Why donors keep asking for sustainability

October 26, 2026 Leave a comment

I have often been asked by the funding partners, ‘How will this project be sustained after the funding ends?’ While it is a reasonable question, it is also often the wrong one. The development sector has turned ‘sustainability’ into a synonym for ‘what will happen when the donor stops paying?’ The donors ask NGOs to build lasting solutions while often funding them through short-term, restricted projects that make long-term institutional and financial resilience harder to achieve. The real test of sustainability is the possibility of value created by the funding that can continue beyond the project cycle, and whether the economic, institutional or public systems exist to carry that value forward.

If a donor spends money on training women entrepreneurs, establishing community institutions, improving health services or creating livelihood opportunities, it is entirely reasonable to ask what happens when the grant ends. Nobody wants an intervention to disappear the moment the donor’s logo disappears from the last banner. But before asking how a project will survive without the donor, we should ask what exactly is supposed to continue, who is expected to take responsibility for it, and whether the conditions exist to make that possible.

A three-year project can be financially unsustainable but socially transformative, and it can end because its purpose has been achieved. A community institution can survive without the NGO but require continued public or market support. A livelihood intervention can become sustainable because participants increase their incomes, while the organisation delivering it remains dependent on philanthropy. And sometimes ‘sustainability’ simply means that the NGO promises to find another donor, which often is the least convincing of all. For years, development organisations have been encouraged to think about sustainability as an exit strategy. The donor funds the intervention often for 1-3 years, the NGO builds capacity, creates local ownership, establishes linkages and prepares an exit plan, and then the donor leaves and the model is expected to continue. While the logic is attractive, ending external funding and creating sustainability are not necessarily the same thing.

The OECD’s longstanding definition of sustainability in development evaluation focuses on the benefits of an intervention continuing after donor funding ends. That is a useful starting point, but it immediately raises a more important question of what will allow those benefits to continue? Government may take over, communities may contribute, users may pay, markets may generate revenue, or another institution may assume responsibility. Or the intervention may change behaviour or strengthen systems sufficiently that continued external support is no longer necessary. These are fundamentally different pathways, yet grant proposals often treat sustainability as a generic quality that can be added through a paragraph near the end of a concept note.

Consider a women’s entrepreneurship program that trains 5,000 rural women, organises producer collectives, provides business support and connects them to markets. If a donor asks how the program will be sustained after three years, the answer depends entirely on the model. Perhaps producer collectives will become commercially viable, or an anchor company will continue purchasing from the enterprises, while the financial institutions in the entrepreneurial ecosystem will provide working capital, and women will eventually pay for business services. Each possibility requires a different intervention design. If sustainability depends on markets, the project must build a viable market proposition. If it depends on government, public institutions need to be involved from the beginning. If it depends on producer collectives, those organisations need governance, capital and commercial capability. If another donor will be required, the project should be honest about that rather than presenting donor substitution as financial sustainability.

Donors increasingly expect NGOs to be resilient, adaptive and financially sustainable, while many NGOs are funded through short-term, restricted project grants that make precisely that difficult. Recent evidence from Bridgespan’s 2025 research, based on responses from 460 nonprofits and interviews with 51 nonprofit leaders, funders and intermediaries from India, found growing movement towards multiyear funding and greater recognition of core organisational costs, but continuing gaps in organisational development and financial reserves, particularly among smaller and non-metro organisations. Earlier Bridgespan research found that 83% of Indian NGOs surveyed had difficulty securing funding for indirect costs, while more than half had fewer than three months of reserves. Only 18% said they invested adequately in organisational development. Another analysis of 40 relatively well-funded Indian nonprofits found that actual core costs ranged from 5% to 51% of total costs and averaged 19%, while the average coverage provided by key donors was only 9%.

Funders ask organisations to be resilient while funding them as if their only legitimate expenditure is the activity that can be photographed and counted. Donor grants fund the field worker but not always enough of the management system that supports the field worker, training but not necessarily the organisational learning required to improve it, and program delivery while hesitating to fund reserves. Funders ask NGOs to diversify their funding while providing little unrestricted money with which to build their fundraising capacity. Then, three years later, the funder asks why NGOs are not sustainable.

Instead of asking an NGO, ‘How will you sustain this project when our funding ends?’, donors should instead ask, ‘What needs to be true for the benefits of this intervention to continue, and what role should our funding play in creating those conditions?’ This question recognises that philanthropy is often most useful when it finances a transition between two states. A grant can demonstrate that an idea works, absorb early-stage risk, strengthen institutions, develop markets, improve technology or support innovations that government and commercial finance are not yet prepared to fund. The grant should help create the conditions for the next stage. That may mean public financing, market revenue, community ownership, institutional adoption, commercial investment or another form of philanthropy. The appropriate pathway will vary by intervention, for example, a rural entrepreneurship program and a community health program should not be expected to arrive at sustainability through the same route.

