Q&A: Mulago Foundation chief on why he's done with gobbledygook

SAN FRANCISCO — At the annual Big Bang Philanthropy happy hour at the Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco, social entrepreneurs working in areas such as conservation, education, and health care perform limericks. They are asked to capture the work they do in five-line stanzas that following the strict rhyming scheme of AABBA, and the crowd goes wild with laughter and applause. While this group of funders and entrepreneurs are serious about poverty, they do not take themselves too seriously. “I have the attention span of a gnat and I think it gets very boring for people to get presentation after presentation,” said Kevin Starr, managing director of the Mulago Foundation, a private foundation based in Silicon Valley that finds and funds organizations focused on the basic needs of the very poor, and is also a member organization of Big Bang Philanthropy. Social entrepreneurship should be fun, he said. Yet Starr still has his eyes set on “impact at scale,” something he mentions often in his writing and speaking. Asked by Devex what he means by that, Starr stuck out his finger and swiped it upward in the shape of a steep curve, explaining he is referring to a kind of dramatic growth. Starr also spoke to Devex about how he chooses his investments, and the Mulago Foundation’s support of Bridge International Academies, a network of private schools that began in Kenya, has expanded to Liberia, and is at the center of a debate over the role of private education in developing countries. The conversation here has been edited for length and clarity. At the Mulago Foundation, you’ve supported organizations ranging from One Acre Fund to Inyenyeri to Last Mile Health, but you say that what unites them all is real impact at a big scale. How do you define “impact at scale,” and what do you see as the different pathways toward this? We [at the Mulago Foundation] think of social entrepreneurs as people who have a solution to a big problem, a scalable idea for how to solve it, and want to build an organization to deliver it to scale. We kind of live and die by this. In other words, we get in [to fund an organization] when we think this can happen; we stay in when we think it’s still going to happen; and we get out when we don’t buy it anymore. “Grim determination gets really tiresome. Somebody who’s like a pig in mud, I love that, and I want to invest in those people.” --— Kevin Starr, managing director, Mulago Foundation We ask the people we fund: “Well if impact is here [at a certain point on the chart], and if the outcome you’re looking for is there, then what are all the different things people need to do differently to get there?” We kind of screen for whether they’ve created the conditions so it can happen and the motivations so it will happen. One of the things that we really emphasize is the question: “Who’s your doer at scale?” And for us, there are four answers. There’s you; there’s lots of NGOs; there’s lots of businesses; or there’s government. If you’re a big business or a big nonprofit, usually at some point you’re replicating via others. And it turns out a lot of people say they’re going to do that, they need to do that, but they haven’t thought that much about how to do that. Once you’ve got a product that’s really ready to scale, you’ve got to package that product so somebody else could do it, and make it as easy as possible for someone else to do it. At our last board meeting we gave all the organizations we thought were really focused on replicating via others an extra $100,000 to say, “Hey, we think this is awesome and we want to support you in it.” Who’s your doer at scale? Who’s your payer at scale? Do you know how to get there? If you’re changing a system, fine. If you’re not, fine. Just get to scale. While you expect social entrepreneurs to be able to answer these kinds of questions, you also expect them to be able to capture their missions in eight words. Why is that? We needed to get to a crisp understanding of what the hell people were setting out to do. And so we wanted to know what they were trying to do first, before we tried to get into how they were doing it. And most mission statements just pissed me off because I was trying to wade through a bunch of gobbledygook to try to figure out what they did, and often I was unsuccessful. And when we can take people through that exercise, we usually get there. We get to some crisp statement. And if we can’t, it’s just kind of the end of the conversation. The eight-word mission statement we ask for is a verb, a target population, and a big picture outcome. You know, “Get African farmers out of extreme poverty,” or “Save reefs in Micronesia.” It makes it clear where you’re working and the scale that you imagine yourself getting to. And it’s really specific about the target population. And that’s the thing that often we really want to press people on. This work should be fun. When I talk to doers, if I don’t get a sense they’re having fun, I’m kind of skeptical that they’re going to last the course. Grim determination gets really tiresome. Somebody who’s like a pig in mud, I love that, and I want to invest in those people. Can you tell me more about your perspective on Bridge International Academies? The Mulago Foundation supported Bridge early on, representing the organization’s only move so far in private education. Now, Partnership Schools for Liberia is bringing in private contractors including Bridge to run public schools. Recently, a randomized control trial of the first year of the program was published, which found mixed results. One concern among