Measuring the impact of social enterprises in humanitarian and refugee response

The humanitarian crisis is gendered and continues to affect women and girls disproportionately. Approximately half of all refugees, internally displaced, or stateless people are women and girls, and 1 in every 5 women refugees experiences some form of sexual violence as they flee conflict. The lack of protective measures increases their risk of rape, trafficking, forced marriage and child marriage. This is exacerbated by limited access to public infrastructure including essential healthcare and solutions that decrease their care burdens. 

The role of social enterprises in humanitarian settings 

Traditionally, the private sector has been seen as a deterrent to emergency response and contributing towards further weakening already fragile public institutions. Due to the sector’s involvement in the manufacturing and distribution of weapons and the harmful effects of activities such as mining and logging, there is a general lack of trust in their ability to contribute towards positive long-term change. 

However, increasingly, there is acknowledgment and recognition that the private sector can add tremendous value to humanitarian response capacity through the skills, competencies and systems it brings. Consequently, aid and humanitarian agencies have been working with social enterprises to develop new practices and approaches to humanitarian aid and emergency response. ‘Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge’ (HGC) is an example of a novel approach, the goal of which is to seek connections and develop strategic relations with the private sector to identify innovative solutions that save and improve lives in complex emergency situations. The program is not only working towards securing the lives of marginalized groups (such as women and children) in conflict-affected areas but is also breaking stereotypes concerning the role of private sector enterprises in co-creating long-lasting positive change. 

Measuring the impact of humanitarian social enterprises 

While building solutions that respond to the needs of vulnerable and inaccessible communities, it is just as important to measure the impact of these efforts that enable vulnerable populations to navigate the complexities of emergencies. Unlike conventional businesses, social enterprises must account for multiple, intangible and subjective outcomes that are difficult to quantify, attribute and compare. This is doubly hard while operating in emergency and refugee settings.  

To address this challenge, Kore Global, as HGC’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) partner, has been supporting a range of diverse and impactful innovators who are a part of the ‘Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge’* cohort. 

This work is critical because, more often than not, social enterprises’ logic models or theories of change have a missing middle: they know what impact they aspire to have in the world, and they know that they can provide products and services that people need. However, the pathway between these two things is typically obscured, and part of Kore Global’s role has been to work with businesses to articulate this missing middle. This typically includes working with innovators to identify the right set of inputs, activities and outputs that lead to the desired short and medium-term outcomes. Additionally, we also help innovators identify fit-for-purpose metrics and develop realistic data collection methodologies that can be implemented in the challenging contexts in which they work.

HGC has demonstrated a strong commitment to understanding these change pathways, in order for successful models to be replicated and scaled. The ultimate goal of the collaboration is to demonstrate that these business models are viable,  investable and impactful. 

Social enterprises responding to the refugee crisis

This year on World Refugee Day (June 20, 2023), we would like to celebrate the work of two inspirational innovators who are committed to improving the lives of refugees living in Kenya and Libya. 

Sun Buckets Africa is a for-profit social business that develops portable cookstoves that store the sun's energy, making cooking easier and more affordable for off-grid families. The Sun Buckets offers a significant improvement over existing cooking mechanisms - such as burning firewood and charcoal as well as conventional solar cooking technologies - as it stores a large amount of thermal energy that can be used at a later time. The enterprise successfully implemented a pilot project in Kakuma and Kalobeyei in 2020, setting up cooking centres in different locations within the two camps.  Refugee community members brought their food to these cooking centres, and were able to cook a meal for less than a dollar (USD). Currently, Sun Buckets Africa is implementing a one-year project providing Sun Buckets System clean energy for cooking and lighting to refugees in Kakuma refugee camp, Turkana West sub-County, and Turkana County, Kenya. Additionally, it is also working towards testing its proof of concept in Uganda, Rwanda, and Côte d’Ivoire.  

Speetar works to make quality healthcare more accessible in the Middle East and North Africa. It leverages telemedicine and cloud-based electronic health records technology to connect patients with cultural- and language-matched medical specialists, thereby breaking down the economic, social, and geographic barriers that limit patient choice. In terms of its impact, Speetar powered Libya's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Ministry of Health's (MOH) COVID-19 triage and information center, serving close to 1.8 million people. Moreover, Speetar's health educational materials on social media reached over 3.2 million people in 6 months in 2021 and 2022, recording over 350k engagements. Its expansion plans include developing strategic partnerships in Yemen, Nigeria and Sudan with non-profits, multilateral agencies and advocacy organizations.  

The impact achieved by Sunbuckets and Speetar as well as other HGC innovators demonstrates that social purpose businesses can play a strategic and proactive role in meeting the needs of refugees and other vulnerable and marginalized groups. It is hoped that the demonstration effect of HGC supported innovators will encourage other humanitarian agencies to consider and pursue long-term partnerships and private-sector engagement as a proven solution to addressing the humanitarian and refugee crisis. 

*Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge is a partnership of Government of Canada, USAID, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, with support from Grand Challenges Canada.