This also means donors should sometimes be prepared to fund the less glamorous parts of sustainability. Financial systems are not exciting, NGO reserves are not photogenic, good middle management rarely features in impact stories, and neither do information systems, HR, audit, leadership development or fundraising capacity. Yet these capabilities determine whether an organisation can survive shocks, retain good people, manage resources and deliver programs consistently. Flexible funding is therefore not necessarily the opposite of accountability. It can be an investment in the organisational capacity required to deliver accountability well. A strong organisation with adequate systems and reserves may actually be better positioned to manage restricted program funding, and respond to changing circumstances and protect donor resources.

Then there’s another very important aspect of development programs, where everything cannot be sustained. Some projects end and achieve the desired results/purpose during their lifecycle. A delivery model may become obsolete, a technology may get replaced, a program may fail to produce meaningful results, or a community may no longer need an external intermediary. Continuing to fund something simply because it has existed for five years is institutional inertia and not sustainability.

The objective should therefore be sustainable value, not sustainable projects. This matters because many development challenges are systemic. Poverty, women’s economic exclusion, malnutrition, tuberculosis, climate vulnerability and the lack of decent employment cannot generally be ‘solved’ by a three-year project. At best, a project can change part of the system like improve a service, strengthen an institution, alter incentives, demonstrate a model, influence policy or help people acquire assets and capabilities.

Sometimes the honest answer will be that an intervention requires long-term funding, and there is nothing inherently unsustainable about that. Governments continuously spend money on education, public health, roads, social protection and environmental management. We do not ask whether a public hospital will become financially self-sustaining after three years, but are more interested in it producing sufficient public value to justify continued investment. Perhaps philanthropy should adopt some of the same logic. A community health program that requires continued financing may still be highly valuable if it prevents disease at a cost society is willing to pay. A program supporting children with special needs may never generate revenue, yet its social value can be substantial. 

So sustainability cannot always mean, ‘Can this generate its own revenue?’ That is a business-model question. For many social interventions, the better question is that, Who has a legitimate reason and capacity to pay for this value over the long term? The answer is an appropriate combination of market, government, communities, and philanthropy as per the need. This also places a responsibility on NGOs to become more honest in how they answer sustainability questions. A reassuring paragraph about capacity building, community ownership and exit strategies is not necessarily a credible plan. It’s better to be honest about it and say that the interventions may require continued public expenditure, or a livelihood project would need several more years beyond the grant cycle before it can cover its operating costs, and show the pathway. If another donor will be required, explain why and what will be different by then.

Sustainability becomes more credible when it is treated as a theory of how an intervention will continue to create value, rather than as a promise that the NGO will somehow find money after the current grant ends. We have turned a ,legitimate development objective into a ritual of grant writing. Every proposal has a sustainability section, a sustainability framework, and an exit strategy. Yet none of these, by themselves, answers the fundamental question of what will make this intervention continue to work when the source of money ends. A serious answer requires thinking about incentives, markets, institutions, behaviour, public finance, community ownership and organisational capability. It may require more than one source of funding and more than one institution. It may take five years rather than three. It may require unrestricted funding rather than another tightly earmarked project grant. And sometimes it may require accepting that the value created by a program is important enough to warrant continued investment. Perhaps, then, donors should stop treating sustainability as the final question in a grant proposal, but should be one of the first. So, instead of ‘How will you survive without us?’, the donor should ask, ‘What will exist, who will own it, who will pay for it, who will maintain it, and what should our role be when the grant ends to make the impact sustainable?’ While these are harder questions, I think, they can also lead to better projects. The most sustainable thing a donor can fund is NGOs capability, institution, market, public system or community ownership that makes the original grant less necessary over time.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

The cover image is generated using AI

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What if love became infrastructure 

September 28, 2026 Leave a comment

I got the title (more like borrowed) from a WhatsApp group where a member shared the theme of the ‘At One Impact Week 2026’ conference in Singapore. This one powerful phrase, ‘what if love became infrastructure,’ made me think deeply from romantic and philosophical perspectives initially, and finally from an economist’s viewpoint, and I ended up doing a visioning exercise (sort of) for the future. Ideating and eventually writing this essay took me back down memory lane when I was a student of Social Planning.

