The Currency of Good Data

Measurement was a hot topic at the Council on Foundations' annual conference last week in Washington D.C. As data and evidence-based decision making continue to wend their way to the center of today's philanthropy conversation, funders and grantees increasingly look to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) for proof of a solution's value and to make programmatic improvements. Rigorous approaches such as Randomized Control Trials are considered the gold standard of impact measurement, and systems like the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) have been developed to standardize social, financial, and environmental performance metrics. Now, networks such as ANDE are encouraging grantees and funders to move beyond standardization and to integrate impact metrics with financial and operational processes, while broadening the collection and distribution of data to benefit an entire ecosystem or society.

Despite these positive trends, M&E is still hard to do well in developing countries. Good information is difficult to obtain, and its collection costs time, effort, and money that many feel would be better spent on direct beneficiaries. Furthermore, many grantees on the ground still struggle with basic evaluations, much less the rigorous M&E systems preferred by many funders. Grantees also frequently need help integrating this data into feedback loops and decision processes in order to make operational improvements.

Practical M&E programs in the developing world means measuring the right indicators with the right approach and the right amount of rigor. For corporate funders and CSR groups, measuring the business value alongside social impact is critical to conveying the full value of programs and ensuring continued financial support. There is an excellent opportunity to share the cost of collecting and analyzing program data with other donors and private sector players. Solid data - particularly on the opaque small-business sector - could help partners improve programs, design products or services, develop strategies, and create effective marketing campaigns. The collaborative approach to development is not new, but the currency of good data has the potential to bring a lot more collaborators into the tent. 

The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown

Ekocenter. Stare at the word for a while and you still might not see the cleverly hidden moniker of one of the world's most ubiquitous brands - Coke. There it is, the first four letters staring in a mirror. Coca-Cola's CEO Muhtar Kent first described the Ekocenter initiative in January, saying it grew out of a partnership with renowned inventor Dean Kamen (of Segway fame), who created the "Slingshot" - an efficient water-purification box capable of purifying enough water for 300 people a year. An Ekocenter is a fully-contained, solar-powered, re-purposed shipping container, equipped with a Slingshot water purifier, an electrical charging station, an Internet access point, refrigerated vaccines, and a few basic necessities - all run by entrepreneurial women in remote locations around the developing world. That's the theory, anyway. The prototype can be seen in Heidelberg, South Africa, and the goal is to deploy 300 more Ekocenters to villages in 20 African and Latin American countries by 2015.

Coca-Cola is working with both public- and private-sector partners, including IBM, Qualcomm, IBM, McCann Health, the Inter-American Development Bank and others to develop and deliver the kiosks. The challenge, well-known by the project partners, is to find the right business model - one that offers a flexible set of tailored products and services, and enough profit to warrant rapid scale. As they fine tune their business model, Coca-Cola can draw from decades of telecenter and cybercafe projects that saw varying degrees of success. These initiatives typically had a narrower range of services - usually telephones and/or internet connectivity - and often followed a franchise model. Many succumbed to the challenges of providing training, support, and security, paying the high cost of telecommunications, or finding long-term economic buyers after the start-up support dried up.

Ekocenters will undoubtedly benefit from the mother company's world-beating distribution system, deep pockets, and the seemingly genuine support of top management. But it's one thing to drop off a case of Coke 500 miles north of Timbuktu, quite another to supply, train, support and protect a scarcely educated woman running the franchise with your logo on it. Coca-Cola and its partners bring enough assets to the Ekocenter initiative to have a fighting chance of success, but finding the right business model is only the first step. The second, third, and fourth step (and every step thereafter) will be committing to that model through ongoing investment, evaluation, improvement, and scale. 

A Case for Strengthening CSR in Emerging Markets

The nongovernmental group World Growth recently released a report entitled "Corporate Social Responsibility: How Global Business is Getting it Wrong in Emerging Markets." The report examines the corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies of nine major international corporations including Nestle, P&G and Unilever. According to the report, the CSR policies of these corporations are disproportionately influenced by developed-world NGOs, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). As a result, their policies often hurt low-income producers, are misaligned with emerging market national development objectives, and promote causes of little value to local people in emerging markets. 

CSR may have once been understood as philanthropy. However, many firms are realizing that giving away a product or service to communities that need them is often a short-term solution to a long-term problem and are examining other models for social and economic development. Companies like Novartis have encouraged supply chain innovation to create profitable new business models that better serve emerging markets in a sustainable manner. Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk recognized how epidemic diseases strain national health systems in markets where it operates. Together with Oxford University, the World Health Organization and Yale University, the pharmaceutical firm spearheaded an international healthcare campaign focused on improving diets and encouraging exercise to fight chronic diseases that it stands to profit from. Rather than giving drugs away, GlaxoSmithKline cut the cost of its products in its poorest markets by providing regulatory and technical support to establish production facilities with local third-party contractors. 

As the above cases demonstrate, CSR efforts in emerging markets can be executed in a profitable and sustainable manner. Firms seeking to improve their CSR programs in emerging markets can focus on improving the delivery of their products or services to make them more accessible, affordable and usable. In addition to discovering new business models, firms seeking to address local problems can engage in partnerships with experts who understand these environments and the needs of customers within them. Mutually beneficial strategic partnerships can also help multinational firms leverage partner core competencies to help gain access to local markets and support operations. When firms consider the impact of their activities from the vantage point of potential emerging market customers and governments, they are better positioned to discover new business models and capture new sources of revenues.