Harvard Entrepreneurship Champion Project: Indian girl lets banana bark change pads

In Tuesday, Harvard University's 2014-year MBA student Amrita Saigar and her pioneering partner, Oracle-Getzu, a corporate engineer, took the spotlight at Harvard Business School's top entrepreneurial competition, which included the Social Entrepreneur Group Award and the most popular prize for the new Entrepreneurship competition. What are their ideas--the establishment of a social enterprise called Satie (Saathi) to provide low-cost sanitary napkins and job opportunities for rural women in India. The two contestants who have a degree in mechanical engineering at MIT have been blown up by the judges and audience, eventually defeating the ideas of other contestants-creating a tuition plan in Colombia with a farmer-and-business-model tomato sauce producer. and an educational advisory service. The two are planning to carry 50,000 dollar bonuses to India to practice their entrepreneurial dreams. Shortly after Satie's victory, social networking site poets&quants An exclusive interview with UNCTAD at Harvard Business School. She opened up and talked about the inspiration for the idea, and the Harvard Business School curriculum and professor's major contribution to the venture. How did this idea arise? I had previously studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in junior year I had an internship at the Women's Health division of the Procter and Gamble company. When I was 21 years old, I didn't realize that the women's health products were meant to be comfortable (synch) and Tampax, and I thought it was flying silk and Pantene. To tell you the truth, on the first day of work, I found something that really shocked me. I am a designer who is designing equipment for the summer, a fact that lies before me: Women in rural India have no pads available. Girls can't go to school because of pads. This is the source of inspiration. That's how this idea came about. I know I can make people have a strong interest in it. After my senior year back on campus, after my persuasion, my design team began to create a small-scale manufacturing process that uses existing fibres from rural India to make pads. We looked at a lot of fibers and worked with a chemical engineering team at MIT. They revealed that the bark of a banana tree is the most absorbent fiber in the world, and it is ready-made. Banana trees have a very interesting phenomenon. I didn't know at the time that it would take 9-12 months from planting trees to harvesting bananas, but banana trees only had to be harvested once a year, and the growers had to cut off the main stems. They usually chop it into small chunks, some of which are used as fertilizers, but the vast majority are simply piled up by growers, waiting to rot. How is the final product produced? Does the consumer accept this kind of mat made from the trunk? We processed the bark into fiber, so it eventually turned into a dry powdered fibrous material that could be used to fill the pads. Therefore, it is a very fluffy material, we have tried, consumers are satisfied with it. What does this award mean to you recently? With this money, weCan go to India to really start this business. In other words, we can go into the Indian countryside and work directly with women. Is there anything else in your life that can be compared to this award? In addition to winning this contest, there are two things that excite me in my life, one of which is getting into MIT-I've always dreamed of becoming a mechanical engineer, but I never thought there would be such a chance. The other thing is to be admitted to Harvard Business School. To be honest, I can't believe I'm wondering if admissions officers are mistaken. This is how I felt when I was admitted to these two schools. What are your long-term plans for the cause? We hope to reach 5 villages by the end of this year. Our business model is to work with self-help groups of rural women. The group, composed of about 10 women, gathered together to create their own small micro-enterprises. These women need to spend 500 of dollars to buy a machine from us and they will be able to repay the money within 3 months. This is not a 10-year investment. Next, they can start producing their own pads, running their own businesses, and managing their own books. It takes only two women to operate the machine, and the remaining 8 use door-to-door distribution models to sell the pads in local communities. Our goal is to have a village of 10000 people, which usually has about 2,700 women at the age of menstruation. A village a machine. We want these women to be able to start their own businesses. We mainly want to solve 3 problems: through the use of discarded banana tree fiber to solve the problem of affordability, through local production to solve the problem of accessibility, door-to-door distribution model and Word-of-mouth marketing to solve the biggest problem-to raise the awareness of the villagers. Our idea is that no matter which village you live in, which country, your local resources should be able to adapt to your needs-whether this resource is coconut fiber or papyrus. The purpose of this undertaking is not only to help rural women find the pads they can afford, but we also want them to feel empowered to help them run their businesses and promote their socioeconomic status. My grandmother grew up in the countryside and couldn't go to school for a couple of days every month. Because at that time, girls during menstruation to go to school is a taboo. Until today, she said, she was still sad to think of the past. It is ridiculous to know that my family has experienced this dilemma in person. If we can finally solve this problem, it will be a great achievement for us. (Translator: Ye Han)