We think of infrastructure as something tangible, visible and measurable, like roads, bridges, electricity, water systems, digital networks and financial systems. We know how to calculate their construction costs, estimate their economic returns, and argue over who should pay for them. We even understand that infrastructure can determine the destiny of societies and can alter the trajectory of an entire generation. But there is another infrastructure without which none of these systems ultimately works, and yet it rarely appears in our economic imagination. It is invisible, difficult to measure and almost impossible to commodify. It is love, not romantic love, though that matters too, but the broader human capacity to care, to notice, to remain, to take responsibility for another person’s wellbeing. We have traditionally treated love as a private emotion and have failed to recognise it as a public resource.

Every society runs on enormous quantities of unpaid love, like a parent getting up in the middle of the night for a sick child, or a daughter accompanying an ageing parent to hospital. However, none of these acts is generally counted as economic output. They do not appear in national accounts and are not part of productivity statistics. However, if we remove it altogether, hospitals will become more crowded because there will be nobody to care for people after discharge. Children will require more formal intervention because fewer adults will be available to support them. Elder-care systems will become unaffordable. Workplaces will become less resilient because employees have no one to rely upon outside them. We have created elaborate systems to compensate for the absence of care while rarely acknowledging the care that prevents those systems from collapsing in the first place.

The more efficiently we organise modern economic life, the more we seem to separate it from the relationships that make life worth living. We have become remarkably good at producing things and increasingly uncertain about how to sustain one another. We can deliver almost anything to a doorstep within minutes, but we cannot guarantee that someone will sit beside an elderly person who is lonely. We can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the planet, but millions of people live without a person they can call when they are frightened. We can build increasingly intelligent machines, but many people struggle to find another human being willing to listen without looking at a screen. The technological revolution has reduced distance while, in some unexpected ways, increased emotional distance. Perhaps this is not a contradiction, and perhaps we simply solved the wrong problem. We became extraordinarily good at connecting devices, markets and information, while leaving the architecture of human connection largely to chance.

If love were infrastructure, loneliness would become an infrastructure deficit. That may sound absurd today, as we are used to thinking of loneliness as a psychological condition, a personal problem or sometimes a consequence of individual choices. But imagine applying the logic we already use elsewhere. If a community has no reliable public transport, we do not tell every resident to become better at walking, instead, we investigate the transport system. If people have no access to clean water, we do not blame them for being thirsty. If an entire generation has inadequate access to education, we do not simply advise young people to become more self-motivated. We build schools and institutions. Why, then, when millions of people experience profound social isolation, do we so quickly individualise the problem? Perhaps some loneliness is personal and inevitable. But some of it is produced by the environments we have built, like cities designed around cars rather than encounters, housing designed around privacy rather than community, workplaces designed around productivity rather than belonging, digital platforms designed around engagement rather than connection, and economic systems that leave people with less time for the relationships they depend upon.

The future city may therefore have to answer a question that today’s urban planning rarely asks if the city make it easy or difficult to belong? A well-designed neighbourhood might not simply be one where people can reach work quickly. It might be one where an elderly person can walk to a park, a child can meet other children, a young professional can enter a community without already knowing someone, and a person living alone has places to go where consumption is not the price of admission. Public libraries, community kitchens, parks, sports facilities, cultural centres, pedestrian streets and shared spaces are not mere amenities but relational infrastructure. Their purpose would be partly to create the conditions under which relationships can emerge naturally. Nobody can be ordered to make a friend. Governments cannot manufacture affection, but governments can certainly create environments in which human beings are more likely to meet one another, spend time together and develop trust.

This would require us to rethink the economics of care. Our economic systems are designed to value what enters markets. Care becomes visible when it is professionalised and paid, like a nurse, childcare worker, therapist, home-care worker, etc. But when the same work is performed by a spouse, parent, sibling, friend or neighbour, its economic value often disappears. What we fail to measure, we tend to underinvest in. And what we underinvest in eventually becomes a crisis. The care economy is therefore not an alternative to the productive economy; rather, it is one of its foundations. Every employee who arrives at work has already been sustained by some network of care. Every entrepreneur has had someone who tolerated their uncertainty. Every successful professional has, somewhere along the way, benefited from someone else’s patience, encouragement, childcare, emotional support or practical help. Economic independence is rarely as independent as we like to imagine.

Perhaps the next stage of capitalism will involve recognising this by redesigning institutions around the reality that people have caring responsibilities. Not by putting a price on love itself, because the moment love becomes a transaction, we risk destroying precisely what makes it valuable. Parental leave, elder care, flexible working, community services and mental-health support are not corporate generosity or welfare expenditure but investments in the infrastructure of human capability. The question would no longer be how much care we can extract from individuals before they burn out, but how we can design economies that reproduce care rather than consume it.

The 20th century built welfare states around the assumption that governments could provide a substantial share of social security. And now, the 21st century is discovering that governments cannot provide human presence, which is increasingly scarce. As populations around the world age and families become smaller, geographically dispersed and increasingly mobile, the question of who will provide everyday human care will become one of the defining social questions of the century.

