Redefining what’s possible through ambitious goals, partnerships in co-creation, and meaningful impact measurement.
Social Enterprise Day — this year falling on November 21 — celebrates businesses dedicated to improving the lives of people and the environment. There’s plenty of praise for the social component of these organizations (what they do), but we shouldn’t overlook the enterprise factor (how they do it). Anyone working in this space will tell you it takes more than good intentions to change the world. To achieve scalable, lasting impact, social enterprises must also dare to dream big.
Social enterprises are grounded in the realities of solving the world’s most intransigent problems. Already an ambitious task. And being equally ambitious when it comes to setting goals, can motivate people and raise expectations about what kinds of change are possible. The challenge of an audacious goal can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy, willing its own accomplishment into fruition.
Sounds like a pipe dream? I can assure you it’s not. We need look no further than one of FINCA’s partners, the Cisco Foundation. In 2016, Cisco Systems, Inc. set a hugely ambitious goal to positively impact 1 billion people by 2025 through the company’s Networking Academy and Social Impact Investments. In December 2023 — one year ahead of schedule — Cisco announced that it had not only met but exceeded that target, having positively impacted 1.1 billion people around the world, an astounding one-eighth of all humanity.
Earlier this year, I sat down with Cisco Foundation Executive Director Charu Adesnik to talk about why social enterprises must set radically ambitious goals and how they can go about achieving them — through partnerships in co-creation and measurement of meaningful outcomes. At FINCA, we believe we can eradicate poverty in our lifetime. We also believe that doing so will require a great deal of collaboration and strategic partnership. The work of organizations like Cisco inspires me and lights the path forward.
Set Ambitious Goals With Intention, Not Hesitation
One barrier that prevents social enterprises from aiming higher is the lack of a detailed roadmap. Ambition is easily hindered by an abundance of caution. “At Cisco, we love setting big goals,” Adesnik said. However, she recalls, at the time of the 2016 announcement “we had an idea of how we would get there, but we certainly didn’t have everything worked out.” Accepting that there will be unknowns and a fair amount of learning along the way is the first step to bold thinking.
Despite not having a fully fleshed-out plan to hit its target, Cisco was extremely intentional about how it would measure its success. The goal was to not just reach, but positively impact 1 billion people. “We had to define what positive impact looks like: At what point can you say someone has been positively impacted? And how do we attribute that back to us?” Adesnik explained.
A few years into the project, Cisco engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct an external assurance on its methodology and progress, which is what ultimately allowed Cisco to confidently state that it had achieved its goal. Social enterprises can take a valuable lesson here: Set audacious targets and use them to inspire innovative solutions — save the pragmatism for measuring results.
Build Partnerships in Co-Creation
Hugely ambitious goals draw headlines with simple statements and nice round numbers, but the work that goes into them is exceedingly complex. No organization can do it alone; partnerships are essential. As a tech company, Cisco believes in the power of technology to connect the unconnected and achieve impact at scale. Equally important, they invest in potential — providing seed funding to ideate and prototype tech-enabled, tech-delivered solutions that address community needs. This is the Foundation’s bread and butter. “That’s the biggest market need, that’s what we’re good at, and that’s our value-add,” Adesnik explained.
But the Cisco Foundation isn’t the type of funder that simply writes a check and walks away. Instead, it seeks to co-create with partners on the front lines that have the staff, the resources, the networks, and most importantly, the expertise. “We look for organizations with the capacity to implement these programs … and to continue the work to have sustained impact after we leave,” she said. Complementing funding, they also provide donations of Cisco technology and offer strategic guidance to their partners, tapping into the passion and expertise of their global employee community. Cisco Foundation currently backs several FINCA Ventures initiatives that exemplify this collaborative approach to supporting innovative, high-impact social enterprises.
One of these is Ignitia, a hyper-local weather forecasting service that empowers intelligent decision-making for smallholder farmers and food-system stakeholders in West Africa and Brazil. Weather patterns are shifting in these regions, resulting in agricultural production deficits and food and income instability. Through two rounds of funding, Ignitia has leveraged FINCA’s financial expertise and Cisco’s technological know-how to take advantage of increased smartphone penetration and customer demand to enhance their advisory services, build a database for climate-smart agriculture, and enable last-mile distribution through mobile airtime payments and bulk SMS distribution — co-creation at its very best.
Design Meaningful Measurement Strategies
The adage “you get what you measure” has been applauded, debated, and ultimately debunked in favor of more nuanced strategies for quantifying progress. We still need to measure success, but only in a way that makes sense to the communities we aim to serve. This is another point on which Adesnik and I coincide.
With the Cisco Foundation’s venture-capital-like investment model of supporting early-stage solutions, their higher appetite for risk makes it especially important to have clearly defined and meaningful success indicators that evolve over the lifespan of a project. If things go off track, it becomes easier to isolate the problem and course correct.
Adesnik knows that impact measurement is expensive and time-consuming for social enterprises and that no good comes from getting bogged down in chasing data for data’s sake. The Cisco Foundation supports funding for impact evaluation in its social investment grants and lends its in-house expertise to assist partners in defining their key indicators. It’s not about imposing certain metrics, but rather helping partners to determine their own measurements of success in line with their strengths and values.
Like Cisco, FINCA Ventures invests in long-term symbiotic partnerships, aspiring to be thorough yet nimble and entrepreneur-friendly. We achieve this by interacting with and gathering feedback from communities and social enterprises in alignment with the Sustainability Development Goals and the IRIS+ metrics designed by the Global Impact Investing Network. This allows for meaningful impact comparisons using a common language and gives us a better understanding of how each organization’s business model aligns with our impact thesis.
Honoring 40 Years With a Bold New Promise
This year, as FINCA celebrates its 40th anniversary, we have the opportunity — and the moral obligation — to ensure that the progress we make in the coming years surpasses what we’ve achieved in our first four decades. To commemorate the occasion, we have set our own ambitious goal of raising $40 million and reaching 40 million people by 2028.
We don’t yet know how we are going to reach it, but we do know that we won’t get there alone. In collaboration with strategic partners like the Cisco Foundation, our network of financial institutions, and the social enterprises we invest in, we will leverage our experience driving innovations in technology, customer-led design, and impact measurement. It’s a bold promise we’re proud of and one we intend to keep.
