-based mechanisms over traditional aid. Instead of giving away malaria nets, for example, they can be manufactured locally (creating jobs) and sold by micro-entrepreneurs (efficient distribution channel) at low prices. This socially-driven form of capitalism makes the nets more widely available and valued compared to grant-dependent distribution of free nets. However, in order for the system to work, the participants must have some level of affordability, even if it’s as little as $2/day.

What has struck me the most through my summer internship and musings with others in the BoP space is that the absolute poorest of the poor, the bottom of the base, are often still beyond reach. I highly doubt the homeless migrants in India, for example, of which the population size is probably unknown, could participant in BoP services. So the question remains: how do we even begin to improve the lives of those at the bottom of the Base? What would be the most effective mechanism?