By Sush Amar & Simon Munk
In a Mozambique schoolroom, adolescent heads
cluster in a tight circle. The kids are poring over
balance sheets. Every now and again, one of them
looks up and asks their teacher to check a sales
projection. Tomorrow, they will be elbow-deep in
beans, working together to make fried snacks to
sell in a local shop. Both activities are part of a shared business venture.
They’ll use the profits from this exercise in entrepreneurship
to throw an unforgettable end-of-year party. But the full impact of
what they are learning will last a lifetime. They’re gaining practical
lessons in planning and cooperation, in social rights and responsibilities,
and in the principles of managing money.
It’s all part of a program called Aflatoun. Behind the program
lies a broad vision: If children are self-confident, socially responsible,
and financially competent, they will be in a position both to
improve their own lives and to improve the world around them. To
unleash that potential, Aflatoun offers an education program that
combines social participation and financial planning. Children are
able to work in groups and to plan their own activities. They get to
handle money and to perform work that benefits their community.
Aflatoun means “a fireball from outer space,” a phrase that not
only appeals to the adventurous spirit of children, but also captures
the transformative potential of the program. Years ago, children in
the program picked that name, taking their inspiration from a character
in a Bollywood movie. Over time, the program came to incorporate
a series of stories, games, and other instructional materials
that feature a cartoon character named Aflatoun—a bright yellow
fireball that zooms in from outer space to teach children how to get
along and how to get ahead.
The growth pattern of Aflatoun also suggests a fireball that
streams across the sky. In 2005, the organization that oversees the
Aflatoun program—an entity that goes by the same name—operated in only one country, India. That year, about 162,000 children in
fewer than 1,100 schools and informal training centers experienced
the Aflatoun program. Today, nine years later, more than 2 million
children at more than 21,000 sites in 103 countries are gaining access
to Aflatoun’s brand of social and financial education.
Aflatoun’s journey illustrates the power of social franchising. At
its simplest, the social franchise model resembles its commercial
franchise counterpart: A central organization develops an operating
model and then recruits franchisees to adopt that model. The
franchisees, because they receive support from the franchisor, are
able to set up shop quickly and with reduced risk. In a social franchise,
though, the goal is not to create profits for shareholders, but
rather to create benefits to society. Like a commercial franchise, a
social franchise has the potential to replicate its model efficiently and
rapidly. In addition, having a network of semi-independent, highly
motivated franchisees can enable robust innovation.
Dan Berelowitz, chief executive of the International Centre for
Social Franchising, cites Aflatoun as an example that other organizations
might seek to follow. “It’s pretty rare to find an organization
that so effectively balances the need to scale up to solve a pressing
social problem with the need to have systems and processes in place
that ensure quality,” says Berelowitz. “Too often, we see one of
two things. Either there is too much central control, which stifles
growth and innovation, or the reverse happens: Organizations just
give the brand away, and it replicates quickly, but quality takes a
serious nosedive.”
In Aflatoun’s case, a growing body of studies seems to affirm that
the program continues to deliver on its promise. A 2011 study conducted
by researchers from Pennsylvania State University at Berks,
for instance, evaluated an implementation of the program at a youth
center in Nyeri, Kenya. They asked children a series of questions before
and after participation in Aflatoun, and found a notable change both
in the children’s financial behavior and in their personal attitudes.
Before going through the program, only 6 percent of participants said that they currently had savings; afterward, that number grew to
24 percent. The same study showed increases in how many participating
children said they had “many friends” at school and how many
said they thought that other people listen to their opinion.
The success of the program has led Aflatoun to launch a plan to
reach 10 million children in 120 countries by 2015. And it’s counting
on its franchise system to enable that kind of growth. “Right
from the start, the franchising model emerged as the best one for
Aflatoun,”
says Jeroo Billimoria, who founded the organization and
who was its executive director until 2012. (She continues to serve
as vice chair of the Aflatoun board.) “It would let us create economies
of scale without diluting the bottom-up principle of giving
our partners freedom, independence, and the ability to adapt the
program to their local circumstances.”
