2024 Program evaluations and two new portfolio programs

Something Elaine and I have in common, we've both read, um, all the books that I don't know if a lot of people read books about how to solve global poverty. There's a lot of them out there. There's like a dozen or so ones worth reading. And, um, so that's, that's something I have in common. That's lame.

And so I know Simple Charity and All Access has, uh, formed somewhat of a partnership and working together to evaluate these organizations. So I'm curious, how did that go this year? I know this year you guys have been, uh, evaluating, I think over 1100 organizations. And so you've put many of them to the test based on a very rigorous methodology. What was that like? Uh, how did that go this year?

And we'll talk about some of the, um, I guess successful organizations that made it through that process here in a moment. But, but how was 2024? What was that like this year?

So education, healthcare, we looked at some wash as well, but really dialed in on education and healthcare. And, uh, Andrew went to town on scraping the world on who. addresses those cause areas in those countries. And that's where that 1100 number started was we're looking at specifically in these countries who's addressing those, um, cause areas.

And then what we did is we sent them a form and said, Hey, if you Uh, believe you can reduce these poverty levels in these countries, then tell us more about your program and, uh, tell us how you collect data, what your strategic plan is, your output outcomes, what it costs to do that. And, uh, Andrew kind of did the science, uh, behind that of when you're looking at comparing opportunities. And when we talk about ending global poverty, it's all about, Getting these spreadsheets down to zero.

And so all we're looking for is who can best reduce these indices in these places, the most per dollar and the most sustainable way. And so there's some qualitative checks, you know, about look at sustainability, how they're doing things, financial efficiency. Uh, but when they make it through that, then we start looking at impact per dollar, which becomes more of a. science And, uh, Andrew, once you, uh, share more about if I missed anything and then what that process look like.

You're saying this non profit, oh, you spend this much money and it will enable a thousand people to access water. How do you compare that to, um, this non profit will build a school that will enable a thousand students to get an education for four years? So, We're using the, we're using different methodologies and we're trying to use, you know, all of the data that we have available, especially the MPI to form some basis of comparison between

That you can assign to a region or to a country and what we were trying to do essentially was build a model to see how much will a particular non profit's intervention change the MPI over time and how much will it do that per dollar.

Um, but what the MPI also does is help you compare apples and oranges according to this weighted index. That's. Broken down into three dimensions, health, education, living standards. We can actually weigh, Hey, an education org versus a healthcare org and see how much will that reduce the poverty level in these countries. And so, you know, Brandon, you were asking about how do we, um, poverty, um, you know, giving, uh,

We flip it on its head and start with a problem and see and say, who, I don't care who, but who can best reduce this poverty level in this place, the most per dollar in the most sustainable way, regardless of what names on their shirt. And that just by doing that alone, which is to be honest, the same thing we do with our investing or anything else in the for profit sector, it can expedite

Which is the quantity of, of potential investment opportunities that you're looking at. And so investors, you know, a lot of people don't know this about kind of venture capital, private equity world, if you're not, you know, plugged in there. But, um, investors are competing with each other to, um, to invest in. And certain businesses, um, because if you have businesses, you know, as great chances of success, then you want to have some share of that business. You want to have some equity.

Um, on their balance sheet, uh, before they grow and, and have tremendous success. So, but the, the thing about philanthropy at your point, Landon, is most, most people have very bad deal flow, which just means, you know, we choose why or not we get to something on the basis of relationship. And we, you know, most people know three or four people who work for nonprofits or family members who start nonprofits, and those are the requests they get. But what we're doing with.

You know, what I'm hoping we're, we're doing with All Access by, by reviewing 1, 100 organizations. That are, um, addressing global poverty is we're saying no to a lot of them, you know, or maybe, you know, for some of them, we're saying actually not no, but not right now, um, but that really matters because that allows us to give a couple yeses. To the cream of the crop, you know, organizations that have a solid theory of change.

They're collecting good evidence and the evidence they're collecting is showing that they are having, um, extremely cost effective impact on a few set of metrics that we've predetermined. And so it's really completely, you're right. It is turning kind of the way things are typically done on their head. I mean, we, we want to take the level of rigor that, um, top performing private equity funds.

Bring to their work and we want to apply that to philanthropy so that Christians can have a great deal of confidence that they are transforming people's lives and they are alleviating poverty and suffering and hardship, advancing the gospel, like spreading the love of Jesus throughout the world and to do that actually requires a lot of kind of technical, you know, you know, Having a good funnel, you know, having a system to pare down that funnel, um, and finding the cream of the crop where,

where God is at work, um, you know, through some, some really remarkable organizations.

Lane, you and I have talked a lot on this show about the strategy and thinking through things, but you know, Having andrew and brian here who've really been some spreadsheet gurus over the last several months Um, I I want to hear more about that because I like your analogy of the investment portfolio So you've got this deal flow coming in you've got these 1100 organizations.

