Davos is somewhat like a white man’s club with a lot of brown men pretending to be white. Even the brown wives are dressed in the de rigeur black trousers and shirts, sweaters or whatever. The only two exceptions were Satguru Jaggi of Isha Foundation, resplendent with his Christ like hairdo and flowing shawls and this writer, as usual, a walking advertisement for several thousand years of our textile traditions. So I was not surprised at the commotion around the session titled The Girl Effect. And it wasn’t an alternative session either, but one of the main ones, in a principle venue.

What has the girl child or effect got to do with wealth creation? I was told later that various women leaders, amongst them the head of CARE and that of UNICEF – both women – and the likes of Melinda Gates had to fight and argue for four years before this could happen. And even in the early days of the WEF people could be heard puzzling over it. For those of us who have worked for years in trying to make the financial and business czars understand the economic sense of including the excluded – girls, women and the marginalized – there were no surprises. For the cynical and unbelieving the session drilled the truth in with what they understood – figures. And the lessons I think are crucial for those to whom only the number of zeroes at the end of a figure seem to matter.

I can’t rattle of the astonishing figures that were displayed. Suffice it to say that if every girl was educated and given a small loan to start a home business like a dairy or piggery or chicken rearing the effect on the GDP is close to 20%. Yes the GDP goes UP that much. Their buying power comes into play. Women buy to improve the lives of themselves and their families so spending on food, nutrition, education, health and necessities for the household go up. This pushes up general consumer buying kick starting an otherwise  moribund economy. And this is a productive everlasting alternative to subsidizing failing banks like the US has done, or pumping subsidies into the market as we seem to plan to do. Here you are creating several million independent entrepreneurs who will always be entrepreneurs. They do not need to build huge environmentally distructive factories.  They do not need to employ hundreds of people. They do not need people to move to the cities. They do it from where they are. It is decentralized, thereby spreading prosperity in the rural areas. It doesn’t encourage migration which in turn leads to infra structure breakdowns in the cities. It directly affects the future generation by investing in it and its betterment. Win win all the way.

So why have people not cottoned on to this? Why are we following the same well worn and not very successful path of thinking of entrepreneurs only as people who invest millions of crores in huge enterprises? Is it a lack of vision? Is it the proverbial bhed chaal?

Yes Mohammed Yunus was there, but he wasn’t the only one arguing this point. There was Vikram Akula, who has made a profitable business out of loaning tiny sums of money to women ( he claims a 99% success rate in people repaying loans) to become entrepreneurs. There was the trendy CEO of Nike and Nike Foundation who was doing the same. And others.

Not to forget Elaben Bhatt, who is herself a social entrepreneur recognized by the WEF.

We are in a financial crises where the rich are squealing. Let’s redefine what enterprise means so that we can broad base entrepreneurship a million fold and not set ourselves up for the kind of situation we are in today. Several million small but sturdy enterprises have a much smaller way to fall then the mighty who crush all the surrounding and more as they collapse. Perhaps we need to relook at Small Is Beautiful.