“Children Are All Children”
In 1991, Billimoria was an instructor at the Tata Institute of Social
Sciences in Mumbai. Some of her students took up internship placements
in shelters for street children. When Billimoria visited
the shelters, she was struck by the children’s attitude.
“These kids were really good at making money,” she
recalls. “They were already mini-entrepreneurs,
earning cash through rag-picking. But because they
didn’t believe they had any kind of a future,
they spent their income as
soon as they got it. We
called it ‘Bindaas bravado.’
‘Bindaas’ means
‘fearless, reckless’ in
Hindi. Despite their
earning potential, they were going to end up trapped in poverty, like their parents.”
Another part of Billimoria’s work, meanwhile, involved a program
in social education aimed at children in Mumbai schools. “Those kids
responded really well to the social aspects of the teaching, but they
had no cash,” she explains. “So even if they wanted to do something as
simple as go for a group picnic, they couldn’t. There was nothing sustainable
in place for them to husband their money and build savings.”
Billimoria looked for a way to help both groups—and, equally
important, a way to bring different groups of kids together. “Children
are all children,” she says. “Rich or poor, they all have shared
experiences. If they actually get to know each other, they can swap
stories, learn from each other, and understand more about the society
they all live in.” Under the aegis of the Tata Institute, Billimoria
set up Meljol (the word means “coming together” in Hindi), a program
that featured the core elements of what’s now called Aflatoun.
It used art, play, stories, and games to teach children about saving
and spending money, among other topics.
At first, Billimoria and her colleagues focused on encouraging
urban schools in Mumbai to adopt the Meljol program, and
they met with a fair degree of success. “We were pushing
at an open door. They liked the concept and the results,”
Billimoria says. Later, she discovered that the
need for a program like Meljol was even greater in
the Indian countryside. “The rural teachers recognized
how useful the combination of financial
and social
education was. It was something real for the children, something that gave
them a sense of their own rights in society,” Billimoria explains.
“And it was fun, so classes were better attended. For the first time,
children were learning to save in a systematic and organized way.
They were also learning to change the legacy of poverty.”
“Go Wide or Go Deep”
In 1999, Meljol severed its formal connection to the Tata Institute
and became a registered NGO. Over the next several years, the organization
grew steadily within Mumbai and the surrounding region,
and its signature offering—an education program that promotes
the social rights and financial capabilities of all types of children—solidified
into the essential form that it has today.
Signs that the program made a real difference in the lives of children
began to emerge during this period. In a retrospective longitudinal
study conducted by Meljol, 78 percent of children who had
taken part in the program in 2000 reported that they were still in
the habit of saving money six years later. The study also indicated
that among program participants, the rates of graduation from primary
and secondary school were higher than the average graduation
rates throughout the same part of India.
Billimoria, in the meantime, had created another organization designed
to help children. Founded in 1996 as Childline India, that organization
provides a 24-hour emergency telephone service to children in
need. As with Meljol, it grew out of Billimoria’s concern for the street
children of Mumbai but expanded to serve young people of many different
backgrounds. Through her work on Childline India, she met a
man from the Netherlands who later became her husband. In 2003, she
relocated to Amsterdam, where she focused initially on launching Child
Helpline International, a global network of emergency phone services.
Then she turned her attention to the future of Meljol and of
the program called Aflatoun. She had formed a secretariat, a small
group of colleagues who helped her manage the organization. They
now faced a crucial decision: Should the organization go deep, by
extending the Aflatoun program further in India, or go wide, by
extending the program into other countries? They brought in a
management consultancy to help them study that question. “The
consultants pointed out—quite reasonably—that according to the
laws of market economics, we should expand market share at home,”
Billimoria recalls. “We would have a better return on investment in
a domestic environment where we had our contacts, an established
reputation, and a model of funding.”
