What We Fund

We work anywhere there is a big need and a strong team with a great idea.

We’ll fund anything that provides a better life for the poor and a route out of poverty. And is scalable.

We operate like a philanthropic venture fund where impact serves as an analog for profit. Every grant or investment we make is a bet on an organization’s potential for exponential impact over time. We get in when there’s a strong case to be made, and we get out when for whatever reason that potential has faded.

Most of what we do is focused on basic needs, like:

Health

Perhaps the most basic need of the very poor is primary health care, which includes things like prenatal care, births in an equipped facility, vaccinations, malaria treatment, family planning, and last mile health access. To us, health rises or sinks with everything from road safety to mental wellbeing, from vaccine safety to sexual violence prevention.

Environment

Human well-being and the health of the environment are inextricably linked. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity, soil degradation, air pollution, a shrinking water supply—all of these disproportionately affect the world’s poor.

Education

Literacy and numeracy help kids make sense of the world. Whether through early childhood education, primary school, secondary school, or your parent’s phone: the more you learn, the more you earn later in life—and the greater chance you’ll break out of poverty.

Livelihoods

Lots of people rely on agriculture as a source of income. We know what makes farms more productive and gets farmers more money: the right inputs, information, training, credit, and access to markets. Increasingly boosting income outside of agriculture is critical to make a dent in poverty levels.

Water & Sanitation

Clean water and sanitation are fundamental to health and education—kids with reliable water stay healthier and spend more time in school instead of fetching it. We back solutions that keep clean water running for the poorest people

Our Portfolio

We fund high-impact organizations to do what they do well. We back both for-profits and nonprofits: mostly grants, sometimes debt or equity if it fits.

Right now that's 77 portfolio organizations and 20 new fellows each year.

How We Decide

The basis of the bet

A Mission

The mission describes what you’re setting out to accomplish—and brevity = clarity. We want it in eight words or less: a verb, a target place or population and —most important—an end outcome. If it doesn’t fit the mission, you shouldn’t do it.

An Idea

An idea is a theory, really, about to accomplish the mission. It’s what drives and shapes all that the organization does. We look for new innovations, or important variations on proven ones.

A Dream

For us, “dream” is a technical term, and a marker for ambition. It is what the world looks like if the idea goes big and it specifies the “doer and the payer at scale.” The key that unlocks exponential scale is the ability to recruit and enable others to it and pay for it.

A Scalable Model

An idea needs a model—a systemic, replicable set of activities that can be methodically scale-up. To get to exponential impact, a model must be:

Good Enough

to be worth scaling. This about impact: we're looking for consequential effect sizes, high-quality evidence, and a strong case for lasting change.

Big Enough

to make a meaningful dent in a big problem. This is about scope—the overlap of where it’s needed and where it would work, and what factors inherent to the model might constrain scale.

Simple Enough

that it can be done by others—specifically the doer at scale (mostly governments, sometimes other NGOs or businesses). The evidence for this starts with a replicable model and is confirmed by observable progress at replication by others.

Cheap Enough

that the payer at scale—government, philanthropy, customers, or Big Aid would pay. It’s about willingness and ability, not just cost-effectiveness. It’s about establishing a target cost and hitting it. Proof is when the payer actually pays.

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Tracking Progress

This simple graphic has proven a remarkable tool to track progress. The dot is where we think they are on the journey to scale, and the arrows track their progress on the “enoughs.” The first line means “persuasive enough to keep going;” the second is “proven enough to scale.” Where the dots and arrows land is a shared judgement with us and them.

A Scale Strategy

Strategy here is entirely focused on what we call The Big Shift—the approach the organization will take to go from linear to exponential impact. It’s fundamentally about decoupling philanthropy and impact, and it is mostly concerned with the transition of growth to the doer and payer at scale. Tech, policy, and collective action can play important roles too.

The Organization

This is about whether, given their stage, we think the organization can deliver the model and strategy. It is a gestalt from deep knowledge of leadership, track record, finances, fundraising, iterative/learning ability, and governance.

How We Fund

Step One: Fellowship

We search for founders — mostly early stage — who have what we think is a big solution.

We recruit the best into our one-year Fellowship. We give them $100K and an intense year of learning bookended by two week-long retreats. We get to know them and their work really well.

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Step Two: Portfolio

We continue funding organizations that we continue to think have a big solution.

When it turns out there’s a good fit—when we’re ready to make that bet—we add them to the Mulago funding portfolio (NB: The fellowship is the only route to the portfolio).

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Once an organization has gone through the fellowship, we make a bet on whether to continue funding. Historically it looks like this...

263 ‍

Fellows over the years

~60%

Convert into our portfolio for longer term funding

~70%

Of those are still in the portfolio at five years.

77

Current organizations in our portfolio.

Our work with doers is a joint venture to achieve the Dream.

We’re not deluded about the inherent power asymmetries, but we do all we can to mitigate them while still doing our job. That means...

Unrestricted Funding

Unrestricted funding drives innovation and growth. It's the most useful for the organization and most leveraged for the donor. If we don't think an organization knows how to use the money better than we do, we don't give them any.

No Proposals

We don't take proposals. Proposals are a hassle for all concerned and rarely give us the information we need. We do our own homework and ask our own questions.

Minimal Hassle

The last thing we want is to waste the time and energy of those who are trying to save the world. We ask for annual milestones and their impact methodology; beyond that, we rely on documents they should already have on hand.

Long Term

We don't abandon a good thing after a couple of years. If we continue to see real impact and clear promise toward scale, we stay in the game for up to ten years+.

Close & Engaged

We visit our organizations, advise when we have something useful to say, connect them to other funders, meet up whenever we can, and talk often enough to avoid any surprises.

Funding Overview

We fund high-impact organizations to do what they do well. We back both for-profits and nonprofits: mostly grants, sometimes debt or equity if it fits.

Right now that's 77 portfolio organizations and 20 new fellows each year. Last year we put $26M behind them.