amandla. mobi
South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world—80% of the wealth is held by the top 10%. Inequality and poverty remain stubbornly entrenched because leaders are not held to account.
The Idea
Pro-poor Policy Advocacy
Total Investment
850000
Grants
0
Equity/SAFE
0
Debt/Convertible Debt
Funded Since
2022
Geography
Structure
The Mission
Get people justice.
How It Works
amandla.mobi takes a systematic approach to campaigning. They identify high-impact opportunities and design grassroots campaigns that target the relevant decision-makers. If decision-makers still don't deliver, they ratchet up the pressure until they do. Once people are mobilized, they launch new campaigns to build on momentum.
The Dream
Grassroots campaigners in South Africa and beyond win using amandla's systematic tools and methodology.
Why We're In
amandla is the rare campaign organization with a truly systematic approach. They've had some big wins, like increasing social grants, slashing unfair mobile data prices, and making sanitary pads affordable for millions of women. They're serious about replicating the success of their approach: they've launched an open-source platform—called awethu.mobi—that enables others to use amandla's approach to good effect.
The Model
A solution that works and can scale.
Identify
Find the right decision-makers through a systematic power mapping process.
Design
Create a campaign with clear outcomes and actionable, realistic demands, focused on timely issues.
Mobilize
Use the amandla.mobi platform (SMS + website) to organize the community, attract supporters, and run the campaign.
Escalate
If decision-makers don’t deliver, ratchet up non-violent public pressure.
Build
Capitalize on momentum from wins to create additional campaigns.
Potential for Impact at Scale
Mulago uses four criteria to gauge potential for exponential impact. The model must be:
This is about impact. They have five major campaign wins (partial and complete) out of 25 campaigns in the last year 2023-24; 9 campaign wins out of 23 campaigns from 2021-24. These include consequential outcomes like: a 12% drop in sanitary pads price for 15 million women; 30%-50% drop in cost of mobile data for 13 million people ; 5-10 million unemployed people received a ~$20 month social grant over three years; and less sugar in commercially packaged drinks. They have five pillars to align campaigns to as a tool to better set targets and measure results: economic fairness and social welfare, health and food justice, social justice, corporate accountability/transparency and thriving democracy and good governance.
Consequential campaigns are rarely won with a single campaign. For example the Data Must Fall Campaign, getting the price of data to fall (a single campaign demand) meant running multiple campaigns under that collectively contribute to achieving the win. On the awethu.mobi platform, they helped facilitate a campaign the pressure the government to reinstate a youth employment program, resulting in 200,000 new jobs for youth in schools.
This is about scope. South Africa is the most unequal country in the world: 10% of the population owns more than 80% of the wealth, ~18M people live in extreme poverty, and race continues to be a major driver of high inequality. Political pressure campaigns have worked in the past, but recent successes are more narrow in scope. The political environment changes every year, and right now the tide is turning against pro-poor policies.
This is about whether other NGOs can deliver at scale. amandla.mobi has a systematic approach to running high-quality campaigns with a template that is constantly pressure tested by their own team. The awethu.mobi product, their decentralized platform for independent users to design and run campaigns using the amandla methodology, is growing and getting easier to use. They introduced a new mobile messaging based product to to make it more accessible and even easier to use. It’s still early in terms of getting other NGOs to use awethu.mobi independently to run their own campaigns, so we don’t know how easy it is yet.
This is about cost. amandla.mobi is still early in defining a unit cost metric that truly depicts their impact per dollar. Cost per campaign shows how much it generally costs to deliver a campaign but it doesn’t consider wide variability in factors like the length of the campaign, no. of beneficiaries, economic value of impact etc. The cost of the awethu.platform should drop significantly with new tech integrations; start-up costs and bumps rolling it out though makes it hard to tell.
amandla.mobi are in early growth stage.
Our Take
Millions of South Africans benefit from amandla.mobi’s campaigns. Their recipe for designing and running campaigns works when they deliver it; the move to focusing on five areas of impact will hopefully make it easier to measure, though it’s always tough to gauge attribution with political advocacy campaigns. They’re able to calculate the costs of bulk messaging per campaign and are expanding their costing model to include measurement of the cost of escalation. Their replication through awethu.mobi continues to improve with the new tech integration, though that’s taking more time than they thought. The real test will be getting other organizations to use awethu.mobi to run effective campaigns on their own.
Are you a serious funder and want to learn more?
This is just a snapshot of what we know about the organization. If you're an investor or funder that might send some serious dough their way, we're always delighted to share more. Reach out and we'll connect you with the right person on our team.
*this is not monitored for funding requests.
