How local knowledge helps create real social impact

Lalita Devi was a homeworker in Fursatpur, a village in the Indian state of Bihar, where her days revolved around looking after her home and family. Her world, as she described it, did not extend much beyond the household, and few people in the wider community knew who she was.

Today, she still begins her mornings in much the same way, preparing breakfast, getting her children ready and taking care of the household. But by around 11am, she is out in the village, visiting homes and meeting groups of women as a Dharmalife entrepreneur. By 4pm, she is back home to pick up the rest of the day’s household work.

The work has given her an income, but also something less tangible. People in the village now know her by name. Asked what had changed most, Lalita Devi summed it up simply: “I have my own identity.”

Assiya Gavandi’s journey began from a similar place. Her life in her village of Agar, in Maharashtra had centred on her home, children and husband. When she first began working outside it, some people questioned why a woman was moving around the village and speaking to other women. Her husband encouraged her to continue.

She started close to home, gradually expanding the area she covered as her confidence grew. Today, Gavandi works across a village of around 5,000 people and is an elected member of its panchayat, the local village council. She is now considering standing for office at block level, representing a wider group of villages.

Their experiences offer a glimpse of what Gaurav Mehta, a London Business School alumnus and Dharmalife’s founder and CEO, has spent years building. Since 2010, the organisation has certified more than 26,000 women entrepreneurs and worked across more than 45,000 villages in 16 Indian states, reaching an estimated 17.5 million people.

That scale grew from an idea Mehta first began exploring with his classmates at LBS: could entrepreneurship be used to alleviate poverty?

Turning constraint into capability

The team had access to a non-profit network that included large numbers of unemployed people in rural India and began looking for ways to create livelihoods locally. Sales entrepreneurship emerged as one answer. But what those entrepreneurs sold mattered too. Clean cookstoves and solar lighting became part of the early offering; over time, the model expanded into areas including health, skills, digital services, credit and market access.

For Rajesh Chandy, Professor of Marketing at LBS and Academic Director of the Wheeler Institute for Business and Development, who has worked with Mehta and Dharmalife since its early years, the scale of the problems created the opportunity.

“Big problems represent big opportunities,” Chandy said.

He pointed in particular to the position of women in India. The country has made “extraordinary strides” in educating women, he said, without creating equivalent opportunities for them to work or become entrepreneurs. Dharmalife has tapped into what he described as their “energy, ambition, creativity, connections, problem-solving skills.”

Lalita Devi first came across Dharmalife when she encountered another woman entrepreneur running a menstrual hygiene campaign in a neighbouring village. The willingness to talk openly about a subject that was rarely discussed caught her attention. She began asking questions about the organisation and eventually joined it herself.

It was not an easy step. Lalita Devi faced resistance when she began working outside the home, but her husband encouraged her to continue. Over time, attitudes changed. The work brought an income of her own, but her role soon extended beyond selling products.

“We’re trying to use the women in the community, our entrepreneurs, to drive change from inside out, versus normally you go outside in,” Mehta said. The entrepreneurs become part of Dharmalife’s extended network, he added and, crucially, “they keep helping us pivot.”

Gavandi described how that could work in practice. After learning digital skills and how to use online resources, she passed that knowledge on to other women. Some used it to improve products they were making and selling; she also helped women understand government schemes and support available to them.

“When I learn something new, I make sure other women learn it too,” she said.

Lalita Devi had seen the same effect through her sales work. Women who initially bought induction cookstoves from her began introducing other customers, earning something from those sales themselves.

What the women learned on the ground also found its way back into Dharmalife. Social-impact organisations often “design for the people they’re trying to impact”, Mehta said.

Connecting different worlds

Dharmalife’s reach has also depended on connections well beyond the villages where it works. Mehta described a network spanning business, non-profits, government and academia, much of it built through relationships that began at LBS. Classmates and co-founders went on to organisations that later supported Dharmalife, while students and academics brought management and research expertise.

Chandy described this as an ability to “connect worlds”: bringing new ideas and expertise into rural communities while giving business executives, academics, students and government officials direct exposure to grassroots entrepreneurship.

That relationship later deepened through LBS’s Wheeler Institute for Business and Development. MBA students have worked on practical management challenges at Dharmalife, while academics and PhD students have become involved in research.

For Mehta, the relationship has provided a “continuous dialogue and sounding board.” What began with student involvement and an early impact study has since developed into a wider research programme through Dharmalife Labs, moving, as he put it, towards “joint research for public good.”

Building the muscle for scale

Chandy described another challenge for organisations such as Dharmalife: developing the “muscle” for scale. Staying focused on rural India while growing meant building relationships with academics, businesses, funders and government far beyond any single community.

Those relationships mattered most when the organisation had to deal with a crisis and partners stepped in to support. What kept partners on board, Chandy said, was not simply trust in its intentions, but “trust in your capability.”

Covid put that resilience under extraordinary pressure. An organisation built partly around door-to-door interaction suddenly lost physical access to communities. Yet it survived and adapted, drawing on the relationshipss it had built and its willingness to change course.

Mehta was wary of making that adaptability sound easy. More than 15 years in, he said, Dharmalife was still encountering new problems and adjusting its approach. The work required “a lot of sacrifice, a lot of perseverance.”

Scaling beyond the organisation

Mehta is now looking at how approaches that have worked locally can reach further. After working with 49 institutional funders and raising more than $30 million since 2010, the organisation is increasingly partnering with the government.

The aim, he explained, is for approaches that work to be replicated, supported or expanded through public budgets, providing a more sustainable route to scale.

Dharmalife is also trying to strengthen the institutions around its entrepreneurs. Women are being brought together into groups intended to give them greater access to credit and markets, as well as a formal voice, with a longer-term ambition for them to have a stake in the institution itself.

For Lalita Devi, the future she described was rooted in her family: helping her children through college, contributing to household finances and building a more secure life with her husband.

Gavandi was looking further into public life. Having started by working with women close to her home, she is now an elected representative and wants to create a place in her village where women can display and sell what they make.

Even as Dharmalife looks towards government systems and larger institutions, Mehta still spends time visiting villages and talking directly to entrepreneurs. Chandy recalled advisers asking recently whether the founder should still be doing so after more than 15 years.

For Mehta, the answer was clear. The visits kept him motivated, but they also continued to generate ideas about “what’s feasible, what is relevant, what can be worked on.”

Chandy had seen some of those changes himself. Women he met spoke about more than income: their confidence had changed, as had the way others treated them and the roles they played in their communities.