Reasonable or not, that strategy for growth failed to win over
Billimoria.
“I was more interested in what I call ‘social impact economics,’
which they naturally had never heard of—because social impact
economics are about a completely different kind of return on investment,”
she explains. “‘Go wide or go deep’ seemed like an artificial
choice. At Aflatoun, we didn’t see why we couldn’t do both. But although
we knew the program worked in India, we had no idea if it would work
in other countries. What we needed was a proof of concept.”
In 2005, the secretariat formed a new entity whose stated goal
was to “facilitate and accelerate the transmission” of the Aflatoun
program from one region of India to the rest of the world. Billimoria
and her team called this group Child Savings International; their
aim at first was to create a global organization with an identity that
was distinguishable from its “fireball”-branded program. In time,
though, they recognized that having two names led to confusion. So
today the organization is known publicly as Aflatoun. (Meljol still
exists and thrives independently in India as an Aflatoun partner.)
As a first step, members of the secretariat conducted market research
to see whether demand existed at a global level for a program
such as Aflatoun. They looked for other programs that had a similar
focus on helping children save money. Ultimately, they found that
there were few if any efforts to bring rights-based financial education
to children and adolescents. In short, there was a clear product
niche to fill. Next, in order to establish what Billimoria called “a
proof of concept,” the secretariat launched a pilot initiative to test
Aflatoun in as many countries as possible.
Piloting the program meant recruiting a series of partner organizations,
and the secretariat was clear about its criteria for partnership.
The most important criterion was alignment around common
goals: Partners had to share with Aflatoun a commitment to empowering
children socially and financially at an early age. Crucially,
partners could not expect Aflatoun to provide either funding or the
reassurance of top-down control. Not only were the resources of
the secretariat extremely limited, but a core element of the emerging
Aflatoun ethos was the idea that implementing organizations
should take full ownership of the program. Centralized funding
and centralized control were both anathema to Billimoria and her
team. “Letting go and allowing someone else to sit in the driver’s
seat is vital to success,” she says. “What we’re attempting to do is
embed a logic of exchange; trust and reciprocity are built into it.”
“Bottom-Up Was the Way to Go”
During 2005 and 2006, Billimoria and her team worked to secure
agreements with organizations that would take part in the Aflatoun
pilot. The response from potential partners was mixed: Many groups,
for instance, had no interest in the program if they wouldn’t get paid
to implement it. But eventually 11 partners came on board. Among
them were governments as well as NGOs, and they represented a
wide range of countries, including Argentina, the Philippines, Serbia,
and Zimbabwe. A few large entities, such as PLAN International and
the Egyptian government, joined the pilot largely because of their direct
knowledge of Billimoria and her work. But most of the partners
were smaller and more local in their focus, and it was their appetite
for innovation
that led them to sign up for the pilot.
Aflatoun received 300,000 euros in grant funding (about
$450,000) to operate the pilot. Of that sum, 215,000 euros (about
$320,000) went to support partner entities. For the pilot,
Aflatoun
developed a manual that explained the core principles of the program and provided advice on how to adapt the Aflatoun curriculum to fit
local circumstances. That document became the foundation for all
of the technical assistance that the Amsterdam-based secretariat
would provide to its far-flung partners.
The pilot period lasted for roughly two years. In 2007, Aflatoun began
gathering extensive feedback from its partners, and it undertook a
broad evaluation of the pilot. That process uncovered a few persistent
problems. Some partner organizations found it easy to cherry-pick program
content: Too often, they emphasized the social elements of the
curriculum—the parts that deal with child rights, personal empowerment,
and the like—rather than the financial elements. Teachers varied
widely in how well and how eagerly they delivered the program to
students. In some countries, such as the Philippines, partners found
that they had to pay teachers a premium to offer the program. That,
of course, was an unsustainable way to scale up the Aflatoun model.
Yet the results overall were encouraging. Most teachers were
enthusiastic about delivering the program, and children enjoyed
participating in it. Aside from a few exceptions, partner organizations
were able to implement the program at a low per-child cost.
