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Social entrepreneurship in Sichuan: Interview with Meg Young of Ecologia, a sustainable development program

This post is part of an occasional series of interviews with those working on development and sustainability issues in China, particularly southwestern Sichuan province.

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Contributing blogger Mark Hiew brings you an interview with Meg Young from Ecologia, an example of social entrepreneurship through rabbit farming in Sichuan. Here, Young explains some of her successes and development difficulties.

Rabbit breeders and interviewers. Photo credit: Meg Young

Young got her start in microfinance during college, while on a five-month long research program in Senegal, where she was introduced to a hunger project. She later connected with Ecologia, an NGO based in Vermont, during an international involvement conference.

Young came to Chengdu as a researcher in the summer of 2006 to conduct a feasibility study. Upon graduating from Middlebury College in Vermont, she returned to China through the Oxford World Leadership Corps in August 2007 on a 12-month program, which places people internationally within NGOs, following a similar pattern as the Peace Corps.

By 2006, Ecologia had been laying partnership roots in Dayi, a town 45 minutes outside of Chengdu, with a social entrepreneur named Ren Xuping. Known as the “Rabbit King,” Ren has been working with local farmers over the past 20 years, training them and providing rabbits as capital. He has affected an estimated 300,000 lives since he started his career in social entrepreneurship. Ren, like Young, was also interested in working with Ecologia when he found he was “hitting a wall” in terms of assisting beneficiaries.

A peasant from a poor family, Ren started raising rabbits at the age of 13. He later became a millionaire (in U.S. dollars) through a meat and fur factory entreprise. He was encouraged to extend his wealth to others by Deng Xiaoping, and then in 1984, through the American NGO Heifer International, he began providing direct lending of rabbits as capital. Heifer’s model of providing direct gifts of livestock for animal husbandry has been used successfully in many developing countries.

Ren Xuping helps farmers like this happy guy, who now takes his family on vacations to Shanghai, thanks to the money he earned through rabbit farming. Photo credit: Meg Young

Ren is building his own socially responsible supply chain through his philanthropy, since farmers can use rabbits locally or sell them back to him. He has great “guanxi,” or social relationships, that lie at the heart of what makes his efforts so successful.

Ren’s work in rabbit farming seemed like a natural place for microfinance. Many rural micro-entrepreneurs often still lack the start-up capital to run business. But Ren had instituted a gift model, wherein beneficiaries receive a 20 rabbit loan, then, after one year, they are then encouraged to pass on 20 rabbits to another beneficiary.

Ren’s NGO, the Rabbit King Poverty Alleviation Research Center (RKPARC), has three main pillars: working with female entrepreneurs, providing girls with education scholarships, and microfinance.

ResponsibleChina: What are some of the major challenges you face in working with your beneficiaries that may be different from those that other microfinance organizations face?

Cultural communication and language is the major difficulty Young cited for Ecologia. Ren said a cultural gap between American and Chinese staff made conversations lengthy and difficult. There are also differences in the way Ren’s RKPARC and Young’s Ecologia work together. Whereas both parties have a lot of clout, from Young’s perspective, Ecologia was looking to add “two grains of salt” to their ideas and procedures, whereas from the Chinese side they felt like “ball was in [Ecologia’s] court,” in terms of procedure and protocol.

Also, Heifer had given RKPARC firm deadlines and benchmarks that they had to follow; however, Ecologia follows a less task-oriented approach, more akin to a consulting partnership. This difference in expectations caused some difficulties.

Young says getting face time with beneficiaries is another difficult aspect of the project. Face time “ebbs and flows,” and it can be “intimidating” to beneficiaries, in that they are revealing sensitive information, which is then made more unusual by the presence of foreigners.

RC: What is the current state of organization of microfinance within the communities you work with in Southwestern China? Are they already on a quite large scale, or are they just starting off?

Microfinance is becoming more advanced and is currently scattered throughout the country. Wokai.org, a Beijing-based Web site, has plans to create a network of microfinance institutions across the country.

According to Young, many NGOs that have tried to cut and paste the “Grameen” microcredit model are struggling in their fledgling stages. They fail in China because of an underestimation of a couple of key points: 1) the important role that social relationships play in conducting business in China, and 2) the often extensive involvement of the government. For example, it’s still illegal to help people keep savings if you are not an officially registered bank. But Young also mentions that microfinance has gotten relatively easier to accomplish in China, as some regulations have already been lifted.

RC: The integral role of women in many microfinance contexts is well known. Are there any particular gender dimensions to your work that have become apparent?

Women’s role in Senegal is more focal, Young says. She quotes a development worker there as saying, “give the money to the woman, or it won’t feed anybody.” Gender relations in China are more balanced, Young believes, but there is still an expanding degree of impact when funds are given to women. Doing so changes some societal roles, and a greater percentage goes into education and long-term benefits.

Ren’s wife Zheng Shuping, the “Rabbit Queen,” has been focusing on female entrepreneurs and girls’ education.

RC: Do you see much room for innovation and creative development models—along the lines of Ashoka and the broader social entrepreneurship movement—within China, particularly at the grassroots level?

Backed by the Rockefeller Fund to expand corporate social responsibility (CSR) through social entrepreneurship, Ecologia has been creating CSR profiles of socially responsible entrepreneurs within the Chengdu region. It considers why people are making the decisions they’re making as far as social sustainability, with an eye towards internal networking within Chinese communities. The goal is to create a mentoring program between beneficiaries and those who’ve already succeeded.

RC: What are some major current issues that rural Sichuanese are facing, and what are some of the solutions that have worked?

Young says environmental policy changes have created major economic hardships for rural communities in Sichuan. A lot of farmland is being returned to forests, stripping farmers of their source of income. In many areas, coal mines are the major source of income, and while many are being shut down for environmental reasons, it leaves a great number of newly unemployed with no alternative source of income. Young also mentions the incredible rural-urban migration movement that separates many rural families. She often sees women beneficiaries who care for their in-laws and parents, as well as their own children.

“A lot of environmental solutions are Band-Aids for the scratch, when people need to be asking why are these things happening in the first place,” she says.

RC: Have you felt restricted or stymied working for an NGO in China, given civil society’s closer relationship to the government than might be the case in other countries?

Young explains that the government has been deeply involved and “very helpful.” At the moment, however, village elections are currently happening and so Ecologia has had to pause the project because it requires the full cooperation of village leaders. The microfinance lending cycle is six months to one year, which can be tenuous depending on the personal sentiments of the village leader.

As for major sources of inspiration, Young cites the “dedication and heart” of the Rabbit King and Queen. “That [two people] who have been working in philanthropy and development for over 20 years can continue to work at [such a pace] astounds me.”

She sees the project as a big victory as an example of successful multilateral cooperation—a small, Vermont-based NGO working with local Chinese social leaders using U.S. funding.

When asked for advice for young Westerners interested in coming to China to work in development, Meg offers some tempering words of wisdom:

“Know that even if you come over with a ‘can-do, idealist’ mentality, in the mean time, you’re gonna get your butt kicked and its not going to be easy. You will not learn Chinese in a day. You will learn to [take pride in] small accomplishments.”

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