Room to Read: Development work with private sector business principles

“The main challenge for any new organisation is the initial growing pains... operating in a new country you navigate the systems and work in different areas. This challenge was overcome by Room to Read in Sri Lanka, by investing in our local staff. For instance, our Country Director and all managers are local and everyone who works for Room to Read is a Sri Lankan national. This has helped tremendously to overcome the challenges we faced in working with govt, other organisations, and with communities in Sri Lanka,” said Jean K. Beaulieu, Regional Director for Asia, currently in Sri Lanka on a brief review visit, responding to question on the challenges of Room to Read in Sri Lanka.

Room to Read opened up a project in Sri Lanka in 2005, after the tsunami. “When some donors came to us requesting donations for affected countries, Room to Read decided to come to Sri Lanka and support the children of Sri Lanka. Since then, our Sri Lankan team has focused its efforts on constructing schools, establishing libraries and publishing children’s books to ensure all children have access to the materials they need to complete their education. We are also engaged in striving to end the gender gap having launched our Girls’ Education program in 2006. I believe we have successfully demonstrated our ability to work in challenging areas like the north and we continue to demonstrate success in other parts of the country.”

Referring to the response of the Sri Lankan community to Room to Read, Beaulieu said “When we work with communities, we encourage themselves to come up with resources to match our contributions. The communities thus come up with 15 per cent of the cost of operating what we have, thus making the programs viable and sustainable right from the beginning. We see them proudly taking ownership of the structures we have, by putting the community’s own sweat into building the school structures, by being involved in library activities and community leaders talk with us about establishing more libraries and increase working with teachers to improve the lives of children.”

Speaking about Room to Read’s unique style of work, he said: “Recently we had a meeting with the Zonal Director of Education in Vavuniya, who observed that Room to Read is an organisation which, instead doing a lot of talking, is always focused on action! And this really sums up what we are. We do not go around in the north, for instance, with large signboards announcing our work; instead quietly on ground we work with the communities and their leaders, with Government and education officials. One of the most positive aspects of Room to Read is that we operate like a private company. Our founders came from the private sector, like our founder John Wood who came from Microsoft, or Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer (now Chief Executive Officer) Erin Ganges who came from Unilever and Goldman Sachs.

“The concept of Room to Read is that we are doing development work but we apply private sector business principles in doing that... We try to keep as low overheads as possible and as we move around the communities we work without much ostentation and we use rented vehicles and even utilise public transport. We do not drive around in great big land cruisers which could cost more than the schools we are building!

“We also operate very transparently and you can see this on our website where we publish our Annual Reports along with our financials. There you can see we are operating, on average, with 80 per cent of the funding going to support children and the rest covering our overheads. Our ability to operate in that manner has won us a number of awards from the agencies that rate NGOs every year and consistently have been rated as being one of the top NGOs for our financials , transparency and impact.

“As a new organisation we are continuously doing research, always looking for ways to improve, as we don’t want to get mired in outdated systems, and are looking for innovative ideas to challenge the norm and do things better and more effectively.”