And at a proof-of-concept level, significantly, the Aflatoun team had
shown that the program was highly adaptable—that it allowed for a
high degree of decentralization. “This is about sustainability,” says
Billimoria. “Meljol and Aflatoun had shown us that bottom-up was
the way to go. With this model, no central voice dominates. Large
and small NGOs have the same voice because they’re doing the
same thing with the same level of responsibility for achievement.
Keep the independence and you keep the spirit.”
“Ethos of Partnership”
By the end of 2007, Aflatoun had begun to shift from a pilot phase to
a phase of longer-term strategic planning for global growth. Taking
into account the findings of the pilot evaluation, Billimoria and her
team looked for an organizational model that would enable them to
replicate the Aflatoun program efficiently while also maintaining a
consistent level of quality. The franchising model swiftly emerged
as the strongest, most feasible option. In 2008, the organization
held an International Stakeholder Meeting at which it launched a
new strategy based on a social franchise structure.
Adopting that structure made sense in part because Aflatoun had
already developed several of its defining features. It had a product or
service prototype, in the form of the Aflatoun education program. It
had a manual that outlined uniform activities and procedures. And
it had a full-fledged brand. There were two important features of
the franchise model that Aflatoun either lacked or needed to make
more robust: a consistent method for training franchisees, and a
system for evaluating program quality.
The social franchise model that Aflatoun adopted differs from
commercial franchising in one crucial respect. “Whereas traditional
franchises o ffer people the opportunity to replicate an incomegenerating
business, a local education program represents a cost,
with no attendant revenue,” Billimoria explains. In fact, Aflatoun
makes it hard for organizations to generate revenue by offering the
Aflatoun program. “We discourage charging the children or their
families, both because they’re likely to be unwilling to pay and, more
important, for rights-based reasons. Aflatoun is providing relevant,
quality education, and we believe every child has a right to that,”
says Alodia Santos, head of programs. Nor does Aflatoun follow the
common NGO implementation approach of paying organizations to
deliver a program. Instead, it charges each organization a nominal
annual fee of 50 euros (about $75) in exchange for educational materials
and technical support.
How, then, does Aflatoun go about building its franchise operation?
“We solved this problem by blending the model of franchising
with our long-held ethos of partnership,” Billimoria says. That ethos
is manifest in the terms that she and her colleagues use. The term
“franchisee,” after all, suggests an entity that is subject to a high degree
of control by an entity known as a “franchisor.” But according
to Billimoria, “a shared belief in the program changed the relationship
between Aflatoun and other organizations” by transforming
the latter “from ‘franchisees’ into ‘partners.’” She adds, “It wasn’t
just Aflatoun that owned the program; it was every single partner.”
Today, Aflatoun has about 150 franchise partners worldwide. Among
them are BRAC, Catholic Relief Services, Mercy Corps, and the YMCA.
These organizations generate funding to deliver the program in various
ways. Some draw on internal budget resources; others
rely on a
mixture of grants and local fundraising efforts. Aflatoun, meanwhile,
has an annual budget of 2.35 million euros (about $3.5 million) and
garners most of its funding from private foundations.
“A Living Network”
Because so much responsibility has devolved to partners who are also
“owners,” the governance arrangements of Aflatoun are necessarily
different from those of a top-down organization. In 2008 and 2009, Aflatoun put in place an array of practices that enable partners to
help shape the work of the secretariat in Amsterdam and vice versa.
Partners are able to engage in consultations and task forces that
help set policy for the franchise system as a whole. Every year, the
secretariat initiates a process that allows partners to evaluate the
performance of the central organization. In addition, the secretariat
promotes knowledge sharing with partners—and among partners—through regional and international meetings, and through other
communication tools. “Aflatoun is a living network, designed to
ensure that we are a learning organization,” Santos says. “With
partners working in so many different countries and contexts, we
want them to learn from each other’s successes and mistakes. And
a big part of the secretariat’s role is to help them do so quickly.”
