Theories of Change

ZanaA was created out of my experience in Kenya for six years, working with street girls, thinking about the world of “development” and what was good and bad about it, looking at the for-profit world and what was good and bad there too, and trying to figure out how to make the largest changes in the world in the most systematic and lowest-cost ways.

ZanaA is founded on many theories of change. Here are some of them.

1. Small self-sustainability initiatives take nearly the same effort to manage as larger ones, and larger ones solve problems for more people while making more money for a non-profit – a major national or international company could be just an extrapolation of an income-generating activity for a savvy non-profit and can create an endowment through the profits

2. There is no reason not to make profit by doing good, if done in the right way

3. Non-profits were essentially created as a reaction against single-minded for-profit motives in the industrial revolution, and we are now seeing a convergence of for-profits and non-profits with an emphasis on a triple bottom line (David Bornstein has a nice section about this in How to Change the World)

4. Charities should be working themselves out of jobs by doing things right. We are redefining charity to be more savvy and accountable

5. Manufacturing – not cottage industry – is necessary to achieve scale, and to leverage eco-friendly energy alternatives to help see Africa become the next centre for industry. There is a reason why the West doesn’t do cottage industry, and it makes no sense to encourage it for Africa

6. Leveraging agricultural waste products makes good economic sense and is good earth stewardship

7. Realizing a world where green products become the normal price point not the high-end price will result in a much healthier world

8. Kenyan women don’t want to manufacture pads per se but want to have financial resources to do what they see best in their villages – training in cottage industry can be another way the west imposes solutions on others

9. Sanitary pads are arguably the smallest investment to make the largest societal change in the short- and long-term

10. Even with sanitary pads, the challenges of adolescence are so great, especially for girls in circumstances of poverty, that psycho-social investment is vital to foster a positive self-image and to support healthy decision-making and maximize the investment made in sanitary pads

11. Real change takes real commitment and years of not sowing seeds and not seeing much fruit, it requires staying the course in the face of tremendous adversity but is the most rewarding things we could ever hope to be a part of.

Tell me your thoughts – do you agree? Disagree? Why?

If you like this blog you may like another blog of mine, “D.I.Y Foreign Aid for Dummies”