We are approaching a world in which machines can converse, remember, personalise and simulate empathy with extraordinary sophistication. An AI companion may be available 24 hours a day, never become bored, never interrupt and never judge. For millions of lonely people, this may provide genuine comfort. There is nothing inherently tragic about that. However, if machines become exceptionally good at giving us the feeling of being understood, will we become less willing to tolerate the inconvenience of understanding another human being?

Human relationships are inefficient as they demand time, contain misunderstandings, and require compromise. Other people have needs that compete with ours, and they disappoint us, change, and sometimes even leave. But these inconveniences are not defects in the human system but are more part of what relationships teach us. A machine can perhaps simulate unconditional attention; another human being offers the possibility of mutual responsibility. The challenge for technology, therefore, should not be to replace human relationships but to protect the conditions under which they can flourish. The best AI may ultimately be the AI that saves time for us by reducing bureaucracy for doctors, helping families care for distant parents, assisting teachers, making public services easier to navigate and freeing people from repetitive work. Technology should ideally expand the space available for human presence rather than fill that space itself.

If this sounds utopian, consider how many things that once seemed private have already become legitimate subjects of public policy. We once treated literacy as an individual matter, and now we build education systems. We once treated disease as fate, and now we build healthcare systems. We once treated poverty as personal failure, and now we debate social protection. Our definition of what society owes its members has expanded repeatedly. Perhaps relational wellbeing will be the next frontier.

Imagine a future national wellbeing report that contains a metric nobody takes seriously today: the capacity to care. It might measure how much time people have for family, whether older people have regular social contact, whether young people have trusted adults, how many neighbourhoods possess accessible community spaces, whether workers can take time off for caregiving without economic punishment and whether people feel that they belong somewhere. Imagine a company reporting not only employee turnover but whether its organisational culture leaves people with enough time and psychological capacity to maintain lives outside work. Imagine investors recognising that communities with high levels of trust and social connection are more resilient in crises. These ideas may sound soft compared with infrastructure spending today. But history repeatedly demonstrates that societies often collapse because the relationships holding them together become brittle.

Love, in this broader sense, is demanding and requires boundaries, accountability and difficult choices. A society organised around love would not be one in which everyone agrees with everyone else or where harm is excused because the perpetrator is human. It would be one in which disagreement does not automatically turn the other person into an enemy, where vulnerability does not become a source of shame and where the dignity of a person is not entirely dependent on their economic usefulness. It would ask a different and radical political question: What do we owe one another?

Perhaps this is where the idea of love as infrastructure becomes most disruptive. Infrastructure is usually associated with physical capital, but civilisation also accumulates relational capital, like trust, friendship, community, reputation and reciprocity. The ability to call someone in a crisis is a form of wealth. Knowing that someone will notice when you disappear is a form of security. Having people who will help you when your circumstances change is resilience. These things are not equally distributed. Some people inherit enormous reservoirs of relational capital through families, communities and social networks, while others inherit almost none. We talk endlessly about inequality of income and increasingly about inequality of opportunity. Perhaps it’s time we should also talk about inequality of belonging.

The most interesting possibility is that love may eventually become a new way of thinking about development itself. It will be a recognition that human beings are profoundly relational creatures and that any civilisation that ignores this will eventually pay for it through other systems like healthcare, welfare, policing, education, mental-health services and lost productivity. What we fail to provide through relationships, we eventually attempt to provide through institutions, often at vastly greater cost.

And perhaps the deepest irony is that we already know how to build this infrastructure. We do not need a revolutionary technology. We need to rediscover ordinary human practices that modern life has made increasingly difficult, like sitting with someone, listening without checking the phone, knowing the names of neighbours, sharing food, visiting the elderly, creating public spaces where nobody needs to buy anything, giving people time to care, allowing friendships to develop slowly and treating presence as something valuable rather than unproductive. The infrastructure of love is built in minutes, conversations, gestures and acts of attention. 

When we imagine the future, we tend to imagine what technology will allow us to do. Perhaps a more important question is what technology will allow us to stop doing, and what we will choose to do with the time we recover. If AI does our paperwork, who will we visit? If autonomous vehicles drive us, who will we meet on the journey? If machines educate our children, who will teach them how to care? If algorithms know our preferences better than our friends do, will we still make the effort to know one another?

