Jolanda van Ginkel of IKEA Foundation opened the session as she shared her experience of the conference. “It has been a brutally honest conversation, a mirror for ourselves. Yesterday we worked with the Ikea Foundation Partners to design a livelihood programme with designated roles for each and every one of us. It showed us the complexity of actually designing a programme, let alone implementing it. This is hard work and it was important for us to realise what is happening on the back end.”

The first speaker for the session was Malika, the Executive Director of the Centre for Microfinance, who shared an experience from 2009, where they got the opportunity to partner with the government as a technical and knowledge support partner. Malika shared, “We were so keen and one of the mandates was to demonstrate something new, which could actually take the sector forward. We conceptualised an MIS which would not only be an MIS but also an accounting software. And since we were the NGO, we hired a technical vendor who would be able to develop the product. We did not understand that continuous technical development is required in any kind of MIS application.”

Some of the learnings included the necessity to have in-house expertise and to have in-house technical people instead of depending on vendors. She also highlighted the importance of letting a tool stabilise before it can be evolved to handle more tasks,

“It only leads to chaos and the data entry becomes a sort of project activity, rather than actually seeing what the data is reflecting. The most important learning is that it’s very difficult to say no to the government, especially when your reputation is at stake. Sometimes it is best to put your foot down and say no.”

Next, Bala, the CEO of Vrutti, took the dais to share his failures and learnings from working in producer collectives, from self-help groups in the past to building producer organizations, and how it could become a vehicle to improve the farmers’ livelihood and income.

Vrutti is part of a catalyst group that works on various livelihood transformation models and one of the models is to work with farmers and working with small producers to make them three times as profitable. The small producer income that they were working on included farmers, fisherfolk, and micro small and medium entrepreneurs. About his learning, Bala highlighted, “These are institutions that we are building, it is for a lifetime, it’s not a project basis. I think that’s where the failure started as we were looking at delivering something instead of looking at what we wanted to achieve as a goal. During the project period, the team also failed to create ownership in the community.”

“The intended outcomes, (for) which we are promoting farmers collectives, is that we want to see that there is a sustained income for them and they are resilient and able to sustain and thrive through their producer collective. I think that is the whole intent of these institutions we started. But we could not reach that milestone. It was possible, but we failed miserably because we went into a territory where we have not actually worked in the past. We implemented it in districts where we did not have a connection with the community. But within this time frame, you have to build that connection, engage with them, and build trust. We were not equipped for moving from the service to the business approach or for building a team that could run the business.”

Suryakumar, the Deputy Managing Director of NABARD, shared his experiences of failure from his rich experience working with the development bank of the country. “In one instance we got a phone call from one of the project sites in Yavatmal, where we had invested ₹15 million, and in the final stages of the project, the villagers completely dismantled all the engineering structures and infrastructure and told the implementing NGO to leave the village. Having spent so much time and effort, we wanted to find out exactly what had happened. After a lot of protracted negotiations, we decided to spend four days in the village. Nobody gave them any answers about what went wrong until the last day an old lady told them, ‘You’re an outsider, how can you come here and change the social order of the village?”

The lesson over here, for the sector as a whole, was summed up in a Korean tale that is now a management lesson — An emperor had sent his son to a teacher so that he could be a worthy emperor. Each time the young man returned from his training his father remained unsatisfied, until he said, “to be a worthy emperor, you must be able to hear even the rustling of the grass.” Suryakumar explained that to truly be part of the ecosystem, one must understand and know the community — only then can meaningful development occur.