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Aflatoun: Child Savings International is laying the groundwork to roll out its SROI-based impact assessment framework, which it is calling “AQIS” (Aflatoun’s Quality assurance and Impact Assessment System), and held the first meeting of its Impact Advisory Committee a couple weeks ago.

The meeting was hosted by Greg Dees at Duke, chaired by John Elkington, and included committee members with tremendous experience and skill, including our SROI Guide co-author, Peter Scholten.
The attached outcomes report from the meeting summarizes the discussion and agreed next steps as Aflatoun prepares to roll out a system for measuring its impact as it scales its model to a targeted 100 countries. An excerpt of the key takeaways:

• At the heart of the discussion was the balance between “doing it” and “studying it”, and between scale and quality. The committee has given concrete input to find this balance
• The committee suggested to combine several approaches, including SROI, qualitative research and randomized evaluation, aiming to create a symbiotic strategy
• This combined strategy aims to answer both at organizational and external demands
• The committee has discussed strategic organizational partnerships for a sustainable process of AQIS. Members agree that it is a process of constant learning.

Aflatoun works with schools and other partners to teach the world’s poorest children the discipline of saving, and to build their sense of themselves as capable and responsible citizens of their communities.  Stay tuned for more as they begin rolling this out!

This week I’ve had three tantalizing conversations with totally unrelated people about their ingenious ideas for how to bring quality healthcare, renewable energy, and units of social impact to market at a price and via a delivery mechanism huge percentages of the world population can afford.

In two cases, these were people who have themselves made a few or more million dollars by innovating new products in their chosen fields (medicine, finance), and now they’re shifting their focus to entrepreneurial good-doing in both unrelated fields (renewable energy) and related (creating new exchanges, but this time it’s units of social value being traded for money). In the third the fellow’s motivation is partly that he wants to make a lot of money– but he wants to do it by transforming the inaccessible way healthcare is delivered in the US and in many other parts of the world. In every case these conversations were with men in their early 40s. As they get further along I will describe what they’re doing.
There are a lot of things about the relatively unfettered capitalism in the US and the resulting income gap that concern me, but I also see peoples’ desire to do something meaningful and genuinely innovative flourishing as a result of the wealth they might make or have already made in this system.

My goal is to make information about the negative and positive externalities of all products and companies tangible, so that the natural inclination of people to do good for both themselves and others can be catalyzed through the free market, rather than suppressed as it has been in the past in all too many cases. It’s deeply encouraging that these entrepreneurs are probably in the company now of thousands if not tens of thousands of other super smart, capable people, who have discovered that the capital market can be an engine for good, and they’re making it happen.