The future will not be short of infrastructure. It may, however, be short of reasons to use it together. Perhaps the civilisation that comes after ours will judge progress differently. It may look back at our obsession with highways, buildings, bandwidth, productivity and growth and wonder why we spent so much effort making things faster while allowing relationships to become harder. It may find it strange that we measured national wealth but not the wealth of human connection, counted houses but not homes, calculated healthcare expenditure but ignored the unpaid care that kept millions alive, and celebrated technological connectivity while tolerating extraordinary levels of loneliness. And perhaps the great infrastructure revolution of the future will begin with a deceptively simple realisation that the purpose of infrastructure is not to connect roads, machines, markets or data, but to enable human beings to live meaningful lives together.

(The cover image is generated using AI)

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Invisible Entrepreneurs

September 7, 2026 Leave a comment

Across rural India and much of the developing world, millions of women wake up before dawn, manage households, tend to livestock, cultivate small plots of land, process food, stitch garments, rear poultry, trade locally, and keep families economically afloat through a variety of income generating activities. Despite their relentless productivity, most of this work does not count as ‘business’ in policy frameworks, financial systems, or even social imagination. These women are workers, contributors, and risk takers, but are rarely recognised as entrepreneurs. Their labour remains invisible, undervalued, and structurally excluded from the very systems meant to promote enterprise and growth.

The invisibility of rural women entrepreneurs is not accidental. It is the outcome of deeply entrenched economic definitions, gender norms, institutional biases, and measurement failures that collectively erase women’s work from formal recognition. To understand why rural women’s enterprises remain unseen, one must look beyond individual capability or ambition and examine how ‘business’ itself is defined, counted, and legitimised.

Entrepreneurship has a narrow and exclusionary definition. In mainstream economics, a business is typically imagined as a registered entity, operating from a distinct workspace, producing for markets beyond the household, employing labour, and generating measurable profits. This definition immediately excludes most rural women, whose enterprises are often home-based, seasonal, informal, and interwoven with domestic responsibilities. When a woman processes grains, sells homemade snacks, stitches clothes for neighbours, weaves handloom products, or rears goats for periodic sale, her work is seen as an extension of household duty rather than economic activity. The fact that it generates income is treated as incidental, not central.

This conceptual blindness is further reinforced by national accounting systems. Gross Domestic Product calculations and labour force surveys systematically undervalue or exclude unpaid and semi-paid work. Women’s labour in family farms, household enterprises, and informal trade is often categorised as ‘assisting’rather than ‘ownership’ work. Even when women contribute substantial labour and decision-making, land titles, business ownership, and enterprise registration are typically in men’s names. As a result, women disappear statistically, even when they are economically indispensable.

Social norms further deepen this invisibility, as in many rural societies, men are perceived as breadwinners and women as caregivers, regardless of actual income contribution in the households. When a man sells produce in the market, he is seen as doing business. When a woman does the same, it is often framed as ‘helping’ the family. Earnings generated by women are frequently pooled into household income, while men’s earnings are recognised as individual contribution. This asymmetry strips women of entrepreneurial identity and reinforces the idea that their work lacks independent economic value.

The location of women’s work also plays a critical role in its invisibility. Because women’s enterprises are commonly home-based, they blur the line between productive and reproductive labour. The home, traditionally associated with unpaid care work, becomes a site where economic activity is rendered invisible simply because it does not conform to spatial norms of business. While a shop has legitimacy, a kitchen does not; a workshop is considered productive, but a courtyard is not. This spatial bias penalises women whose mobility is restricted by safety concerns, social norms, accessibility, or caregiving responsibilities.

Most rural women operate outside formal regulatory frameworks, not as their choice but by necessity. Registration processes are complex, documentation-heavy, and poorly aligned with women’s realities. Limited literacy, lack of identity documents, absence of land titles, and dependence on male family members make formalisation difficult. Formal financial institutions, in turn, rely on formal registration to extend business credit, insurance, and market linkages. This creates a vicious cycle, where women remain informal because systems exclude them, and systems exclude them because they remain informal.

Despite extensive evidence that women are reliable borrowers and effective managers of small enterprises, rural women face disproportionate barriers to credit and access to formal business financing. Collateral requirements favour land and property ownership, which women rarely possess. Credit histories are tied to formal transactions that women are excluded from. Even microfinance, often celebrated as a solution, has limits. Loans are frequently used for household consumption rather than enterprise expansion, and women bear repayment responsibility without gaining corresponding control over assets or profits. Financial inclusion without entrepreneurial recognition risks turning women into financial intermediaries rather than empowered business owners.

Rural women tend to operate at the lowest end of value chains, engaged in production rather than aggregation, branding, or marketing. They sell in local haats (markets), through informal networks, or to middlemen who capture most of the value. Because their scale is small and operations fragmented, their economic contribution is dismissed as marginal. Yet, collectively, these micro-enterprises form the backbone of rural economies, sustaining food systems, crafts, services, and local trade.

