research

Where do you live - in a house, an apartment, a condo, a dorm room? Is that an easy question to answer? If so, you’re in the minority worldwide - especially in a country like Pakistan, where more than 30 percent of the population lives in squatter settlements and an even larger percentage is effectively shut out of the home ownership market due to speculation, land prices and a difficult bureaucracy.

Affordable housing - and how best to provide it for low-income customers - is something Acumen Fund has been exploring for years now - especially in Pakistan. Along the way, our team has discovered some things that work, and many more that don’t. While these learnings made for great intra-team discussions and e-mails, we felt it was time to start sharing what we know - and what we don’t know - with our sector at large.

Along these lines, be sure to check out the latest additions to our Knowledge Center. Aun Rahman, Pakistan Country Director, and I recently completed a paper entitled The Challenges of Expanding Saiban: Scaling Affordable Housing for Low-Income Communities in Pakistan. In it, we describe how an entrepreneur named Tasneem Siddiqui has extended land title and housing to tens of thousands of previously un-served families. We also explore how Saiban - an Acumen Fund investee - is expanding into different geographies and the early lessons learned from this expansion.

The Pakistan team is also hard at work behind the camera. We now have two new videos to share, “My Story: Jawad Aslam, Class of 2008 Fellow” and “From Squatters to Homeowners”. Both videos follow Acumen Fund 2008 Fellow Jawad Aslam as he works to help build a community at Khuda Ki Basti 4, outside Lahore.

Editor’s note: New contributor Brad Presner is Acumen Fund’s Metrics Manager. In this role, he manages the development of the Pulse social metrics platform and helps define Acumen Fund’s performance assessment strategy. He joined Acumen Fund in July, 2008, having worked closely with the Pulse team while an employee of Google.org. Brad holds a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

By Brad Presner

Last October, Brian Trelstad and I were fortunate enough to be invited to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offices in Seattle. As a part of their own processes for engaging in thoughtful and actionable measurement, the Impact Planning and Improvement (IPI) Group brought together a set of leading thinkers to help inform their own thinking and potentially change their approach to measuring social impact at the Foundation.

Acumen Fund’s contribution to this meeting was a discussion of our BACO Methodology., an exercise whereby our Portfolio team compares the estimated social output of a potential investment we are considering with that of the best available charitable option that addresses the same issue. For us, this process helps us ascertain where philanthropic capital will be most effective – whether invested in the social entrepreneurs we seek to provide with patient capital or with an alternative charitable vehicle.

I think it’s safe to say that Brian and I got as much out of this meeting as we contributed. We were humbled to be in the room with peers such as Jed Emerson ofSROI fame and his former colleagues at REDF; Paul Brest of the Hewlett Foundation; Michael Weinstein from Robin Hood; Kat Rosqueta of the Center for High Impact Philanthropy, Sara Olsenof SVT Group, and others from banks, think tanks and consulting firms. The collection of thoughtful, engaged leaders was truly inspiring.

A little more than halfway through the meeting, Paul Brest made a point that all eight of the methodologies being discussed that day could be boiled down to a similar fundamental goal—calculating the expected return as a function of how you value the benefit of your program, weighted by probability of success, as a ratio of the cost of your program:

Expected Return = (Benefit X Probability of Success) / Cost

This keen observation underscores both the inherently simple goal—how much good came out of what we put in—and an abundantly complex set of questions that all eight of us in the room had endeavored to answer for ourselves – namely, how do you accurately estimate the benefit of your work?

I don’t think we came away with any definitive answers. In fact, the only thing we seemingly could agree on was that there was no single “right” answer (and that it may not even be desirable for there to be). But what this convening really highlighted is that this conversation is happening more and more. At conferences, in team meetings at Foundations, in phone calls among peers – we are seeing a convergence in the field around what we at Acumen like to think of as “cost effective cost effectiveness”. While our methods may never be the same and the metrics we track may differ, the conversations about how and why we seek to assess impact are happening with more frequency and greater depth. And while it will likely take us many more years to get there, we are light years ahead of a time not long ago when the conversations weren’t even happening.

We encourage you to take a look at the recently posted “Measuring and/or Estimating Social Value Creation Report” put together by Melinda Tuan and sponsored by the Gates Foundation. We are grateful to have been included in their process and hope that in some small way, we were able to contribute to our shared goal of advancing the field towards more cost effective cost effectiveness.

Deepti shushed me; gave me the look – let’s get started, she was trying to say. I kept talking anyway. Then Abigail shushed me; same look. I still kept talking. Finally, Hali gave me a nod – the presentation was starting. I finally shut up, and politely asked Jason Rzepka from Pop!Tech to come in and have a seat. Through the shushings, Jason and I were using the last few minutes of pre-event networking to catch up on his work – a yearly conference held in Maine. But neither he nor I had come to Gibson Dunn’s 48th floor offices (sidenote: thanks to Gibson Dunn for letting us use their amazing space) to talk about Maine. We were there for a presentation by the returning class of Acumen Fund Fellows.

Why would someone from Pop!Tech – and about 50 others – be interested in the Acumen Fund Fellows? Well, in Pop!Tech’s case, they’ve just launched their own Social Innovation Fellows program. So Jason joined us – along with representatives of the financial, non-profit, academic and business sectors for the first ever Acumen Fund Fellows Knowledge Discussion.

I took my seat, and looked around the room. Moses Lee – a researcher from the William Davidson Institute – was sitting across the room from David Auerbach and Elmira Bayrasli of Endeavor. Gary Rindner – an Acumen Fund partner and one of the Fellows’ mentors – sat in front of Jason from Pop!Tech and across from Jason Spindler of the NYU Reynolds Fellowship program (more fellows!) My colleague Mariko sat with Sarah Murray from the Financial Times; Mike Hokenson from Minlam Asset Management sat in front of them. The crowd stirred and squinted – the sun set behind Acumen Fund Talent Manager Deepti Doshi as she introduced the event, sending a glare into our eyes – and the program began.

One at a time, all seven Acumen Fund Fellows presented his or her research project, each based on work they’d done in the field. First to present was Chris Walker, who spent the last 10 months working for Dial 1298 for Ambulance in Mumbai, India.

There is something Orwellian about last week’s World Bank announcement of a new poverty line, and the Bank’s entire effort to categorize the poor, that I found moderately disturbing. This top-down attempt to box the problem and then convince ourselves that, because of some statistical shenanigans, there are now more (or fewer) people living in poverty is the kind of pointless navel gazing that I want us to avoid getting trapped into at Acumen Fund.

We have had internal discussions about this, which inevitably end with the realization that we will know poverty when we see it. What’s more, we need an honest check against moving too far up market - thereby neglecting our charitable intent and our aim of trying to serve the poor, who we define in terms of lack of income, lack of access, lack of dignity and lack of a chance to take control of one’s own destiny.

It certainly should be someone’s job to think about the distribution of wealth, the trends in economic development and the amount (and distribution) of human suffering, but I would take the effort more seriously if it were done by an organization that holds itself accountable to evaluating its programs for their ability to systematically alleviate poverty.