Mulago

Nice to see Nick Kristof discover Muso and co-founder / Mulago fellow Ari Johnson. As Kristof says, Muso is "a triumph of public health nerdiness."

Fundraising for social impact is hard. And bad news bears: it doesn’t get (much) easier as your organization grows. Even when your solution is at scale, most organizations continue to need $ to support their doer. I’m thrilled to have been a small part of Spring Impact’s new report Securing Nonprofit Funding - which explores the funding models that enabled 28 leading non-profits to increase their reach and impact - including a number of Mulago rockstars like Healthy Learners, Village Reach, Bridges to Prosperity, Last Mile Health, Foundation For Ecological Security (FES), One Acre Fund, StrongMinds & VisionSpring. Doers and Funders should check out the study for insights into securing funding for scale: https://bit.ly/3O9aifN If you’d like to dive deeper, you can also join Spring Impact for a webinar on 5 December here: https://bit.ly/3UQHyfy Shout out to the awesome Spring Impact team Amy Ragsdale and Alice Metcalf! #WhoPaysForScale #FundingScale #ResearchReport #NonprofitFunding #SecuringNonProfitFunding

Just published by Last Mile Health and Integrate Health: our gender equity Framework for Action, with 16 recommendations equipping governments and partners to build a gender-responsive community health workforce where women #CHWs are safe, supported, and fairly compensated. Women make up 70% of the community health workforce—but they face unequal pay, risks to their safety, and limited opportunities for advancement. For the women who deliver lifesaving care in the world's most vulnerable communities, this must change. Join us in our work to build a future where a gender equal community health workforce is the reality: https://bit.ly/womenCHWs

In the spring, I wrote a piece called “Big Bet Bummer.” Mostly it was about the “funding cliff,” the thing that happens when big bet-driven dreams meet current funding realities. Instead of a series of eight-figure grants fueling a march to glory, leaders found themselves unwinding grand plans and laying off hard-won hires. In the aftermath of that piece, a lot of people thought I was opposed to the whole idea of big bets. Not at all. I just think we got some things wrong on the first go-round. It doesn’t have to be that way, and I think we’re at a point where we can turn a bummer into a bonanza. I have a new formula for big bet (or any big windfall) success and it’s this: *???????????? ??????’???? ???????? ?????? ??????.* Why? Well, that’s the experience of 90 percent of recipients so far. But the more important reason is that the “only-one” scenario will nudge you toward the optimal use of all that dough. Big bet money is your chance to escape a linear relationship between money and impact. Mostly, this means a big shift from direct delivery—from doing it yourself—to the ?????????????????????? ?????? ???????????????? ???? ????????????, ?????????? ???? ???????? “??????????-????-??????????:” Governments, NGOs, or businesses. That transition to the doer-at-scale is the central and essential driver of the “?????? ??????????” from linear to exponential impact, but there are other necessary, intertwined contributors. The most important are: - ???????????? ?????? ?????????? to make it better, simpler, and cheaper.? - ???????????????????? ????????????-????-??????????—mostly Big Aid and governments—to drive all that doing.?? - ?????????????? ?????? ???????????????? ???? ???????? to lower transaction costs, extend reach, and improve outcomes. - ???????????????????? ?????? ???????????? ?????????????? that pave the way to scale. - Finding various ways to recruit allies and create coalitions for ???????????????????? ????????????. Read the full piece for how to turn a one time score into an impact jackpot with some examples of how some organizations in our portfolio —Food For Education, Muso, Last Mile Health, Living Goods, Amani Global Works , Integrate Health, and Healthy Learners — are using big bet money to drive the ?????? ?????????? to exponential impact.

? NEW RAINER FELLOW ? Utkarsh Saxena is the founder of Adalat AI. They use AI to speed up justice in Indian courts. The India judicial system is overwhelmed by a backlog of 50 million cases, each taking an average of 12 years to be resolved. Many languish in prisons simply waiting for their cases to start. Bottlenecks in legal transcription and translation are a big part of the problem. Adalat AI provides AI-powered legal translation and transcription to end judicial delay. Their model is expertly trained in Indian vernacular and legal jargon. It offers near-real-time transcription and translation in multiple regional languages, converting voice to text with ease. With secure encryption in place, Adalat AI ensures that all confidential legal data remains protected. They're also trialing the solution in Ghana next month. There are a lot of justice systems across the world with similar backlogs to India! Utkarsh Saxena is uniquely suited to lead Adalat AI. He was a practicing lawyer and litigated India’s recent same sex marriage case. He was also a clerk on India's supreme court. Before that he was an economist with the World Bank and several governments. He is soon to get his PhD from Oxford with a thesis on judicial backlogs.

