Tuesday 20th November 11.30am

Yesterday morning we presented our ideas on how to approach selling the fortified yoghurts in the slums of Dhaka.

There were four main parts to the plan. First, we have identified which slums to go to first on the basis of size, location, safety and presence of NGOs. Second, we suggested recruiting an independent "sales hub owner" from each of the relevant slums to manage all the sales ladies in that slum. Their local knowledge and network would be far superior to ours and they would be commerically incentivised to make it a success. Our expertise would be in the recruitment and training of the sales hub owner and the sales ladies. Third, we thought an ambient product stood more chance of success with the consumers than a chilled product and would also have a cheaper and simpler supply chain. And lastly, we proposed a marketing plan that involves focusing on one slum very strongly and moving on to another one only once there are successful and sustainable sales in the first.

Corinne, the General Manager, seemed to like the proposals, particularly the identification of which slums to go for and the concept of a local "sales hub owner". Follow this link for our full presentation (minus the financials) http://www.scribd.com/full/44388841?access_key=key-2fnmjfm9pq10elr6wdmc

Overnight flight and got home this morning. Fields, hedgerows, woods, gently rolling landscapes, a volume of life so vastly smaller than Bangladesh. Tolkein knew what he was talking about, I think I must be a Hobbit at heart.
Writing the blog has been a great focus for me while I've been away. If you have been, thanks for reading. And thanks to Sean, Hilary, Giuseppe, Bruno, Judith and Jerome for all the work together.

Sunday 28th November 3pm

Holed up in the hotel finalising the project so not much news. You can't take anything for granted here: no-one knows how many people live in the slums; they don't have addresses; they have no rent, bills or tax to pay; they might as well not exist. There are lots of people in charities and businesses like ours trying to help. We found a comprehensive list of estimated populations and precise map locations of all the 5000+ Bangladesh slums on the internet! From a population research centre at the University of North Carolina, done in 2005. Now we can identify the biggest areas and employ people there first. How did anyone ever do anything before Google was around?

Presentation tomorrow, will post it then.

Hope you've had a good weekend. Enjoying the snow?

Friday 26th November 4.30pm

There are small pockets of wealth here and the beginnings of some commerce. I am staying in a very nice and comfortable, if slightly dowdy, hotel. And this is a massive shopping centre in Dhaka - the only one as far as I can make out:



But most people who are buying anything are shopping in bazaars and street stalls. The quality of the vegetables in particular is wonderful:

If you want a chicken, they will kill it and pluck it for you on the spot:

Yes, those are the innards in a pile on the street - plenty of carrion crows swooping down. You can buy wild or farmed chicken but one Bengali man told me there was not much demand for farmed chicken as it wasn't natural. Mmm...I think they might be smarter than us in a lot of ways.

I mentioned the electricity was a bit sporadic. Well, you can see why:

And I said the roads were lethal. This is a typical sight ahead of you as you bump along at 50 miles an hour:



Not sure how you're meant to get passed but somehow, miraculously, you do. In general the solution is to drive off the road and send pedestrians scuttling.

Friday 26th November 3.30pm

Snack anyone?

Friday 26th November 11am

Bangladesh is 80% muslim so Friday is their weekend. There doesn't seem to be much difference to the other days really - a bit quieter perhaps and the offices/banks etc. aren't open.

We've had a driver for the last two days to take us out to the factory and rural areas but we are just staying put today. Will visit a market later.

212 page views on the blog, that's good, let me know if anyone has any questions or photo requests. I really can't imagine snow on the ground at home - post a pic if there is.

Thursday 25th November 6pm

How to reduce poverty and malnutrition in a sustainable way in Bangladesh?

Get a loan for a cow (£700 for a cow with calf):

Milk it daily:

Take your milk to a Grameen Danone collection point, where you get paid 25p per litre if it's of the right quality. (Most "farmers" get 15-20 litres from their cow each day so that's up to £5 per day of which their profit is around £2 after paying for animal feed, vet bills etc.).

Turn the milk into small, nutrient-enriched yoghurts (each yoghurt is 80% milk). The nutritional composition of the yoghurt has been put together with GAIN, a major global charity, and it includes 30% of a child's needs for iodine, vitamin A and...wait for it...yes, iron. The milk is also a good source of protein in which they are deficient, living as they do on a diet of rice and lentils. The factory looks big in this photo but is actually quite small - the production area itself is about the size of the Careline part of the office:

Ship it to distribution points - supply chain as it was meant to be:


(Iain - I asked if he had implemented S&OP or GPS but he hadn't heard of either).