Even at the level of program content, the structure of Aflatoun is
far from rigid. The flexibility of the franchise approach allows partners
to adapt the Aflatoun curriculum to suit their situation. The
only non-variable rule involves the need to include both financial
themes and social themes in lessons and activities. All the same, the
Aflatoun brand implies a certain standard of teaching; those who
fund or partner with the program must have confidence in its quality.
Until 2009, Aflatoun had no formal approach to training—no
means of ensuring the consistency or quality of program delivery
at a local level. Previously, the organization operated on a centralized
hub-and-spoke model, which allowed the secretariat to make
changes to its core program and to implement them quickly throughout
its network. But the rapid expansion of the franchise network
put increasing pressure on that model. So Aflatoun leaders confronted
another important decision: Should they hire more people
to staff the centralized training “hub,” or should they tap into their
partners’ resources to extend that function on a regional basis? In
keeping with Aflatoun’s emerging “ethos of partnership,” they opted
for the latter course. “We decided to train our partners’ very best
trainers at Aflatoun’s expense. In return, they would train people
in other partner organizations in their region,” Billimoria explains.
“It was one of the best decisions we ever made. It breathed new life
into the program, giving us the ability to rapidly expand Aflatoun’s
recruitment of new organizations.”
Developing a cadre of Regional Master Trainers, as Aflatoun
calls them, transformed the organization’s training capacity. The
secretariat launched the new training system in 2009, and within
a year Aflatoun went from relying on seven staff members based in
Amsterdam to deploying 120 training experts who operated in every
region where Aflatoun had partners. Regional Master Trainers are
paid staff members of partner organizations; in exchange for the
training that they receive from Aflatoun, they offer their services
to the network as a whole for 10 days each year.
So successful was the decision to decentralize training operations
that it led Aflatoun to decentralize other functions—quality
assurance, for example. It’s a standard organizational practice for
each new partner to receive a site visit within a year of launching
its program. Before, staff members
based with the secretariat
in Amsterdam handled such visits
in all cases. Today, Regional
Master Trainers and other experienced
people from partner
organizations take responsibility
for conducting nearly half of
these quality assurance exercises.
Also during this period,
Aflatoun
developed a series of
eight instruction manuals for use
by its growing roster of partners.
Collectively called the Aflakit,
this set of documents covers all
aspects of program delivery—from governance and fundraising
to training and child participation.
The cornerstone of the
series is the partnership manual,
which provides a six-step guide
to starting an Aflatoun program
from scratch. These manuals build on the one that Aflatoun created
for its pilot, but they also incorporate a wealth of information and
advice that partner organizations have gathered from their on-the-ground
implementation efforts. The content of the manuals continues
to evolve, and it serves as a testament to the organization’s efforts to
share ownership of the network with its partners.
Graeme Thompson, a regional program coordinator for Childfund
Americas, a group that joined the network soon after the pilot phase,
emphasizes Aflatoun’s commitment to partner inclusion and notes
the “regular, reliable spaces” for interaction that Aflatoun provides.
“There’s a regional network, global meetings, regional meetings,” he
says. “Aflatoun is very open to being influenced—to hearing from
the field about our implementation experiences and suggestions
for improvement.”
“Time Is Usually Against Them”
Building a social franchise brings with it certain persistent challenges.
It’s not possible in every case to strike exactly the right balance between
partner autonomy and centralized direction. In part, that’s
because partners vary widely in how much autonomy they desire and
in how much autonomy they can benefit from. Thompson notes, for
example, that the comprehensiveness of the Aflakit manuals might
lead some partner groups to develop an unrealistic sense of what
they can achieve. “The manuals are brilliantly simple,” he says. “But
I do wonder if the manual’s ease of use gives some local staff the illusion
that they can ‘cure all’ and do absolutely everything that’s in the
manual. I think they’re not always clear on how to adapt the program
to achieve specific local objectives.”
