Catalyst fund for impact measurement africa 

The goal of the ANDE Catalyst Fund is to increase the productivity and effectiveness of ANDE members while creating tools and insights that can help the SGB sector as a whole.  

With this challenge fund round, awarded in May 2018, ANDE supported organizations to test measurement tools, frameworks, and analytical approaches, and who are willing to learn from and inform ANDE members based on their experience in order to move impact measurement and management forward for the field as a whole. 

This funding round is generously funded by Department for International Development’s (DFID) Impact Programme.  

This round of the Catalyst Fund funded both collaborative projects based out of ANDE's Learning Labs in East Africa and South Africa, and also individual organizational projects through an open RFP.  

WINNERS ANNOUNCED! 

Learning Lab Winners

B Lab East Africa & Genesis Analytics 

B Lab East Africa and Genesis Analytics will focus on an ecosystem mapping exercise to better understand available tools and frameworks being used in the region, and will develop a platform to disseminate information for practitioners in East Africa. Wherever possible, this information will inform and support the workshop series that will be run in parallel by Acumen.

Acumen 

Acumen Lean Data proposes to facilitate a series of workshops to equip members and attendees with the skills to practically enhance their ability to measure the impact of the work that they do.  Acumen will execute and facilitate four workshops on impact measurement, geared towards social enterprises, NGOs, investors, and donors. The content for all four workshops will work towards achieving the ultimate goal of strengthening the impact measurement ecosystem in East Africa, with a focus on Kenya. We believe it is imperative for local stakeholders and practitioners in the region to be equipped to speak about impact measurement and decide which tools/frameworks they will use.

Genesis Analytics & Impact Amplifier

Genesis Analytics and Impact Amplifier have formed a research consortium to conduct research into the impact measurement and management (IMM) landscape in South Africa. The output of this research will be a detailed and interactive infographic and supplementary guide. The intention is that this output will be hosted on the ANDE website or ANDE Global Metrics webpage, so that the research content is live, interactive and accessible to all ANDE members. 

Individual Winners

CapitalPlus Exchange 

Create and pilot practical tools and methodologies for financial institutions to use to collect, analyze and report social impact data from SMEs they finance, focusing on institutions providing credit to low-fee private schools in sub-Saharan Africa. The approach will be designed for replication in other financial institutions and social enterprise sectors.

Engineers without Borders Canada 

Gaps and challenges remain in collecting high-quality impact data and insights, most acutely at the seed-stage of enterprise development. Engineers Without Borders Canada is seeking funding from the ANDE Catalyst Fund for Impact Measurement for a project with Dr. Donna M. Mertens, a transformative evaluation (TE) expert, and one of our seed-stage investees that will explore and test if and how TE improves social impact measurement. Outputs from this evaluation research include a detailed and replicable case study of our transformative evaluation, a meta-evaluation report outlining the potential and challenges with TE in impact investing, and an applied toolkit on using TE to deepen outcome evaluations. Through dissemination of these outputs, we will help entrepreneurs, investors, and other evaluation experts add rigor to their impact measurement approach, ultimately helping de-risk seed-stage enterprises and catalyze the growth and strength of the SGB sector.

Partners in Food Solutions   
Partners in Food Solutions (PFS) seeks to use Catalyst funding to move from impact measurement to impact management, using information to make key performance decisions, not only for ourselves but for our clients. At the end of this project, PFS will have a better understanding of what SGBs want to see regarding outcome level data, the challenges clients face in collecting it, in what format it is most useful to be received and how best to set them up to further capture this information in the future. Specifically, PFS will have 15-20 individual high-potential client reports that outline the impact PFS projects had on their businesses, and a greater understanding of data collection and analytical challenges faced by those clients on a day to day basis.

The ANDE Catalyst Fund was launched in 2009 with $1,000,000 in seed funding from The Lemelson Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Shell Foundation. Since then, more than $2.5 million has been disbursed to 39 member organizations and the grant-making facility has been replenished with funds from Citi Foundation, MasterCard Worldwide, and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women, and S&P Global.

Special thanks to this round's sponsor: DFID's Impact Programme