The development sector itself has played an ambivalent role in reinforcing invisibility. Programs targeting rural women often frame entrepreneurship as a social development or empowerment intervention rather than a serious economic strategy. Women are encouraged to ‘supplement’ household income, and not to build scalable enterprises. Training focuses on skills rather than markets, confidence rather than capital, participation rather than profit. While these interventions have value, they inadvertently reinforce the idea that women’s enterprises are secondary and subsistence-oriented and not engines of growth.

Most measurement surveys and impact assessments rely on indicators that fail to capture women’s economic realities. Metrics such as revenue, employment generation, or formal registration overlook non-monetary contributions, seasonal income, risk mitigation, and household-level decision making. Women’s enterprises are often judged against male norms of entrepreneurship, setting them up to appear less productive or ambitious, when in fact they operate under entirely different constraints. When women’s work is not recognised as business, they are excluded from policy support, denied access to finance, overlooked in market development initiatives, and marginalised in economic planning. This exclusion perpetuates gender gaps in income, assets, and agency. It also represents a massive loss to economies that fail to harness the full potential of half their population.

There is growing evidence that recognising and supporting rural women entrepreneurs yields significant economic and social returns. Studies show that women are more likely to reinvest earnings in nutrition, education, and health, creating intergenerational benefits. Women-led enterprises contribute to local resilience, especially in contexts of climate stress, migration, and economic shocks. Yet, without recognition, these benefits remain undervalued and underleveraged. Changing this reality requires a fundamental shift in how entrepreneurship is conceptualised and operationalised. Definitions of business must expand to include informal, home-based, and collective enterprises. Economic contribution should be measured not only by scale and formality, but by sustainability, resilience, and impact. Data systems must be redesigned to capture women’s work accurately, including unpaid and semi-paid labour, joint ownership, and household enterprises.

Institutional reforms are needed to lower barriers to formalisation without penalising informality. Simplified registration, group-based enterprises, and recognition of alternative forms of collateral can help bring women into formal systems on their own terms. Financial products must be tailored to women’s enterprise cycles, risk profiles, and asset constraints. Credit should be linked to capacity building, market access, and asset ownership, not just repayment discipline. Market interventions must move beyond production to address value chains holistically. Supporting aggregation, branding, digital access, and collective bargaining can help women capture greater value. Technology, if designed with women’s realities in mind, can play a transformative role by reducing mobility constraints and expanding market reach. However, as experience shows, access alone is insufficient without confidence, trust, and institutional support.

Finally, social norms must be confronted directly, as recognition is not only a technical issue but a cultural one. When communities, families, and institutions begin to see women as entrepreneurs rather than helpers, power dynamics shift. Legal recognition, public visibility, and role models matter, and so does language. Calling women ‘business owners’ instead of beneficiaries is a political act, and not just semantics. Invisibility is not a natural state, and is produced through choices about what counts, who counts, and whose work is valued. Rural women have always been entrepreneurs in practice, even if not in name. Making their work visible is not about charity or inclusion alone, but it is about economic realism. Until rural women’s enterprises are recognised, measured, and supported as legitimate businesses, development efforts will continue to underestimate both the problem and the potential.

If this essay made you reflect on rural development, women’s entrepreneurship and human potential, subscribe to my blog for one new article in your inbox every week. It’s free!

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

The cover image is generated using AI

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Why rural digital entrepreneurs matter

August 10, 2026 Leave a comment

When policymakers in India discuss infrastructure, they usually refer to roads, electricity, telecommunications, railways, and industrial corridors. These investments are undeniably important. Yet there is another form of infrastructure that receives far less attention despite its growing importance in connecting citizens with markets, government services, and economic opportunities, which is rural digital entrepreneurship.

Across India, thousands of rural entrepreneurs are quietly performing functions that neither government offices nor private companies can efficiently deliver on their own. They help citizens access digital services, complete applications, make online payments, obtain certificates, access welfare schemes, receive medical advice, connect with markets, and navigate an increasingly digital economy. In doing so, they have become an essential layer of last-mile infrastructure.

India’s digital transformation has been remarkable, especially in the last 10 years or so. Digital public infrastructure, including Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, and numerous online government services, has created unprecedented possibilities for inclusion. However, access to digital platforms does not automatically translate into digital participation. Millions of citizens still face barriers related to literacy, language, confidence, connectivity, documentation, and procedural complexity.

For many rural households, the challenge is not the absence of technology but the absence of trusted intermediaries who can help them use that technology effectively. This is where rural digital entrepreneurs play a critical role. A villager seeking to apply for a government scheme, update land records, register a grievance, obtain a certificate, access telemedicine, or complete an online transaction often relies on a local entrepreneur who understands both the technology and the community. These entrepreneurs bridge the gap between sophisticated digital systems and the realities of rural life.

