Funders, Do Your !!@%@#! Job
In the for-profit world, if customers don’t value your product, you go out of business. In the nonprofit world, if beneficiaries don’t benefit, you can survive—and even thrive—if you can persuade funders otherwise. The most fundamental job of the funder is to make sure the beneficiaries benefit. The way to do that is to fund only those organizations that effectively measure and make the case for impact. If you’re not doing that, you’re part of the problem.
Stanford Social Innovation Review
Why We Shut Down
This excellent article prompted Kevin’s latest diatribe. It’s by two social entrepreneurs who shut down their family planning project in Ghana when they realized it wasn’t working and never would. How and why they pulled the plug makes for fascinating reading, but what really struck Kevin was their take on why it is so rare for ineffective NGOs to go out of business.
Youth Impact’s A/B Testing Journey
A/B testing is a method widely used to great effect in industry but it’s little used in the social sector. We are obsessed with both evidence and iteration, and this is where Youth Impact in Botswana is leading the pack. Their methodology melds the rigor of RCTs and the agility of rapid iteration cycles to create a new tool for both evidence and ongoing iteration toward maximum impact. We really think they’re onto something. This detailed guide shows how these methods can be applied across sectors, from healthcare to conservation.
What Works for Global Education
Timeline of YouthImpact’s A/B testing journey
Their A/B experiments are critical to their impact measurement strategy—and make them nimble and able to rapidly iterate.
Early Childhood Education Effects: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
The evidence on a bunch of celebrated ECD programs showed they boosted cognitive skills in the short term, but the impact often faded after a few years. For many, this argued against the whole idea of ECD. This clever meta study found that lasting impact depended on how many peers also went through the improved program. It’s a very punchy argument for equity: if everybody gets it, the impact compounds for all. If access is restricted, there’s little lasting impact for anyone. Serve everyone.
This shows the fade out of lots of celebrated ECD programs.
Securing Funding: How 28 Leading Nonprofits Secured Funding To Increase Their Reach And Impact
This report looks at the funding models of a bunch of big nonprofits, including a few from our portfolio like Healthy Learners, VillageReach, Bridges to Prosperity, Last Mile Health, FES, One Acre Fund, StrongMinds, and VisionSpring. Key finding: scaling works best when governments fund or adopt the solution—not just the nonprofit. If government is your payer at scale, focus on getting them to pay.
There Just Isn't Enough Money
But here’s the kicker: governments in Sub-Saharan Africa will not be able to provide quality public services until national economies grow. They’ll need a lot more money if they are going to be able to take more solutions to scale. Broad-based economic growth is the engine that drives improvement in public services, and development outcomes in general.
The Global Prosperity Institute
The Africa Gap
The special report in The Economist this week is full of harrowing graphs like the one below on the widening economic gap between Africa and the rest of the world.
Africa in 2025
There’s some good news, though: many African economies are on track to grow faster than the global average. The brilliant Ken Opalo gives his perspective on how this year will see several African countries consolidate their return to a growth trajectory in the aftermath of COVID, even as security challenges in the Horn and Sahel endure.
IMF projections of fastest growing economies in 2025.
New Additions to Mulago’s Portfolio
We’ve added 6 remarkable organizations to our portfolio. We’re betting on them taking their solutions to scale. You should too.
When kids fall behind in math, they tend to stay behind—forever. Darsel has developed a smart, text-based math chatbot to catch kids up. Kids receive math questions by text that are tailored to their level and get help when they get stuck.
Too many women in India never get to see a gynecologist. Pinky Promise uses an AI-powered app to give women of all incomes instant access to private, high-quality, empathetic gynecological care.
Kids should be happy. But too many kids in India, and across the world, are too stressed to learn. Labhya addresses this with daily, standalone well-being classes in public schools. The classes use guided mindfulness exercises, engaging stories, and reflective group activities, to help kids learn more, and be happier.
Invasive fish farming has ruined most of Africa’s Great Lakes. Tanganyika Blue uses native-species aquaculture to protect the biggest surviving lake — Lake Tanganyika. They breed native fish and use best-in-class aquaculture practices. They build markets for their fish, and support smallholder fish farmers with training and inputs, to keep invasive species out.
Modern monoculture farming has seriously damaged land in India. Farmers for Forests use nature based payments to create biodiverse farmland. They provide farmers with saplings, training, and inputs. Then they monitor the farmland with drones that record tree species, health, and growth. With that data they verify carbon sequestration and unlock payments to farmers.
A lot of land sits idle in Africa because farmers lack the resources and incentives to invest in their land. Furthermore, over generations land gets increasingly subdivided leading to tiny acreages that make it nearly to impossible to make a decent living. Cinch unlocks farm productivity with mosaic agriculture: they lease fragmented plots from smallholders and aggregate the land into larger, more productive operations.
And Finally…
Comments