I have attached my most recent comments below – but some of this will be out of context if you don't read all of the posts. Happy Reading!

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I AGREE! 90 women or 900 women would (or will!) be MUCH better. We need to invest in Rachel and in Keokjay, because she, and people like her, are not the first ones to jump up and down and wave their hand when people throw investment carrots in front of them. They are skeptical of scale for the sake of scale, because they value quality over quantity. They don't want to turn into the filter company which is scaling, and producing cleanER water, but not the MOST clean water possible. Some times, like in that case, losing a little quality for the sake of quantity is NOT worth the trade off.

I agree, we do need to find ways to invest in organizations who can reach more people, in more places, faster. But, just like when I worked for a consulting firm with a management team who would over commit to impossible feats just to get a client, there are social enterprises trying to scale “because the money is there”, “because people want to invest in them”, because they “sold out of everything on their site so they better find ways to get more up there.” Too often, when the demand for our work is increased, we all try to increase what we can supply when perhaps we should be sitting tight and growing at the scale where we can keep quality in check.

This happens in development work ALL the time. I met with a hotel here in Cambodia which allows their guests to “help poor people” by picking from a list of things they can donate (food, school supplies, a well, a house, etc). When I asked how they decide what projects to support, they said the do so by what the clients want to buy. They want to buy this person a house, or they want to fund 200 wells with their name on it. A hotel or an NGO or a person who will allow their development projects' scale and scope to be dictated by the funders' demands is looking to scale for the sake of scale, often at the expense of quality. This is the same as a social venture taking funding because it's on the table – a micro-finance organization frantically seeking out more places to give loans because more people want to fund them – a voluntourism program looking for more places to put English teachers and begging NGOs to take them because that is what people are looking to pay for. It's backwards!

YES, let's invest in scale and scope and more people and more numbers… but ONLY if they can be tied with more impact! Dilution due to scale in the social venture world can cause harm AND can take support away from the great leaders who are growing more slowly because they believe that quality is the most important part of their work. They are committed to changing lives. They are not willing to dilute the “social” side of what they do.

The “other water filter company”, the one not using the silver, is not really “social-washing”, shall we call it. They ARE producing filters which produce water which is MUCH cleaner than what comes out of the pumps and taps. They just aren't producing the CLEANEST water, because in order to do so, they would have had smaller margins and perhaps had to scale slower than the big funding organizations would have liked. Maybe the first group wouldn't reach “1 million people in three years” – maybe it would take 10. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to them because they are more realistic or afraid of diluting their quality. We should though, as you imply, help them to consider other ways to scale which will keep the quality they are looking for. Our carrots can’t be “we will give you money if you prove you can reach more people.” They should be “we will give you money if you prove you are committed to quality and we will help you find ways to reach more people while keeping that quality intact.”

In regards to your comment, please let me know if I am making too many assumptions here, but I suppose that when you wrote that your social mission is to “help microfinance institutions reach 100 million new clients over the next 10 years through the strategic use of technology” it might also be implied that you not only want to help bring loans to 100 million new clients, but you want to help them reach 100 million new clients with “high impact” loans, yes? Is it fair to say that you want to further the Grameen initiative which isn't just about “giving out more loans” but giving out the right loans to the right people which help improve people's lives? Loans which result in foreclosures or repossessions or micro loans to buy TV's for family homes here in Cambodia (which tend not to pay themselves back, though there is always someone willing to lend that person more money to pay back the original micro loan) are not the types of loans I think you are hoping will be include in the 100 million new clients.

Of course we have to accept that their will be failures and less successful areas of our work, but we don't set out to achieve those. Might it be fair to say that, for all of the quantitative numbers put out as goals by organizations, the ones aligning their actions with achieving “quality” results as they scale are the ones we should look to partner with? To see if an organization is really focusing on impact, we don't want to know that they are building 1000 schools, helping 100 million people access micro-finance loans, delivering training to every primary school teacher, etc. Schools don't teach kids. Loans don't help people. Poor training can be useless. We need to get to the CORE reasons we do the work that we do. From an outsiders perspective and from speaking to some Grameen staff, it looks to me like Grameen is not focused on giving loans, but improving lives. The CORE reason that Grameen and some other MFIs are successful (and by successful, I don't mean making the most money nor reaching the most people, but successfully IMPROVING LIVES) appears to me to be because you all recognize that loans DON'T change lives. People do. Loans can put a person more in dept and make their situation worse, so Grameen and others train their MFI employees to thoroughly vet clients, to explain the implications of loans, and to support and connect borrowers to resources which will make THEM successful. Not their loans, not the bottom line of the MFIs (though of course it does impact that), but their LIVES. You are working hard each day to offer people access to a tool which they can use to change their own lives, yes?

I wish this was the case with all social ventures, NGOs, and foundations, but a lot of times, once people set quantitative goals, they forget the CORE reasons for their work and instead work towards the numbers they have declared that they are setting out to achieve. We partnered with an organization who at one point told us to “deliver the items and take a photo, we don't care if the training is done or if the project is ready, but we need proof for the donor that it exists by the end of the month”. They are aiming to be in more and more towns and provinces ut I can assure you, they are not aligning their actions with improving many lives, just reaching useless self-made metrics. And, as we all know, they are not alone.

I intended my post to be a call to remind us all to FOCUS ON IMPACT! Your work and the work of Grameen overall is not and will not be successful because you focus on reaching more people or giving out more loans. You all will continue to be successful because you all focus your actions on improving lives, and by doing so, you will continue to make sure that the loans you give out to more and more people are primed to do just that.

Thanks for the work that you do! I appreciate that you responded to this blog post. Thank you as well for the link to the Hybrid Organization Summit. It sounds like there are a lot of others who share similar ideas!

Hybrid organizations while a complex structure are key to successfully driving a social venture. This past June we participated in a Hybrid Organization Summit lead by the Mozilla Foundation. Check out what was discussed and who attended here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Hybrid:Summit:Agenda

Edward Cable
Mifos Initiative
@mifos

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