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So we work also with faith based organizations and all other civic

organizations, of course, to be able to support us to deliver the messages,

because, clearly, whatever health promoting messages we're delivering

have to be part of a community, kind of the social norms within the community.

So we work with other partners.

The other partner that we have increasingly starting working with is

the private sector.

So within our department we actually have a unit,

a business development unit that is focused on identifying

opportunities within the private space where we can collaborate

with private sector partners to work with us and alongside us and

partner with us to provide services

because especially in the context of limited resources,

we can't do this by ourselves.

And so we have a myriad of partnerships with the private sector

where we are working together on delivering health services.

Well the one sector that I want to talk about today is his whole issue,

of the social impact bond.

And as I said our objective is

to promote health and well being and not just provide health services.

So as part of that we were very attracted to whole notion of an impact bond

because it's calling on us to actually do what our constitutional mandate is,

which is to deliver on outcomes and impact.

So we are very attracted to the philosophy of having something that

is positioned to deliver outcomes and ultimately population based impact.

>> So essentially the core resource when trying to solve the slum issues:

we build on the resource of the communities.

Like I said earlier, the communities build local assets through saving groups, and

then we as the professionals take the solutions and

resource of the communities and then try to amplify that through negotiation with

formal institutions whether its local government or private sector.

So as a professional working for the secretariat, my role is primarily

resourcing the national federations around the globe, working with my team,

but I also do get involved in providing particular technical solutions,

but these are not like solutions that I bring from the secretariat or top down,

but it's based on understanding the grassroot's initiatives and

then adding value by bringing resource and

more technical input from perhaps specialists.

So that could be, I think some of the challenges like the technical,

like there's some problems also require technical solutions, that

if it's a sanitation you need a different engineering input.

If it's planning issue, you need input from town planners or etc., etc.

If it's a legal issue you need input from a convincing attorney.

As a secretariat professional what I will do is

I'll put all in these from professionals and

help find a solution for much more complex problem.

>> When it comes to resourcing, I guess we've had the full monty.

We've raised grant funding, depending on what we're doing.

We've raised equity,we've raised debt as well.

And so depending on the type of projects that we are taking on. For

example we just had our series B raise in 2015 that was specifically

around expanding our products and expanding into different markets.

We started as Zambia as our first market we are now in Malawi and

Mozambique as well.

So we've used grant funding for example in creating our new products.

Our whole savings product was funded by $500,000

grant from the MasterCard Foundation.

And they also helped with finding resources

around some consultants that we could work with.

Specifically around the design thinking and

the piloting of the product, before we launched it for scale.

This was useful because we could then really have a lot of room to work.

One other things that we did as a result of that for

example is create a new type of entrepreneur in the communities that we

call the Zona-FIAs the Zona Financial Inclusion Ambassadors.

So they go around educating the community about the importance of savings and

how they can use the savings product.

We wouldn't have been able to do that, had we not raised this grant funding.

Because a lot of what they are doing,

if they open up an account, they get a commission

based on the number of accounts they are opening of the certain amount of value.

So both from the customer side; we do work a lot with our communities for

what we need.

I'll give you a typical example of how we do some of our marketing.

We engage a lot with working with community leaders

to help us spread our messages on whatever is topical at the time.

So most recently we had issues around fraud and fraud education.

And so we would tap into people in markets and hook up to the community leaders

within the markets to help us spread the word around how safe our product is and

what they found to be useful and the elements of what safety is for them.

So it would be things like I know my that PIN is my secret,

and I'm only going to share my PIN with my receiver.

But if it's being driven from the community themselves, then the message

is more likely to be received than it would be from say like a billboard.

And so we do work a lot with people from all communities and

with messaging that is coming out of our customer base because that matters.

We have to speak to them in their language and

not insist that our language is what will work for them.

>> Okay, so when we look at the resources that we need to run Innovation Edge,

there's obviously our core funders.

We have five core funders that were our founder founders.

They were involved from the start and

they provide us with the financial as well as some of the technical and

network resources in order to set up Innovation Edge.

Then we attract additional funders who come in and are willing and

able to support individual projects and start ups.

But very importantly in order to innovate, we need to be able to attract thinkers.

We need to attract people who are problem solvers in other sectors.

And when we're looking at scaling something,

who has successfully scaled at restaurant chain or spaza

outlets or thinking through supply chain and really looking at how

we can draw other ways of thinking into early childhood care and education.

And I think that's been our biggest challenge and a critical factor in our

success, has our ability to attract different people in the space and

not for them to bring founding, but for them to bring their social capital,

their networks, their business procsses and their thinking.

In order to bring these different resources in,

we have different approaches.

We use our networks, and we use our connections and we go out and find people.

We have events.

We have events called pot luck, for example, where we bring a group of people

together, over the course of a day, and we take them through a journey

of understanding the challenge and then trying to co-create solutions.

Another thing that we do is we go to pitching sessions where people

are pitching ideas that have nothing to do with early childhood care and

education, and we participate on those panels.

And then we identify opportunities to pivot a solution that's being developed

for another sector to address a need within early childhood care and education.

>> And it was one of these pitching sessions that we obtained and

we saw a company called Hear Screen.

And they were pitching technology

which is aimed at children in high school to detect early hearing loss.

And the entrepreneurs were extremely passionate and we could see that they

were highly skilled, both in terms of running a startup but also in terms of

the knowledge of an academic foundation in terms of early hearing loss.

And we propositioned the entrepreneurs and we had a conversation with them, and

we just informed them of the early childhood challenges around early hearing loss.

And through this conversation they've actually pivoted their business model

to specifically innovate in early childhood development and

we've just ran a very successful pilot and we are currently exploring various avenues

to scale, both within the private and the public sector.

>> Again it's been such an interesting journey and

not intentional at the beginning.

But unfortunately, in our landscape, you know,

it's new and inertia's the strongest force in the universe.

And so we found out that there were early adopters certainly in terms of investors

so we had some early interest, early commitment.

But to start scaling it and then kind of reach a tipping point for us as a team,

we realized that we needed to find ways to address a negative perception around risk.

So there was a perception that impact investing meant sub-optimal

returns sort of by definition, and we worked really hard at dispelling that.

Our track record really is excellent, and

we've never had a default, so just to kind of dispel that straight off.

But despite that and despite the fact that we felt strongly that

the kind of investments we were making were providing this double return,

strong financial return, measurable impact,

there was a reticence on the part of investors and

that continues to this day and we see that in all the global movements that

are trying to propel impact investment more generally.

But we did recognize was that there was the potential for

strong collaboration in space.

So because we recognize that impact investing really shouldn't be

controversial, not at all,

in fact we should be aligning interests across

different groupings be they government,

be they the NGO world, be they the investment world, be they the investors.

Such that we could create quite powerful products, quite powerful solutions

because of that alignment of interests and job creation is one of them.

>> I think it's also I mean what Heather's talking about it's

a changed management exercise of note.

I mean you are not only trying to understand how to change the macro picture

in terms of aligning various interests along the same objective, but

you're also internally having to work at changing perceptions internally.

So from a resourcing point of view, we've also had to think about

how we resource a team and it comes with a very diverse set of skills.

If we actually look at, again I'd love to say that this was by design, but

it's just a glorious accident of how people have come together.

But more lately we've been quite specific and

intentional about how we actually resource a team.

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