Or self fund since it sounds to be a profitable idea.
His plan is bad because he creates yet another cause to give money to. With a business, he gets the same outcome and doesn't need help. It's a win-win-win!
His plan is bad because he creates yet another cause to give money to. With a business, he gets the same outcome and doesn't need help. It's a win-win-win!
Of course, this defeats the stated purpose of encouraging usage by poor Indian women, but if the point is to make money...
Let's start from the scratch. The goal is this:
Create affordable sanitary napkins for women in India.
To achieve this goal, he worked hard to master the first step i.e. to be able to manufacture the napkins at low cost. Great.
Now there are two approaches:
1. Sell machines to different NGOs so that they can create their own napkins. As I mentioned it requires hefty investment of 1,200$. Also, I think it's easy to underestimate how much effort is required to reach different parts of India and selling the concept of these machines.
2. Create machines on his own (using outside investment if needed) and create cheap napkins afforded by economies of scale. He can use the money from the sales and extend it create a better process, better machine and drive prices even lower. He can now rely on an existing vast distributor network to spread these products all over India [I refer you to my shampoo sachet example in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3370219]. Heck, he can now even export it to other developing countries.
If the goal is to make napkins available to more women in India (and everywhere else), I think that 2nd approach is vastly superior than first. What do you think?
PS: If there is a viable market, I suspect some of those groups will start to grow and you may end up with the type of large company you want him to build.