You've got this big spreadsheet And you're building financial models to understand each of these, you know as if you were a private equity firm And what a private equity firm would be looking at is like You know, the equity premium they're taking the beta on this, you know, the risk, the volatility, they're looking at PE ratios, balance sheets, you know, all of that sort of thing to understand and analyze whether this is a good investment or not, in addition to qualitative factors like

management team and sector and, you know, things like that. So what are those? What is like the, uh, capital asset pricing model for these organizations that you're looking at. What is like volatility or risk or what are those metrics that you're, and how do you quantify those? And I've heard stories. Legend says that there is differential equations involved in this model.

And I'm very curious on like, how do you actually quanti, uh, quantitatively analyze these organizations for those that don't have a lot of background in the nonprofit world or are familiar with Oxford's MPI or anything like that? Like Like, give us, give us like, follow that analogy and help me understand what I'm looking at in the spreadsheet.

So, so that was the, the first thing is kind of, is this group within scope? Um, and so, and the reality is you just have to do that organization by organization and it, it actually can take a decent amount of time to figure out. What does this nonprofit do? Um, I think there's, gosh, I've seen 50 nonprofit websites in the human trafficking space that are all going to end human trafficking. I hope that one of them does. And, uh, but the marketing can look the same.

Um, and so, but how do you actually get down into what do they do? Um, so that's, that's the first thing. And then finding their contact information. Reaching out to them, um, and asking them to, um, to complete our, our application form, which gets into some of the things like, you know, what is your monitoring and evaluation process? Like, how are you collecting data? What data are you collecting? How much does a particular project cost? What are you expected outputs and outcomes?

And so starting to get some, to getting some of those numbers. Um, maybe Andrew could share a little bit about the, the, the. You know, the nice thing about all access is there's this clear, this clarifying element of, hey, we're trying to tackle the MPI, you know, we're, we're moving the needle on this, this one particular vetted metric. It's the instrument developed from Oxford, but the math for the MPI is actually fairly for the complex. Maybe. Oh, yeah, go ahead.

So that process alone narrowed it down to, I think, about 150.

And then once I kind of, uh, I think I narrowed it down to about 40 or 50 for Andrew to do a deeper dive on the quantitative stuff.

Um, so that's where the calculus comes in and that's where the, the dealing with a lot of the complex math that, um, the people at the Oxford program, um, and the UN development program have already done for us. We just have to plug in the numbers that we get from these organizations. Um, and make a best guess about, because sometimes they're not always key to The oxford or the U. N. Categories, right? So an organization might report impact metrics to us that say it's a water organization.

They might say this number of people got access to clean water. Well, we kind of have to dig into their documents and say, Okay, what does that mean? Does that mean they already had access, but it was 60 minutes away, not 15. Does that mean that, um, they just got an improved source of drinking water? So you have to dive into what exactly is the organization doing? And does that match with what the MPI considers to be an improvement in their living standard?

And then it becomes a little bit back of an art of looking at the poverty data, uh, which Countries have the lowest or the highest poverty levels, um, of those remaining few, you know, the, um, cost to do it, the range and scope of, uh, these programs and a lot more like making phone calls and zoom calls with people who have been there in person and saying, yes, I've, I've seen it or yes, I've seen that. And these are my concerns. So, um. Yeah, it's an art and a science. Yeah,

There are conversations by the time we get to the point where we're, we're actually serious about a program where.

You know, it's like, okay, this, they check the boxes with their monitoring evaluation, um, you know, documentation with the, the cost equivalencies that we're seeing here, then it becomes, okay, who, who are these people, you know, and so we do, um, it's not just quantitative, like there are, there are real relationships that get formed with these nonprofits, and I think that actually really matters a lot because that gives us a chance to ask some deeper questions. Thanks.

Um, and also to, um, and it becomes an ongoing relationship, you know, like it's not just a one time grant. It's a, you know, there, there, there's communication, there's, um, trust, you know, there's this desire to, really, it's a partner to, to make a deep impact. I've seen that in Lane, anyone who knows Lane Kemp knows he's just super relational and, um, you know, it's, it's, it's not a, It's not a formula.

There are formulas involved, um, but it's, you know, and this is, I think, also true about the best private equity firms. I think if we were to contrast what we're doing, um, with private equity, it's just the different, I mean, obvious, the biggest obvious ones. This is a different bottom line, you know, like the goal is not the performance of a business, the financial performance of a business. The goal is.

Human lives, escaping poverty, achieving, flourishing, and like doing that, you know, investing that to the glory of God. Um, so it's, it's, um, you know, I like to say, the motivation, hopefully, for all of us in our work is, is love. Um, and you can do investing from anywhere. a place of love. Please don't hear me say that. Um, you can, um, but, yeah, but, you know, there's something about giving money away for free.

You're not getting it back, um, just to benefit other people, strangers, that I think is spiritually formational for all of us to grow into kind of like Jesus. Jesus y love, um, that I think is unique to the act of, of effective generosity.

And then for somebody on the outside as a. Uh, donor giver investor in the analogy to basically look at all these organizations across the world and understand who's doing what. And so you guys kind of step in at that place doing that due diligence. So it's very, very cool. And I love it. So I guess to to kind of wrap up is that there were two organizations.

