Mulago finds and funds solutions that can benefit at least a million people - save a million babies, get a million families out of poverty, provide a million kids with a decent education. Based on our experience, we’ve developed a set of five criteria for what makes a solution likely to produce lasting change that will go to scale:
1. Real impact
Work without real impact shouldn’t scale up. We don’t invest in organizations that don’t measure impact – they’re flying blind and we would be too. We’ve developed an approach to measuring impact that is simple enough to do, but rigorous enough to mean something.
2. Bang for the buck
Solutions that are too expensive can’t scale. We calculate the cost per key impact in all organizations we fund. With a thorough knowledge and consideration of context, these calculations provide a useful guide for investment choices.
3. Lasting behavior change
Impact comes from behavior – from people doing things differently. For a given solution, we look systematically at the behaviors that drive impact to determine whether the conditions and motivations are there to make behavior last and continue to generate impact.
4. Easy replication
A model that is complicated is difficult to scale. Scalable solutions deliver a focused big idea in a systematic way, adapt to a broad array of settings, and don’t have too many moving parts.
5. Right path to scale
There are five paths to the kind of scale we’re talking about – namely, via the market, governments, growing a really big organization, co-opting other NGO’s, or viral spread of behavior change. We haven’t seen any others and each has its pros and cons. We look at whether the organization is thinking clearly about a path to scale and whether their model fits and can deliver via that path.