Thrilled to share the IDinsight RCT of our Luminos Fund Liberia program, now open access in Education Economics: https://lnkd.in/epc-7fMg. The study showed children in our program learn in just 1 year, 90% of what the average Liberian learns in their entire education! An amazing story of excellence, impact, and equity at scale. Excellence: "Children in the treatment group were able to read 4.5x as many words per minute and complete twice as many addition and subtraction problems at endline compared to children in the control group." Impact: "Treatment effects were between 0.5 SD and 2.1 SD for all reading and numeracy subtasks, and specifically were 1.6 SD for reading simple words and 0.6 SD for addition and subtraction." Equity: "Effects were similar in size for girls vs boys, younger vs older children, children who were previously enrolled in school vs dropouts, and children who started with lower baseline learning levels vs higher baseline learning levels."

So, so good! Anyone in or adjacent to the so-called impact investing should read this - meaning, among others, every single attendee of SOCAP. This distinction between an aligned investor and an impact investor is super important. Mulago basically takes on all of the SOMEBODY roles Sharon is talking about. As such, our single biggest risk is the dearth of real impact investors in the markets where we work. We all thought we’d see a lot more impact minded funders willing to take more risk or accept lower returns to make good things happen that would not happen otherwise. Instead we got a small number of investors with agonizingly slow due diligence processes, looking for unrealistic rates of return. if you’re looking for market rates of return, we wish you the best- but please, call it something else. It’s astonishing that i’m still hearing the same self-serving nonsense in 2024 as I did in SOCAP year one.

?? NEW RAINER FELLOW ?? Safiya Husain co-founded Karya. They get fair pay to people in India for phone-based gig work to train AI. For most of the poorest people in India, at current growth rates, it will take generations for them to reach India’s mean income level. There’s a growing number of accessible data jobs, especially for AI training, that could speed this up, but most of the jobs are very low wage. Data workers make cents per hour for datasets that are often sold for hundreds of dollars. Karya gets fair pay for data workers who capture AI training data. They recruit low-skill workers and assess their digital literacy. Workers earn and learn, with task complexity increasing as they gain experience, thanks to predictive mobile technology. More complex tasks mean higher pay. Through Karya’s digital platform, workers complete tasks remotely via mobile phones, breaking down barriers to employment. Once workers earn a life changing amount of money, they graduate, ready for new jobs with their skills and experience. Safiya Husain is the Chief Impact Officer and Co-Founder of Karya. She grew up in Central Asia and has a background in humanitarian work and research. Before Karya, she co-founded two companies in India and worked as a research consultant for International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and the United Nations. Later, at STIR Education, she led their monitoring and evaluation with the design of some big impact research projects.

?? NEW HENRY FELLOW ?? Solange Bandiaky-Badji leads the Rights and Resources Initiative. They're a big coalition of organizations that work to make human rights central to conservation, globally. At Mulago, we’re bought into the evidence that secure land rights for indigenous people lead to better conservation outcomes, and there are a lot of local organizations already driving this work. We’re also convinced that well-run coalitions can amplify impact and unlock global funding to accelerate progress. The Rights and Resources Initiative is a global secretariat of members who work to secure land rights for indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, and local groups. Rights and Resources Initiative identifies critical landscapes where there is a pressing need and opportunity for change, and partner with local members to co-author tenure reports and policy recommendations. Rights and Resources Initiative advocates for pro-community tenure policies, increased capacity, and funding shifts. They also identify, train, and place fellows—researchers, academics, and practitioners—to strengthen systems and drive policy change. Solange Bandiaky-Badji is the President and Coordinator of Rights and Resources Initiative. With a background in environmental justice, she previously led their Africa program. Before that, Solange worked with Partners Global on access to justice and peacebuilding, and served as a regional expert on gender and climate change for the Africa Adaptation Programme. She holds a Master’s in Environment and Philosophy and has a PhD that focused on decentralized natural resources governance in Senegal.

Who did your website and brand? Did you love them? Share them with our Mulago fellows. We do a ton of work with all our fellows on design and comms — and they always ask us for referrals on how to turn that work into an awesome website and brand. We'd love to have a kick-ass list for them. Know any best-in-class agencies that can help them? They don't have to be social impact focused but it helps. I'm thinking folks like: - Fifty & Fifty and Javan Van Gronigen: A digital agency for purpose driven brands. - MIGHTY ALLY and Kevin L. Brown: Build brands that maximize funding. - Brand By Boudica and Lauren Jones: Exquisite branding for impact-focused female leaders. - BrandTheChange.org and Anne Miltenburg: Tools and community to use the power of brand to amplify solutions. - Lightful and Vinay Nair: digital skills and tools for storytelling and fundraising. I'm sure there are more great options out there — please drop them in the comments ?? Cheers!