That made it through this process that are doing what they say they're going to do and they're doing it really well And so the two organizations are musana and plant with purpose So lane i'll start with you. Tell me about these organizations and and What they're doing and why you're excited to add them to the portfolio

And so we took a lot of time looking at those four and chose, uh, number one was plant with purpose. I would say fairly by far, uh, it was very, very clear. They, They also focus on the M. P. I. Then measure. I mean, they do randomized control trials. They measure outcomes really well, which makes our job really easy because they when we say prove it, they proved it. And, um, sometimes that's not so easy getting that on. They proved it really well. So what they do is essentially savings groups.

So village and loans associations, micro finance, and they do it through the local church. And they also combine that with, um, ag development, like regenerative, uh, ag, uh, training. So teaching rural farmers, which are, uh, most of those who are impoverished in developing countries are rural farmers, teaching them improved farming methods, giving them access to banking. And, uh, the impact is pretty amazing.

Um, I'm trying to remember off the top of my head, but I know they, I believe, tripled their savings. Uh, when they go through the program, uh, I believe they cut their, uh, poverty level in half. So 55% of, uh, people who go through the program, uh, they reduce their MPI by 55%. And, uh, it's pretty amazing. So we're specifically partnering with Plant With Purpose in four countries. So Burundi, uh, the DRC, Ethiopia and Tanzania. And it's a really, uh, rather large. program.

So it's 790 local churches, 61, 000 farming households, about 360, 000 people. And it's over what they call watersheds, 28 watersheds. So that's a whole another story. Maybe when we get the plan with purpose folks on to explain what that is. But basically it's land covering about 5000 square So, yeah, we're very excited about Plant With Purpose. I don't know if you guys have anything else to add on them.

Um, when I evacuated Haiti and went from Haiti to the DR because we couldn't make it to Port au Prince safely, uh, it's like as soon as you cross the border, it's the same land. As soon as you cross the border, it's forested and beautiful, but Haiti is deforested and, um, obviously in more poverty. So.

I mean, so if I go to the hospital down the road, very similar, you know, you can deliver babies, have surgeries, X, Y and Z. You know, there's also disease prevention and care, uh, there. So we saw is in Uganda, but they're scaling to be in seven more districts in Uganda to, um, yeah, start these hospitals, start these schools and they'll use the donations to build them, get them operating.

But once they're operating, they're completely, uh, self sustaining, meaning they don't need our donations anymore, which has a compounding effect on your impact per dollar, uh, which helped them add up. Pretty quickly. And the fact that they focus on secondary education is also really powerful with the MPI because one of the indices in the MPI is years of schooling.

And that's where, as we're looking at a lot of education organizations, many of them focus in primary education, which is great, but where you see the biggest need and the developing world is actually in secondary education. As you see a huge drop off of kids who go to primary school and then don't go to secondary school. And now Musana is helping.

Kids have affordable access to really high quality secondary schools, which kicks that MPI in the sea of the years of schooling and directly attacks that. So,

The effect is actually the education itself. So to go to have one more year of education, like if you, if you make it. To 11th grade, you're going to make more money as an adult than you can make it to 10th grade, um, and low income countries. And so that just shows, I think, just how powerful education in particular is where it's the, the effect of that is, you know, and there's other compounding effects to have more educated population is more likely to.

You know, maintain a democracy, you know, to your, there's a study that in, um, uh, the book bottom billion, um, from by Paul Collier, he says, countries in Africa are more likely to have an overthrow of a corrupt government and become more democratic if more people are educated, you know, so we talked a lot about like, you know, in Africa, especially corruption, government issues.

Um, but actually investing in education is one of the best things we can do for the long run chances of a country becoming more democratic because people are more involved in the political process, they have kind of higher standards for their leaders, um, anyways, education is a great investment, and I think,

Has a much younger population and it's also a faster growing population, especially among males But its growth rate from 18 to 35 year olds was like through the roof And so you can you kind of extrapolate that for the next cohort down the younger cohort. That'll be in like a high school You know entering kind of a college age group um, it's it's fascinating how many people there are in africa that fit that demographic and also how fast they're growing and so You Investing in their education.

I can imagine it's like massive. It can be massively helpful.

innovations and the solutions to, um, their own problems.

You have these organizations. What do you recommend people do?

Um, and so I think, yeah, I mean, come, genuinely, come join us.

And let, you know, like actually maybe start by taking a moment and You know to remember the poor like paul says and in in this holiday season to just remember that like all the things we have are just great blessings from the lord and um, And you know a lot of people around the world hundreds of millions of people are still in extreme dire destitute poverty in the world and The reality is what lane has built Gives all of us an opportunity to do something about that that we can have confidence

is actually going to work um and You know, and Andrew's done the differential equations on the Delta MPI and which is a, which is a piecewise function with in the calculus gets really messy. I don't. Yeah. I mean, I, I'm not even joking with that, but, um, So anyways, yes, I heartily endorse as someone who does not work for all access international I work with all access. I do not work for lynn. I say join me in giving to all access to fight global poverty

I know like all year you guys have been working on this and doing some really amazing things. And so I'm grateful because I don't have to do that because I don't know differential equations cause I'm a creative writing major and I don't know math. Um, but I'm just really appreciate the work that you guys are doing. And I'm excited about 2025 with these new programs and more people getting involved.