Their contribution extends beyond service delivery. They generate local employment, build trust in digital systems, reduce transaction costs for citizens, and create pathways for financial and social inclusion. In many communities, they serve as informal advisors, helping citizens navigate an increasingly complex administrative landscape.

The importance of this role is likely to increase rather than diminish. As artificial intelligence, digital governance, online education, telehealth, e-commerce, and digital financial services continue to expand, the demand for local assistance will remain substantial. Contrary to the assumption that digitalisation eliminates intermediaries, experience often shows that new technologies create demand for new forms of facilitation and support.

The success of India’s digital future therefore depends not only on technological innovation but also on human infrastructure. However, rural digital entrepreneurs continue to operate largely at the margins of policy discourse. While considerable attention is paid to startups, MSMEs, and technology companies, relatively little focus is placed on strengthening the ecosystem that supports last-mile entrepreneurs. Access to affordable finance, business development services, training, digital tools, market linkages, and growth pathways remains uneven.

Women entrepreneurs face additional challenges in the form of social norms, mobility constraints, and limited access to resources, which restrict their ability to expand their enterprises. However, where these barriers are addressed, women-led digital enterprises often become powerful catalysts for household income growth, community trust, and social change.

Therefore, a more deliberate policy approach is needed. Rural digital entrepreneurs should be recognised as a strategic component of India’s development architecture. Their role goes beyond commerce, as they enable access to rights, services, and opportunities. Entrepreneurship development programs should move beyond one-time training and focus on long-term business viability. Mentorship, market access, technology support, and peer learning networks are often more important than short-duration capacity-building interventions. Partnerships between government, civil society, and the private sector can create sustainable service ecosystems. Rural entrepreneurs are uniquely positioned to deliver a wide range of services, from financial inclusion and digital literacy to telemedicine, skilling, and e-commerce support. Finally, impact measurement frameworks should capture not only income generation but also the broader social value created through improved access, reduced exclusion, and enhanced citizen participation.

India’s development story has often been driven by investments in physical infrastructure. The next phase may depend equally on investments in human infrastructure—people who connect citizens to systems, opportunities, and institutions. As India advances toward a more digital, inclusive, and knowledge-driven economy, these rural digital entrepreneurs deserve greater recognition not merely as service providers but as builders of development infrastructure. Their work may not be visible in satellite imagery or national construction statistics, but its impact is felt daily in villages where citizens gain access to opportunities that were once beyond reach.

The future of inclusive development will not be determined solely by the technologies we create. It will also be shaped by the people who help others use them.

If this essay made you reflect on digital infrastructure, rural entrepreneurship, and human potential, subscribe to my blog for one new article in your inbox every week. It’s free!

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

(Photo: A rural digital entrepreneur from Jharkhand)

First published in LinkedIn on 9th June 2026

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Building Demand for Development

July 13, 2026 Leave a comment

India’s rural development dialogues have treated health, education, and income as parallel priorities often pursued through separate policy silos. Budgets are allocated, schemes are launched, infrastructure is built, and targets are set, all with good intent. However, one foundational truth remains insufficiently acknowledged, that increasing rural incomes is not merely an economic goal but one of the most effective demand-side interventions for health and education. Without income security, even the best school education systems and local health facilities struggle to translate access into outcomes. With income growth, aspirations gain purchasing power, the choice basket expands, and human development accelerates in ways no standalone welfare program can achieve.

The constraint on health and education in rural India is rarely a lack of awareness alone. Most families understand the value of a healthy body and an educated child, but they cannot act on that understanding consistently. Irregular incomes, seasonal employment, debt cycles, and exposure to shocks force households into a constant state of prioritising needs and what is immediately affordable. In such conditions, preventive healthcare is postponed until illness becomes unavoidable, and education becomes negotiable once opportunity costs rise. When incomes increase, particularly when they become predictable rather than sporadic, this calculus begins to shift fundamentally. I have witnessed this change countless times among the families from rural livelihood and entrepreneurship development programs across multiple states of India, from the north to the northeast.

The first visible change that accompanies rising rural income is in health-seeking behaviour. As disposable income grows, households move from reactive to preventive care. They begin to spend on nutritious food intake, diagnostics, maternal health, and timely treatment rather than relying solely on home remedies or last-resort interventions. This is observable across rural belts where livelihoods have stabilised through dairy cooperatives, non-farm employment, or entrepreneurship opportunities. Increased income reduces the psychological cost of seeking care. A doctor’s visit no longer feels like a financial gamble, and medicine is no longer a choice between recovery and indebtedness. Over time, this shift translates into lower morbidity, higher productivity, and a virtuous cycle of income and wellbeing.

