The leadership challenges in emerging economies ~ Education is a litmus test

In my constant motivation to understand where the winds of the future are blowing from, I constantly meet with various stakeholders from across society. Students, business leaders, social entrepreneurs, people and kids to see what is on everyone's mind.

I am going to separate the academia and students from business, engineering and other K-12 students that I interact with on multiple platforms and will state why is it important to understand what are the core challenges, which are the real opportunities or pain points to solve.

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The pain pints are obvious. Indian industry leaders believe from that around 20% to 30% of the engineering undergrads and masters students are employable and what happens to the rest of the odd 70% is a question that reflects the scale of the challenge and the opportunity to leverage human capital.

The most common questions that are students constantly ask me;
a. How do I connect with industry or society to solve real world pain points when the academics are all about the exam?
b. How do I build a globally competitive career and have the skills to do so?
c. Where do I start?

My common replies to all of the above are people who live in India, China, SE Asia or other emerging economies have the great opportunity of being in the heart of the coming future and have the chance to create it. To start with my feedback to the students are to look around. Not many people have the answers to questions such as how do we address BOP markets or how do we create products and services for these markets? These are great challenges that are not necessarily today's case studies in text books and opportunities waiting to happen. In addition one has access to technology platforms such as the www and mobile telephones, which means that with an email and search the opportunity to connect with stakeholders and create ideas are there. Just need to put your hand out. Third is. Just start and you can connect to people.

What all of the above is also telling us that if one abstracts this challenge to a higher level then this is across other socio-economic strata of society in emerging economies impacting all communities. So whether it is farmers or students or local communities or small villages, everyone is now asking to be connected to the “opportunity-web”.

That is why the mobile telephone in countries like India and China have skyrocketed and are playing a very important role in connecting disconnected webs of people and opportunities. The Grameen Phone is a great example where a pioneer Iqbal Quadir, led a groundbreaking project, which started in 1993, to bring mobile telephones to villages and rural areas in Bangladesh. This acted as a catalyst to great change and has over 3.5 million subscribers and connecting over 115,000 village phones. These phone act as , where they serve as "owner-operated" pay phones and as access for the local community to access and connect to other communities. The key is the business model that made the difference and continues to do so and a great example of leadership that’s possible.

http://www.grameenphone.com/

This is the leadership challenge to be leveraged to create the platforms, markets, products and services that can expand the boundaries of imagination that have the potential to impact billions of people for the coming century. It is for those social entrepreneurs and leaders to create and share these visions and get the bottom-up effect to kick in and the results are well, for everyone to participate and win.

This is the leadership challenge. The engine has got to kick in fast.