"Sufiya begum suffered because she did not have the cash to buy her raw materials."
As a result, she could survive only in a tight cycle - borrowing from the trader and selling back to him.
Her life was a form of bonded labor, or slavery. The trader made certain that he paid Sufiya a price that barely covered the cost of the materials and was just enough to keep her alive.
"She could not break free of her exploitative relationship with him," writes Muhammad Yunus in his book Banker to the Poor, which outlines how the above encounter with bamboo stool makers in Jobra village in Bangladesh transformed his life and inspired him to effectively develop the micro lending model.
Later on in the same book Yunus writes, "Bangladesh is a land of natural disasters. This is an unfortunate but unavoidable factor in our business.
"But no matter what cataclysm, weather disaster, or personal tragedy befalls a borrower, our philosophy is always to get that person to pay back his or her loan, even if it is only at the rate of a half penny a week.
"This discipline is meant to boost the borrower's sense of self reliance, pride and confidence. To forgive a loan can undo years of difficult work in getting that borrower to believe in his or her own ability."
There is some pertinent learning in the context of CSR in Indonesia. A key message is the importance of ramping up efforts centered on rural and lower class communities that can bring about lasting poverty alleviation and progress toward the UN's millennium development goals.
There are still a large number of Sufiya begums in Indonesia being bypassed by the commodities boom, development of skyscrapers in Jakarta's CBD, stock market surges and glitzy business magazines glorifying the super rich.
At a recent UN World Food summit it was disclosed that the world now has 1.02 billion hungry people of which over 90 percent live in developing countries.
The bulk (65 percent) of these live in seven countries - India, China, Indonesia, DR Congo, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Ethiopia. And over 60 percent of the chronically hungry are women.
The one dimensional "lowest hassle-minimum effort" approach of CSR has been to largely ignore the problem and at best make some donations to coincide with natural disasters, religious festivities or new project announcements.
We live in times when "bottom of the pyramid" marketing theories are being implemented with lower classes being aggressively marketed shampoos, soaps, noodles, cell phones, cigarettes, garments, footwear, cosmetics, budget airline tickets, cooking oils, motorcycles, baby food, medicines, sub-prime loans and so on.
The focus is on how to induce more consumption not how we can help enhance the purchasing power. Many of the seven countries mentioned above also appear in different seminars as high potential destinations for investment, growth and business opportunity.
So it's more than organizing "hand-washing days" by soap manufacturers or "green rides" by motorcycle makers.
The question is whether companies - profiting from their presence in developing countries, utilizing (some would call it a euphemism for exploiting) resources to become big, bigger and biggest in lucrative sectors and whose future models are dependent on attractive demographics, including from the poor class expected to somehow "graduate" from their condition - are doing enough.
Yet this "graduation" is not possible unless the debilitating trap of poverty - borderline subsistence level income that cannot cope with inflation, limited skills, no assets, limited access to micro credit, high interest rates from money lenders, educational curriculums that are failing to develop job oriented competencies and absence of proper family planning - can be broken.
CSR can play a big role here and if companies "go grameen" and start to develop inclusive supply chains, distribution networks and build capacities in villages, schools, vocational centers then they will help communities take better ownership and control of their lives. Providing rural and poor communities with means - direct or indirect, earned not donated - to ultimately become self sufficient should be the objective.
Just as companies are ambitious about their quality, process, performance or market share parameters they need to get ambitious about the scale and impact of their CSR programs on communities.
Companies will discover dollar spends go a long way in rural communities - for the cost of a big event in Jakarta a school can be built, bore wells dug or help provided to several self employed.
It is the long-term impact of the CSR event that matters not the event organization, souvenirs, press releases making tall claims and photo ops. These might be good to create a buzz, develop employee morale, spread the message and reach out to stakeholders but this cannot become an end in itself.
Each day we see examples of certain CEOs, including of multinational banks and companies, who like to regularly feature themselves in newspapers and magazines using "token CSR" - a charity check here, a group walk there and planted photos everywhere.
And then there are some business leaders on the one hand accused of large debt write offs or tax evasion, posing as big philanthropists and collecting all sorts of awards and recognitions.
Such efforts do a disservice to CSR and it is time serious models like Grameen Bank are used to re-orient prevailing practices.
Yunus believes "human beings are much more complex than just being instruments for making money". He and like-minded are dreaming of a world of social businesses and enterprises. In the interim, CSR programs provide an opportunity to demonstrate a purpose broader than the consumption, brand and profit motive.
The columnist is CEO of international management consulting group, IndonesiaWISE. The concluding part of this series will focus on environment as a core pillar of CSR activities. He can be contacted at amoltitus@IndonesiaWISE.com.