Education follows a similar but slightly delayed trajectory. At very low-income levels, schooling competes with survival. Children’s labour, whether on farms, in family enterprises, or in caregiving roles, has immediate economic value. As incomes rise, the opportunity cost of schooling declines. Families are more willing to keep children in school, invest in better quality institutions, often private schools in their own villages or neighbouring towns, and support supplementary learning such as tuition or digital tools. Crucially, income growth often changes learning outcomes and ambition, and not just enrolment. Education stops being about literacy alone and starts being about mobility, including English proficiency, technical skills, credentials, and pathways beyond the village economy.

This transition from survival to investment is critical as human capital investments respond strongly to income thresholds. Below a certain level of income, households simply cannot afford to plan long-term, and above that critical level, behaviour changes rapidly. Rural India today stands at precisely this inflection point. Decades of infrastructure expansion, electrification, and digital penetration have laid the groundwork. What remains uneven is sustainable income enhancement pathways at scale. Where it happens, demand for health and education services rises organically, often faster than supply systems can respond.

However, increased income alters expectations and does not merely increase consumption. Rural households with higher incomes begin to demand quality, accountability, and outcomes. They compare schools, question teaching standards, seek second medical opinions, and are willing to pay for reliability with profound implications. It challenges the assumption that rural citizens will accept poor service quality indefinitely. It also creates space for private, social, and hybrid service models like low-cost clinics, diagnostic centres, skill academies, and ed-tech platforms that were previously unviable due to weak demand. Income growth can enable choice for households, who would increasingly adopt mixed strategies of using public facilities for some services and private providers for others. This duality can, if managed well, improve overall system performance. 

The ripple effects of income-driven demand can extend beyond individual households. As spending on health and education will increase, local economies will diversify. Teachers, health workers, lab technicians, transport providers, and service support staff will find employment closer to home. Women’s participation in the workforce will rise as care responsibilities will reduce and aspirations will expand. These multiplier effects will strengthen rural markets, making income growth more resilient and less dependent on a single sector like agriculture.

However, income growth alone is not sufficient, as demand without supply will lead to frustration, not development. In many rural areas, rising incomes have resulted in out-migration for services, with families travelling long distances or relocating temporarily to access quality healthcare and education. This is not a failure of income-led development, but a failure to anticipate and respond to it. Both public and private supply systems must be designed to scale alongside income growth. Physical access, skilled personnel, digital connectivity, and trust are essential if local ecosystems are to capture the benefits of rising demand.

Livelihood programmes and social sector investments are often conceived independently. Income-generation schemes focus on outputs like jobs created and enterprises supported, while health and education programmes focus on inputs like schools built, staff hired, and beneficiaries enrolled. What is missing is an integrated demand-supply lens. Rural income enhancement should be explicitly recognised as a human development strategy, with parallel investments planned in service delivery capacity. When livelihoods improve in a region, health and education infrastructure should be strengthened proactively, not reactively.

For corporate social responsibility (CSR) and philanthropy, this insight could be particularly valuable. Rather than choosing between livelihoods and social services, funders should see them as sequential and reinforcing investments. Supporting rural entrepreneurship, value chains, or digital livelihoods creates the conditions for sustained demand for health and education. Complementing this with investments in service quality of teacher training, primary healthcare strengthening, telemedicine, or skill education will maximise impact. Fragmented interventions will yield fragmented outcomes, while integrated strategies can create lasting change.

When rural citizens earn more, they become more vocal stakeholders in the local political economy. They demand better governance, transparency, and responsiveness. Health and education, being highly visible services, often become focal points of this demand. Income growth thus strengthens democratic accountability. It shifts the relationship between the state and citizens from charity to entitlement, from gratitude to expectation. 

India’s development journey offers ample evidence of this dynamic. States like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra that have successfully diversified rural incomes through improved irrigation, manufacturing clusters, or services consistently outperform others on health and education indicators. The lesson is that the effectiveness of social spending is amplified when households have the means to engage with it meaningfully. Supply creates possibility, and income creates participation.

As India looks ahead to the next phase of rural transformation, the question is no longer whether to invest in health, education, or livelihoods, but how to sequence and integrate them. Treating income growth as the foundation of demand generation reframes the debate. It reminds us that people are not passive recipients of services, but active decision-makers whose choices shape outcomes. Empowering those choices through income security may be the most humane and pragmatic development strategy to have. This has the potential of unlocking a chain reaction that will turn latent needs into effective demand, services into systems, and welfare into wellbeing. Healthier bodies and educated minds do not emerge in isolation, but they grow where households have the freedom to choose them. And that freedom, in rural India, begins with income.

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(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

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