“I’ve always wanted to do something really mea-ningful.” – why toilets can make a happy man, more than selling shampoo and how a market approach can help.

Jaime Frias, Country Director, International Develop-ment Enterprises, Hanoi, Vietnam

“I think IDE has a very unique approach of doing develop-ment work. It is adopting commercial business principles to create sustainable market environments that can effec-tively respond to the needs of the poor. As former business man I really like this way”, Jaime told us enthusiastically, when we met him in Hanoi. Looking at him, it doesn’t take too much fantasy to see that he is happy and satisfied with what he is doing, and that he doesn’t consider for a minute going back to Chile and continuing a successful business career.
“What we achieve with our projects, really feels good. We helped to create a rural market for the sustainable pro-vision of sanitation technologies improving hygiene of poor people. Or, we helped to reduce the spread of trachoma (blinding disease) and tobacco consump-tion by designing rural advertising and promotion campaigns. It’s great to see poor people invest in the right tools to earn their own living. There are so many incre-dible things that I can do with my knowledge to support others,” Jaime explained, “that I would not know one reason why I should go back to sell shampoo.”

Let us give you a first impression of our short but lively conversation with Jaime Frias in the following lines. You might be able to read more about him and his interesting projects in our book “MyImpact”.

Jaime Frias’s selected quotations:
“I’ve always wanted to do something really meaningful. However, after school I needed to work and I took the Procter & Gamble offer for money and image reasons.”

“At Procter & Gamble I was just another person of many, someone who could be punished or promoted as way of showing success. Today, the respect I get is different and it is shown in a different, more personal way.”

“After a few very successful years at P&G I started to ask myself: Are you going somewhere? Are you happy? To leave this life behind to try development work was not a huge sacrifice since, in a way, I was not leaving any-thing.”

“Somehow what I do, what I use my energy for is for something much more meaningful than it was before. Be-fore it was my personal ambition that made me work all night, today it’s the meaning of the work itself.”

“I am doing what I really believe in. Our employees see that, appreciate that and they go along and do the best they can. That’s fantastic, I can tell you.”

“A lot in life is about being in the right place at the right time. But if you don’t go out, search, see places, you will never get there.”

“Another aim of IDEs work is to contribute to changing the policies in the countries we work to have a larger le-verage and impact.”

Some background on Jaime Frias:
Jaime was born, raised, and graduated in Industrial Engi-neering in Chile. Being offered a very attractive job in marketing from one of the world’s most renowned con-sumer goods giants, Procter & Gamble, he could not resist and was eager to pursue a successful business career and to make good money. After doing this with more than the expected success for around three years, Jaime was in-creasingly unsatisfied with his lifestyle. He decided to quit and go to Australia together with his girl friend.
After a short period in Australia he took a job at UNESCO in Bangkok to try an area he thought could be the right thing for him - development work. He recognized pretty soon that it was not for him to sit in an office again, al-though he did like the purpose of the work. The next step was to take the challenge of becoming country director of IDE in Vietnam, a decision he never regretted. He really enjoys his work there and has finally found the inner sa-tisfaction P&G could never give him.

Some background on International Development Enterprises (IDE):
IDE’s vision in Vietnam is to become a leading develop-ment organization that uses pro-poor in-novations and market-based approaches to serve the rural poor. Widespread im-pact in rural development is achieved by transferring the innovative and replicable solutions to local partners and policy makers.
Improving the life of the rural poor, with special emphasis of women and disadvantaged groups, by identifying, de-veloping and marketing appropriate, affordable and envi-ronmentally sustainable solutions through market channels is what IDE is mainly about. IDE Vietnam focuses on agro-enterprise development, water supply and improved hygiene and public health.
Since its foundation in Vietnam in 1991 (USA 1981), IDE has helped enable thousands of rural households to ac-cess affordable clean water and sanitation and to pro-gress from subsistence farming to small-scale commercial production, thus beginning an upward spiral out of po-verty. In all its projects IDE regards the rural poor not as “recipients of charity”, but as potential customers, pro-ducers and entrepreneurs. IDE has demonstrated that the poor can and will invest in their own well-being.

If you would like to engage with the work of Jaime Frias or get to know more about his organization “International Development Enterprises”, please visit www.idevn.org,
or, for more specific opportunities, contact joanna.stefanska@myimpact.ch or wolfgang.hafenmayer@myimpact.ch directly