A similar issue arose, according to Thompson, when Aflatoun
launched its Aflateen program in 2011. That program, as its name
implies, aims to help older kids cultivate financial and civic skills,
and one of its main features is the use of young people as program
facilitators. Although Thompson praises the design of the program
overall, he suggests that Aflatoun should do more to provide on-the-ground
support. “Local youth will not understand as well as adults
some of the issues at stake in some of the activities,” he says. “The
weight of responsibility put on their shoulders can be too high.”
Here again, the work of drawing a line between delegation and
supervision
presents an ongoing challenge.
Another challenge faced by Aflatoun concerns the degree to which
the secretariat enables—or fails to enable—communication to, from,
and among partner organizations. In responses to formal surveys,
partners generally agree that Aflatoun respects their voices as part
of the organization’s decision-making process. But when partners
were asked in a 2012 survey whether their feedback actually influenced
secretariat decisions, nearly half of respondents (48 percent)
indicated either that they didn’t think so or that they weren’t sure
about it. Across the network, moreover, partners have expressed
concern that there is too little scope for “sideways,” or peer-to-peer,
collaboration. Their participation in the network always
tends to be
mediated thorough the secretariat.
Partners, as it happens, have not taken the initiative to create
such lateral relationships on their own. And, according to Berelowitz,
that dynamic is fairly common in rapidly expanding social franchises.
“Franchisees genuinely want to help each other, but time is
usually against them—so supporting others loses traction against tackling more urgent issues in their own organization,” he explains.
“The challenge for social franchises is to formalize different ways to
communicate with each other, through formal mentoring programs
and by scheduling regular meet-ups.”
To address that issue, the Aflatoun secretariat has moved to
sponsor regular face-to-face events where partners from various
regions can engage in knowledge sharing. “We realized that we had
to look more pluralistically at the types of relationships we have with
partners,” says Santos. Challenges of this kind, she notes, add to the
complexity of managing a global social franchise: “It may take longer
than in a purely top-down organization, but acting collectively
is the only way we can keep an alignment between our ethos and
that of our partners.”
“The Myth of Command and Control”
In 2012, Billimoria stepped down as executive director of Aflatoun,
in part so that she could focus on a new venture: Child and Youth
Finance International (CYFI), a global advocacy organization that
promotes what it calls “economic citizenship” among children and
young people. Again and again, she and her colleagues have encountered
institutional barriers in this area. Bank laws and banking
practices, for example, often make it difficult for children to set up
savings accounts. CYFI aims to overcome those barriers through
policy work and by building a movement, and so far, the organization
reports, the movement has reached more than 18 million children
in 100 countries. Like Aflatoun, CYFI embodies a rights-based
model that goes beyond the traditional aid-based model. For both
organizations, the goal is to make children active participants in
their own lives and in the future of their countries.
The goal of empowering children—socially, financially, and
otherwise—lies at the heart of the Aflatoun program. And that ideal
of empowerment finds an echo in the way that Aflatoun has structured
itself as a global network: Local partners are active agents in
the development and implementation of the Aflatoun curriculum.
For an organization that aims primarily to reach children in developing
countries, that’s an essential principle. “This was not the usual
model, in which the North tells the South what to do,” Billimoria says.
Building and maintaining a social franchise is no simple task,
Billimoria
notes: “The myth of command and control from the
center dies hard. Not every potential partner will understand our
model. Reinforcing that independence from the center is a constant
challenge—something we must do over and over, whenever a new
partner comes on board.” Aflatoun and its partners, moreover,
struggle at times to achieve an optimal balance between local flexibility
and cross-network consistency. “This happens,” Billimoria
acknowledges. “But it happens with centrally controlled organizations,
too.” All the same, the story of Aflatoun shows the critical role
that social franchising can play in scaling up a proven solution to an
urgent social problem. “This model gave us a very strong network,
aligned in our ethos and led by our partners.”