Ashoka's Full Economic Citizenship initiative is currently implementing and testing two pilot projects in Mexico, in the fields of low-income housing and small-scale irrigation.

Testing and validating this innovative new model requires the cooperation of the business partner and social entrepreneurs and their organizations to learn, adapt, experiment, and innovate to create competitive products/services for low-income citizens.

Ashoka plays an active role in developing these selective pilot partnerships. Depending on specific partners' capacities, our role may include:

• Building a common vision and trust among partners;
• Defining the partnership's objectives;
• Identifying contributions and gains for each partner;
• Designing the pilot and supporting the preparation of business plans for both partners;
• Designing processes, creating tools and preparing the team;
• Implementing the pilot;
• Measuring the results and progressively refining the model;
• Replicating the model to reach a massive scale and sharing the results.

Small-scale Irrigation

Objective
In 2004, Ashoka launched a partnership between a leading water distribution and irrigation company and a group of selected Ashoka Fellows with strong local presence in rural communities in Mexico. Together, they are inventing a new type of rural distribution channel, not only to deliver irrigation systems appropriate to the needs of small farmers, but also to bring value-added services such as affordable technical assistance in production, crop certification and marketing and financing mechanisms needed by most clients at the grassroots level as well as other critical products. The partners are committed to developing sound business solutions that will ensure impact at the farmer level by increasing household incomes, position the company to lead in this underserved market representing hundreds of millions of dollars in potential sales, and enable social entrepreneurs to generate new sources of income for their organizations and further their social mission.

Role and opportunities for social partners
Ashoka Fellows Arturo Garcia Jimenez and Juan Jose Consejo are using their networks and community knowledge and trust to aggregate demand, promote, distribute, install and maintain irrigation systems, and play a key role in securing financing, mobilizing subsidies and providing technical assistance to small farmers. Arturo is the founder of RASA, a network of farmer-owned and managed cooperatives in the state of Guerrero. He aims to advance RASA's social mission among the 12,000 farmers they are currently serving. Through the partnership, he was able to create a team of field promoters who advance Arturoýs vision of creating sustainable opportunities for subsistence farmers. Juan Jose and his organization, INSO, are concerned with the natural degradation of the eco-system due to mismanaged conservation strategies. He will use the irrigation technologies as an example of effective, sustainable water saving techniques for impoverished and small scale farmers in the Oaxaca region. Commission on sales generated by the citizen organizations will help diversify their sources of funding.

Role and opportunities for business partner
The partnering company provides irrigation technology, preferred distribution terms as well as promotion materials and training to social partners. They also committed to long-term product innovation in order to further decrease the cost and tailor the irrigation systems to small farmers' needs. Small farmer markets represent a significant market potential.

Affordable Housing

Objective
Ashoka has brokered a partnership between one of the largest global building materials companies already serving thousands of low-income clients and Ashoka Fellow Patricia Nava who has extensive contacts in the informal sector. The partnership is designed to test ways in which existing social networks can become more cost-effective than traditional promotion channels to reach families interested in improving their housing conditions.

Role and Opportunity for social partner
The citizen sector organization, SISEX, is an umbrella organization that partners with existing networks (unions, cooperatives, community associations) to train as many as 75,000 people annually in sexual education. For Patricia, improving housing conditions is a strategic issue that she views as a way to address her core topics of domestic violence and having a balanced life. SISEX has trained a select number of promoters who liaise with these groups to identify potential clients, and generate a commission based income for SISEX. The social gains for SISEX and Patricia Nava are evident when women and their families are able to have a dignified home, and are often rewarded by increased sexual health. SISEX has an agreement with the company and gets commissions on each new sale.

Role and opportunity for business partner
The company has had several years experience in serving low-income markets, whereby individual promoters work on commission to encourage low-income citizens to join the program. By providing a way for low-income citizens to access a previously closed market, the company has expanded its sales base, built client loyalty, and is proving that it can be profitable to tap into this market. However, in order to expand more effectively, it has now entered a partnership with a citizen sector organization with large social networks.