The African Development Initiative (ADI) is a social-entrepreneurial nonprofit organization based in Boston, Massachusetts. ADI is dedicated to investing in opportunities to improve the health, education and economies of communities in low-resource settings.
Using our expertise in finance and investing in energizing markets, and we seek out opportunities to fund and implement self-sustaining projects that will improve the heath education and business structures of communities with whom we work. We then couple social entrepreneurship with strenuous evaluations of our efforts, using the rigors of research and academia to refine market solutions. We prefer to take a social-entrepreneurial approach because we think it has two valuable advantages: One is creative energy and the second, accountability.
Entrepreneurs take a risk by investing in an endeavor they believe will succeed, but they also accept the responsibility of providing the customers with a desirable product. This entrepreneurial element of ADI demands us to constantly question a better, more efficient or more enjoyable way of providing our good or our service.
Rather than focusing solely on profit generation, we work to ensure that at the onset of our project, the success of our work will make substantial improvements to either the educational services, the health outcomes, or the economic development of the communities where we work. The goal being that any profits generated will be reinvested back into the communities. The other key element of ADI is our focus on sustainability and self-sustaining projects. We don't just give things away.
While this is a common approach with many nonprofit organizations, what makes us a little different is that we instead seek buy-in from the communities where we work. This obviously makes our jobs much more difficult, but it results in projects that provide community stakeholders with choice, and a quality service from an organization that will be accountable to its customers.
In order to make this work, we partner with local governments, we partner with traditional leaders, with locally embedded nonprofit organizations, with universities, with the private sector, and with development institutions. Together, we aim to create empowerment and not dependence. The third foundation of ADI is our use of academic research. ADI is dedicated to research-driven financial responsibility. We understand that each community and village has its own needs and will require unique solutions. With all of our development projects, we aim to maximize the social returns on all of the resources we use. First, we conduct rigorous background research on the best practices and case studies for any project we undertake. Then we begin with a diligent formative assessment to understand the needs and the demands in our communities. During the implementation of our projects, we continue to evaluate our efforts, constantly using feedback from these reports to improve as we implement.
Finally, we scrutinize our projects at their termination to evaluate our outcomes, ensuring that we actually achieved what we said we were going to do.
The last pillar of ADI is the use of market solutions. Although we are a nonprofit organization, we tend to implement our projects as if we were a business, to make sure that our solutions to social problems are culturally and regionally appropriate. If people do not like our products or ideas, they simply will not use them. It is then up to us to either make the products more attractive, less expensive or easier to use for our customers.
In any situation where we derive any income from our projects, we take this income and reinvest it in new projects, thus creating a recycling fund for development.
AGYEMENTI
In 2008—designated by the United Nations as the year of water and sanitation—Darryl Finkton and I cofounded a project, Access to Clean Water for Agyementi (ACWA). Our goal was to provide clean water and sanitation to Agyementi, a village in southern Ghana. We chose Agyementi after a visit to Ghana in 2007, when we met with the minister of Water Resources Works and Housing and the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development.
We informed them of our intention to design and implement a water and sanitation project in an area of need in the country. We were looking for a community with poor access to clean water and poor sanitation. We were also interested in a location close to the capital city of Accra, with good road access to facilitate monitoring visits. Finally, we sought to work with a population sizable enough for the project to have a real impact.
At the time we began the project, 56% of the rural population and 49% of the urban population in Ghana did not have access to safe, clean water. Sanitation was an even greater public health problem in the country. Only 11% of the rural population and 40% of the urban population had access to hygienic means of preventing human contact with hazardous waste. As a result, a significant number of people in Agyementi (and other villages in Ghana) suffered from Trachoma, a bacterial infection of the eye completely preventable but a major cause of blindness. They also suffered from Guinea worms, skin diseases and diarrhea— all of which resulted from contact with contaminated water and poor sanitary conditions.
The project we designed was a collaborative one which drew on academia, non-governmental organizations, and local and national agencies of traditional government. The academic component of this project was sparked by Professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and leader of a pedagogical initiative on social engagement. According to Professor Higginbotham, social engagement is motivated in
students when they are better able to understand what they study because they step outside of the ivory tower. It is a field that emphasizes how and why academic ideas and technological discoveries are challenged by the lived experiences and cultural prescriptions of communities with whom we work. Thus, project ACWA was not just a sustainable development project under the auspices of ADI, but also a product of academic study combined with practical experience and field work.
His previous essays for Fortnight can be found here: Seeding Growth, Investing in Africa, Investing in Africa II, and Developing the Future.
