What if We Redefined Scale in International Development?
As the Chief External Relations Officer at Ubuntu Education Fund, I spend most of my time fundraising. Over the years, I have wrestled with my own inconvenient truth: for many donors, thinking about small, prudent steps forward is just not exciting.
We spent our initial years struggling to impress donors and build enough credibility to sustain the organization. We became fixated on output, overselling our impact to supporters. But as we gained experience, we began to understand not only how to save a life, but how to transform it. To achieve that, we made a difficult decision: rather than expand geographically, we chose to focus on depth, measuring success in terms of outcomes rather than outputs.
Yet transforming one child’s life at a time is tedious. It feels excruciatingly slow to most funders. As a non-profit, we depend on a wide range of donors. While they all have different priorities and guidelines, almost all require a good deal of convincing that sustainable development is expensive and time-consuming. Most don’t believe that impactful non-profits require investments in infrastructure and overhead. They don’t want to fund a program with high costs per child as it is deemed inefficient.
We have lost many donors. In 2010, management consultants McKinsey and Company analyzed the impact of Ubuntu’s most resource-intensive interventions. It found these long-term commitments generated a greater impact than any of our outreach program. Yet, after a three-year strategy based on these successful approaches, our funding decreased by 22%. In a recent meeting, a donor told me: “We really love and believe in what you do, but our board wants a more low-hanging fruit.”
Such perspectives, the rise of rating agencies and the heightened focus on impact investing, has generated a push for bigger, faster, and cheaper. Non-profits are forced to increase their targets, expand their models, and minimize costs. Program have become output-oriented. Numbers are inflated. Long-term investments are abandoned. To compete, organizations oversell the vulnerability of their beneficiaries while conflating one-off interventions with transforming a life.
To illustrate my point, let me share the story of Siphokazi, who at 17 was the head of her household. On a visit to her home in Chris Hani — one of Port Elizabeth’s poorest informal settlements — with one of Ubuntu’s social workers, we found her siblings cowering in the corner. Just an hour earlier, someone had tried to break into their aluminum shack; Ubuntu’s iron gate and lock were the only things that had prevented the intruders.
Protecting their home is just part of a range of services that Ubuntu provides to Siphokazi’s family. We cannot chalk up the success of one service — the efficacy of the burglar bars — to a ‘success story’.
The progress of Siphokazi and her siblings will be a long, slow trek. They will need years of psychosocial support to cope with the loss of their parents, additional repairs to their home, and assistance accessing government services. Siphokazi, in particular, will need intensive interventions to help raise her family and, if she can make it through secondary school, she will face a new series of challenges. Who will care for her family if she attends university? How will she secure a job in a community with an unemployment rate of 80%?
As development workers, we all understand Siphokazi’s situation, the complexity of the reality on the ground. So why do we continue to promote one-off health workshops as lives saved? Why are we counting outputs as success stories?
Because these large numbers make us, and more importantly our donors, feel like we are changing the world.
Progress at Ubuntu often comes slowly, and we have had to accept that we cannot change the world. Yet our model is working. Ubuntu students are now more than twice as likely to complete high school education and, for every $1 that we invest in them, they will earn $8.70 in real earnings over the course of their lives.
Our success stems from this comprehensive approach. We strive to address every facet of poverty, helping 2,000 children attain financial independence and lead healthy lives. Our commitment to children ‘from cradle to career’ gives us the courage to push back against the ‘bigger, faster, and cheaper’ mantra, to acknowledge that progress often comes incrementally, that real change requires sustained and sometimes expensive services. And, most importantly, it lets us redefine success as outcomes rather than single interventions. Who’s with us?
This article was originally published via The Guardian on April 2014.
