Lean Impact by Ann Mei Chang

Author:Ann Mei Chang
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119506645
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Government Funding

A fascinating experiment has been taking place in Liberia, one of the poorest countries in the world. Besieged by 14 years of civil war followed by the Ebola crisis, Liberia’s schools have been failing. Estimates are that less than 40% of school‐age children attend primary school, and that half of the country’s youth are illiterate. In a shock to the nation, zero students were able to pass the entrance exam to the University of Liberia in 2013.

Faced with this crisis, Liberia’s forward‐thinking education minister at the time, George Werner, recognized it was time to consider radical new ideas and launched the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) in 2016. PSL awarded contracts to eight nonprofit and for‐profit organizations to operate 93 public schools. The schools are free to students, with the government paying teachers’ salaries plus an additional $50 per student per year to the operator. After the first year, a rigorous third‐party evaluation found that students in the partnership schools learned 60% more than in government schools. While open questions remain about whether results will endure over time, costs will be sufficiently reduced with scale, and the political winds can be navigated, the hope is that the program will be expanded nationally over time to dramatically improve the education system.

For basic public services, such as education and healthcare, government tends to be the largest provider, and purely market‐driven business models may not be viable. Thus, tapping into existing government funding streams can often be the most promising path to reach massive scale. To do so, a provider must fit into the government’s budget, policies, and processes, or work to change them.

Among the PSL schools is Bridge International Academies, a social enterprise company that runs over 500 low‐cost schools in Africa. It seeks to provide better education than is available in many public schools through innovation and technology. While Bridge operates private schools in most countries, it ultimately hopes to demonstrate that high‐quality education is possible within limited public‐education budgets even for disadvantaged communities. In essence, its schools serve as pilots to demonstrate the benefits of a new model to governments, with the hope that it will eventually lead to public schools that are free, effective, and available to all children.

In Chapter Seven, we learned how Code For America created GetCalFresh to vastly simplify applications for food stamps in California. This improved experience landed it a Food and Nutrition Service outreach contract, allowing for the use of government funds to pay for its ongoing recruitment, operations, and service. Rather than seeking donations to meet the nutritional needs of low‐income Californians, GetCalFresh taps into unclaimed government budget already set aside for food stamps. Code For America estimates that for every $10 invested, $180 in food benefits has been unlocked for a client.

You might not think that the first drone delivery service operating at national scale would be in Africa, but that’s exactly what Zipline has done in Rwanda. And as a venture capital–backed company with high expectations for returns, this is no charitable project.

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