Using our expertise in finance and investing in energizing markets, and we seek out opportunities to fund and implement self-sustaining projects that will improve the heath education and business structures of communities with whom we work. We then couple social entrepreneurship with strenuous evaluations of our efforts, using the rigors of research and academia to refine market solutions. We prefer to take a social-entrepreneurial approach because we think it has two valuable advantages: One is creative energy and the second, accountability.
Entrepreneurs take a risk by investing in an endeavor they believe will succeed, but they also accept the responsibility of providing the customers with a desirable product. This entrepreneurial element of ADI demands us to constantly question a better, more efficient or more enjoyable way of providing our good or our service.
Rather than focusing solely on profit generation, we work to ensure that at the onset of our project, the success of our work will make substantial improvements to either the educational services, the health outcomes, or the economic development of the communities where we work. The goal being that any profits generated will be reinvested back into the communities. The other key element of ADI is our focus on sustainability and self-sustaining projects. We don't just give things away.
While this is a common approach with many nonprofit organizations, what makes us a little different is that we instead seek buy-in from the communities where we work. This obviously makes our jobs much more difficult, but it results in projects that provide community stakeholders with choice, and a quality service from an organization that will be accountable to its customers.
In order to make this work, we partner with local governments, we partner with traditional leaders, with locally embedded nonprofit organizations, with universities, with the private sector, and with development institutions. Together, we aim to create empowerment and not dependence. The third foundation of ADI is our use of academic research. ADI is dedicated to research-driven financial responsibility. We understand that each community and village has its own needs and will require unique solutions. With all of our development projects, we aim to maximize the social returns on all of the resources we use. First, we conduct rigorous background research on the best practices and case studies for any project we undertake. Then we begin with a diligent formative assessment to understand the needs and the demands in our communities. During the implementation of our projects, we continue to evaluate our efforts, constantly using feedback from these reports to improve as we implement.
Finally, we scrutinize our projects at their termination to evaluate our outcomes, ensuring that we actually achieved what we said we were going to do.
The last pillar of ADI is the use of market solutions. Although we are a nonprofit organization, we tend to implement our projects as if we were a business, to make sure that our solutions to social problems are culturally and regionally appropriate. If people do not like our products or ideas, they simply will not use them. It is then up to us to either make the products more attractive, less expensive or easier to use for our customers.
In any situation where we derive any income from our projects, we take this income and reinvest it in new projects, thus creating a recycling fund for development.
AGYEMENTI
In 2008—designated by the United Nations as the year of water and sanitation—Darryl Finkton and I cofounded a project, Access to Clean Water for Agyementi (ACWA). Our goal was to provide clean water and sanitation to Agyementi, a village in southern Ghana. We chose Agyementi after a visit to Ghana in 2007, when we met with the minister of Water Resources Works and Housing and the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development.
We informed them of our intention to design and implement a water and sanitation project in an area of need in the country. We were looking for a community with poor access to clean water and poor sanitation. We were also interested in a location close to the capital city of Accra, with good road access to facilitate monitoring visits. Finally, we sought to work with a population sizable enough for the project to have a real impact.
At the time we began the project, 56% of the rural population and 49% of the urban population in Ghana did not have access to safe, clean water. Sanitation was an even greater public health problem in the country. Only 11% of the rural population and 40% of the urban population had access to hygienic means of preventing human contact with hazardous waste. As a result, a significant number of people in Agyementi (and other villages in Ghana) suffered from Trachoma, a bacterial infection of the eye completely preventable but a major cause of blindness. They also suffered from Guinea worms, skin diseases and diarrhea— all of which resulted from contact with contaminated water and poor sanitary conditions.
The project we designed was a collaborative one which drew on academia, non-governmental organizations, and local and national agencies of traditional government. The academic component of this project was sparked by Professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and leader of a pedagogical initiative on social engagement. According to Professor Higginbotham, social engagement is motivated in
students when they are better able to understand what they study because they step outside of the ivory tower. It is a field that emphasizes how and why academic ideas and technological discoveries are challenged by the lived experiences and cultural prescriptions of communities with whom we work. Thus, project ACWA was not just a sustainable development project under the auspices of ADI, but also a product of academic study combined with practical experience and field work.
***
Sangu Delle is an entrepreneur from Ghana currently based in San Francisco, California. He is founder of African Development Initiative and CEO of Golden Palm Investments LLC, an investment company with private equity interests in agribusiness, real estate, financial services and healthcare. He is currently on leave from his MBA at Harvard University in order to work as Global Generalist at Valiant Capital Partners.His previous essays for Fortnight can be found here: Seeding Growth, Investing in Africa, Investing in Africa II, and Developing the Future.