Get ladies to collect the yoghurts and take it round their villages to sell on commission (they get 1.5p for each yoghurt they sell). Here is a boy with his mum's bag of yoghurts for the day:

And now here's the challenge. How to get people subsisting on £2 a day in the urban slums to fork out 8p (that's all one yoghurt costs and that includes VAT, milk costs, production costs, money for the ladies) for each of their children every day? Because that's the only way that the cow-owners and sales ladies get to keep their jobs and the only way that the children can avoid stunting and all the other results of nutritional deficiencies that you know about from Food Matters!

We've got 4 days left to figure that challenge out for the urban slums. Any ideas anyone? (I did suggest a Big Iron Count already...)

Thursday 12pm

Quick post before heading back to Dhaka from the factory 4 hours away. Yoghurt is 80% milk so the factory is in a rural area where people are able to have a cow in order to provide milk. We have to leave now as the roads are lethal in the daytime and it's very dangerous to travel at night - nothing to do with crime, just awful roads and crazy driving. The rule on the roads seems to be that you give way to anything bigger than you. The cyclists and rickshaws have a tough time.

I'm glad it's winter - it's dry and 30 degrees which is pretty ok. In summer it's also the rainy season and is 40 degrees with 100% humidity.

Pics later.

Tuesday November 23rd 7.30pm

Eat your heart out John Simpson, this is David Wilson reporting from Dhaka.

Tuesday 23rd November 7pm

The girl in the blue dress is Charna. She lives in a slum on the edge of Dhaka.

She lives with her parents and four brothers and sisters in a corrugated iron "house" about the size of a typical lounge. They have no running water and no loo, they have electricity for about 8 hours a day. They have one double bed in the house, some of them sleep in it and the others sleep on the floor under it.

Her dad works in a small kiosk/shop and, on a good day, he can bring home up to 200 Taka (1 Taka = 1 pence). All of the money he earns goes on food for the family. Charna and her family eat rice with lentils or beans twice a day every day. Usually she is able have some chicken once a week to go with the rice and lentils. Her mum normally gives her a few Taka each day to buy a sweet or a biscuit. In the picture, she is eating a yoghurt which she bought from a Grameen Danone sales lady for 8 Taka (she loves them and has one most weeks).

She goes to school for 2 hours each day where she is learning to read, to add up and also to write a little. The rest of the time, she looks after her little brothers and sisters or plays games in the street with other children. She never leaves the slum as there is nowhere for her to go and she cannot afford to buy anything.

Sunday 21st November 11am

I have been invited to visit Grameen Danone in Bangladesh as part of a Danone training program I am on.

The aim of the Grameen Danone business is to reduce malnutrition and poverty in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. It is a partnership between Grameen Bank and Danone. A small loan is made to a farmer to buy a cow. He/she then sells the milk to Grameen Danone to repay the loan and earn a living. Grameen Danone employs people in a small factory to make the milk into a nutrient-enriched yoghurt and then distributes the yoghurts to over 500 ladies, each in their small community. These ladies then sell the yoghurts and earn a living for themselves. Each yoghurt sells for 6 taka, equivalent to about 5p. Not much - but then the majority of the population here subsist on less than one pound a day...

You can find out loads more on the website of Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in creating the Grameen Bank ("bank of the poor") and who set up this partnership with Danone:
 http://www.muhammadyunus.org/images/stories/in_the_media/GDFL_BP_210510.pdf

or on Wikipedia :  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grameen_Danone

There are 7 of us in all on the training program, each from Danone Baby and Medical businesses around the world: China, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy and Singapore. Our project for the next 6 days is to work out how Grameen Danone might extend its approach into the slums of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. So far most of the work has been only with the rural poor; the urban poverty in the big cities can be even greater and no-one has yet been able to work out how to help the people in the slums of the capital using this approach.

Friday 19th November 9pm

Passport? Visa? Tickets? Travellers cheques? Credit card? Immunisations? Deet? Immodium(!)? Yup, all sorted (famous last words).