Rural Entrepreneuship Division (RED)

Rural Entrepreneurship Division (RED) is CEL's rural entrepreneurship project, running in Rajasthan and Goa, and looks to turn our rural location into an advantage, by looking to assist and setup rural enterprises and in the process give a sustainable source of income to village folk in surrounding areas. A lot of RED's recent emphasis went on making the Biogas project, which aimed to put up a Biogas plant in the dairy community attached to the BET campus.

Currently the team is working in the field of sanitation by pursuing an approach known as Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) which focuses on igniting a change in sanitation behaviour rather than constructing toilets. It does this through a process of social awakening that is stimulated by facilitators from within or outside the community. CLTS entails the facilitation of a community's analysis of their sanitation profile, as well as their practices of defecation. Under this project, Participatory rural appraisal methods are going to be used to enable local communities to collectively internalize the impact of open defecation on public health and on the entire neighbourhood environment; hopefully leading to collective action to become open defecation free.

The team's immediate goals in pursuing CLTS is to achieve an open defecation free status in nearby villages, but the real and long term objective behind it is to identify potential leaders through our CLTS initiative. It will enable us to identify enterprising individuals who might be willing to work for rural entrepreneurial ventures in the future.

In Goa, RED is working towards creation of social businesses amongst the stake holders of the society who act as change makers in the long run. To achieve the same, the RED is working to infuse a Socio-entrepreneurial financial model to the Nirmaan-Goa chapter, an organisation working primarily on philanthropic lines by establishment of Self-help groups in the slums of Goa by producing Recycled Paper and Handicrafts for a sustained source of income and value creation.

Reach us at:
Aditya Dave
Project Lead (Pilani)
aditya@celbits.org
+91 97850 33233