Where the money comes from
The work has been paid for from three kinds of source since it started, and all three are still running.
Grants and partnerships
More than twenty since 2019, deliberately spread across funders — among them BookBridge, United Nations Volunteers, Search for Common Ground, Peace Direct, IREX, USAID through Global Communities, Lenovo, GIZ, the United States Embassy and ChanceMaker.
Revenue we earn
Services, training and trading, sold at a price. That income has done two jobs: running the organisation, and paying for work that had no funder behind it.
The founders’ own capital
The co-founders have put their own money into the organisation. It belongs in any honest account of how this was paid for.
We do not describe ourselves as grant-led, and we do not describe ourselves as independent of grant funding. Both are claims about which source leads, and the relative shares have never been measured. Until that measurement exists, neither sentence is available to us — and a gap in the evidence is not permission to fill it from either end.
Describing ourselves as a social enterprise is a statement about structure, not about funding. It is not a claim to be independent of grants, and it is not an admission of dependence on them. The two get conflated constantly in this sector, which is why it is worth separating here.
One thing worth naming as structural rather than organisational: early-stage capital in this country is scarce, the ecosystem is concentrated in the capital, and domestic venture capital is immature, so young organisations here run on bootstrapping, angel capital or foreign grants[60]. That is a property of the ecosystem, and it shapes the options available to anyone working in it.
The design intent
The intended shape is an ecosystem that funds a growing part of its own work rather than an organisation that raises the same money again every year. Four things are supposed to compound.
Units that earn
A community unit sells services and products locally, to local people, at prices those people can pay — which is how the organisation that incubated us expected its own loan to be repaid.
Ventures that trade
Ventures that come out of the pathway create local economic activity, and some of that value returns as mentorship, partnership and demand.
Capital that recycles
Loans rather than only grants, so that a repayment funds the next founder instead of ending the relationship.
Alumni who return
People taught here coming back as trainers, mentors and directors. This is the one part of the loop that is visibly happening already.
Self-financing through earned revenue and franchise share has not been reached. Presenting the loop above as how things currently work would be false, and we would rather publish the gap than the diagram.
How we describe our own role
Two of our largest early programmes reached us through intermediaries: we were third in one delivery chain and fourth in the other, and in neither case were we the funder’s grantee of record. That is a fact about how the organisation grew, and it carries a claiming rule rather than merely a description.
- We do not describe a sub-contracted delivery as our own programme. The honest form is the one we already use in our own documents: we joined as the incubator, or as the delivery partner. That names the role without claiming the mandate.
- We do not write that we ran a particular funder’s programme when that funder did not contract us. Anybody who checks will find an intermediary in between, and finding it themselves is worse than being told.
There is a further consequence worth stating, because it cuts against a story we could easily tell. We have been on the receiving end of exactly the structure we now propose to operate — incubated by one organisation, sub-contracted by two others. That is useful experience. It is not the same thing as evidence that we can run it from the other end.
Four things called bridging
Bridging is our most distinctive capability and our most slippery word. It names four arrangements with different economics, different counterparties and different failure modes. They must not be added together into one number, and only one of them bears on whether the model can be replicated.
| Mode | What moves | Who carries delivery risk | Bears on replication? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trainer placement | An individual. | The funder’s own programme. We are not in the delivery chain. | No. It is income for a person. |
| Delivery devolution | A school cluster or a district. | A local organisation, employing its own staff. | Yes — this is the only mode that is shaped like a franchise. |
| Venue and convening | Premises and standing. | Whoever owns the event. | No. It is hospitality, not delivery. |
| Exposure | A network position we hold. | Nobody — there is no delivery. | No. And its beneficiary is often our own staff. |
Devolving delivery
The second mode is the interesting one, and it is genuinely a strength: we devolve delivery of school programmes to local organisations that run clusters with their own staff. That is local capacity delivering the work — which is precisely what was missing in the place where a hub of ours closed.
Three reasons, stated together. We did not build those organisations — we handed work to bodies that already existed, and devolution is not incubation. Our name is on delivery we do not control, which is a quality risk arriving through a door most risk registers do not watch. And no terms are documented for any of these clusters: not the agreement, not the money, not the quality gate.
So the safe form is the one we use: we devolve delivery to local organisations, and we can name them. We do not count their clusters as units we built.
Replication
The vehicle for taking the whole model somewhere else is a social franchise: local partners running community-rooted units under a shared curriculum, brand and quality framework, with surplus reinvested into the mission rather than extracted from it[48, 49, 51]. Nothing is designed, costed or launched before a site diagnosis has been done for that particular community.
How that works in detail — what travels, what must be adapted locally, and what the quality framework actually holds people to — is set out under replication.