evaluators was that high levels of spending per pupil among some operators, particularly Bridge, might not be sustainable. You’re now working with PSL to raise money for the second year. Can you expand on why this is an organization and a partnership you’re backing? We invested in Bridge, and then we were kind of friends with them, so we would just check in and see where it went. We were super impressed with a lot of the progress. We didn’t quite understand what a lot of the critiques were about. It is complicated, but it seemed like a really high-quality product. The bummer was, as cheap as it was, it wasn’t getting to the poorest of the poor. So when I got in touch with George Werner, the minister of education in Liberia, it seemed like this was our chance to get that product to the poorest of the poor. All our current education investments are to improve the performance of public schools. Now, in trying to deliver the Bridge and private operator product through public schools that are free and serving the poorest of the poor, it’s like we’re just doing how to make public schools better. I was concerned about putting a randomized control trial into the mix when you had a bunch of inexperienced operators, but that’s what happened, so here we go. And I think the first year was great — everybody had high costs because it was the first year, and some of the people performed better than others, but Bridge ended up showing that the schools they were operating offered the equivalent of an entire extra year of schooling [compared to primary schools not included in the PSL]. Now I’m part of raising money for the second year, but the controversy keeps getting fed by people who like controversy and call it a controversy. “The controversy [over Bridge International Academies] keeps getting fed by people who like controversy and call it a controversy.” --— Kevin Starr, managing director, Mulago Foundation It’s super hard to raise money before you get the results with all the sniping going on, but now we’ve got results, and it’s way easier. And with the prospect of results-based financing in the third year, you tell second year potential funders that and it’s really encouraging. It’s scary to put money in when you don’t have any idea what’s supposed to happen the next year. I never intended to be in the middle of the fundraising effort, and I will tell you that it’s really good for a funder to do that. It’s kind of like when I was a doctor and the few times I had to go to the doctor, it was illuminating. I feel kind of the same way now. I have a sense of what they’re up against and in this instance a lot of that has really sucked. There are just people who are really angry and they don’t seem to really grasp it and they spread nonsense. I know some funders who, by nature of the organizations funding them, have kind of a responsibility to stay out of controversy and as long as this controversy is [surviving] on artificial respiration that’s going to continue to be the case. Others just need to step up. I report to a board. If I screw up, that’s a problem. If I honestly represent the risk to them and the upside and they say yes and I keep on it and I’m doing my job and telling them what’s going on, well that’s how it’s supposed to work. So personally, there’s not a lot of risk in this for me and we’re just making a typical high-risk, high-reward investment. We do that everywhere all the time. So it doesn’t take a bunch of courage on my part. This is awesome. This could end up with a huge payoff. It’s what we do. In addition to directing the Mulago Foundation, you’re also involved with Big Bang Philanthropy and ImpactMatters, an organization that conducts impact audits. You’ve said you want to see more of a culture of measurement in philanthropy. What will it take for social entrepreneurs to measure not only for the sake of reporting back to donors, but also to do their work more effectively? The social sector isn’t really functioning like a market for impact and the subset of that market involved with social entrepreneurs isn’t really functioning any better in that regard. There aren’t enough funders committed to the notion of impact and knowledgeable enough about it and executing on that. At least in the social entrepreneurship sector you have a lot of business people involved who think of impact as the analog of profit, and it makes the analysis much easier. But until we become a market for impact, we’re going to be sort of marginal players and we won’t really know who to advance and they won’t have the resources to advance. “There aren’t enough funders committed to the notion of impact and knowledgeable enough about it and executing on that.” --— Kevin Starr, managing director, Mulago Foundation Big Bang Philanthropy is one way of trying to work from the core outward to accomplish some of this. All the members are people who are interested in the needs of the poor and impact at scale. We don’t try to dictate how anybody funds, but we co-fund a lot and we share due diligence and we share leads; we share impressions and ideas. It’s worked really well to get a lot of people funding in the same direction and it’s moved a lot of money to a lot of organizations. We think it’d be great if there were lots of baby Big Bangs that didn’t necessarily have to refer to that silly name. It is an easy model to imitate. Funders need to be accountable. And they don’t need to be accountable just for how they treat people or how they manage their money. They need to be accountable for impact. I don’t know quite how to get there yet, but we’ve got to get there, so I’m looking for ideas. Read more Devex coverage on philanthropy.