Participating alongside 100+ global social entrepreneurs and changemakers, Motive formed a civilian-military team and participated in a 2-day virtual Impactathon August 21-22, 2020, taking second place among 25 teams for the most innovative approach to addressing extreme poverty.
Hosted by the NGOs Innov8Social and Join the Journey, the Impactathon challenged teams of participants to produce a social enterprise business model in less than 48 hours that could contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goal #1 to end poverty in all forms by 2030.
Stacked with an active duty Civil Affairs (CA) captain, a CA NCO, a recently transitioned Army intelligence officer, Major Zach Watson now serving as Chief of Staff for the global NGO Evidence Action, and senior leaders from Motive International Melissa Vanderburg and Morgan Keay, our five-person team reflected Motive’s hallmark cross-sector approach to problem-solving. Team diversity, along with a methodical, structured approach to the challenge at hand, contributed to our winning pitch.
The moment the Impactathon working groups launched, Team Motive applied the rigorous analytic and planning method featured in our Transforming Crisis Systems (TCS) course. This methodological approach allowed our team to rapidly hone-in on a leverage point for the onerous task of ending global poverty based on data and analysis, without scrambling to find a starting point or relying on gut instinct alone.
“In keeping with Motive’s mission to mitigate conflict & instability, we decided to focus on a geographic area not just acutely vulnerable to spikes in poverty, but affected by violent conflict as well,” Motive CEO Morgan Keay explained. “Headlines coming out of Mali immediately grabbed our attention.”
Just three days before the Impactathon, a coup d’état took place in Mali’s capital, Bamako, ousting the sitting government, triggering widespread protests, and prompting the regional body ECOWAS to close Mali’s borders and pledge new sanctions. Stock prices plummeted among international firms operating in-country. Analysts reported that as many as 2 million Malians became immediately at risk of slipping into extreme poverty due to fallout from the coup and ongoing COVID-19 economic disruptions. Mali’s poverty is especially pronounced in the north, which is largely separated from the politically and economically powerful south by geography, ethnic divides, and the persistent legacy of colonialism. This has contributed to long-standing grievances that have made many northerners susceptible to recruitment into armed groups, and cycles of violent conflict re-triggered by the coup.
“We conducted a conflict assessment and created a systems map depicting patterns of conflict and poverty in northern Mali, cross-walked with locales underserved by existing economic development and peacebuilding initiatives,” the CA officer on our team explained, describing how our team applied tools & methods he’d recently learned as a graduate of Motive’s TCS course. “That further refined our focus on the city of Gao and helped us identify precise leverage points we could feasibly effect, namely specific shortfalls of capital, skills, and relationships among marginalized groups. From there, we crafted a Theory of Change (ToC) that sought to achieve our “near star” objective to reduce structural poverty and conflict drivers in Gao and contribute to the SDG “north star” goal of eliminating poverty everywhere by 2030.”
Working backward, our ToC revealed two pre-conditions that were necessary and sufficient to target persistent poverty and conflict drivers: 1) Entrepreneurs gain skills and knowledge to design and implement conflict-sensitive business models, and 2) investors mobilize capital to Gao-based enterprises. Using Alexander Osterwalder’s business model canvas framework, our social enterprise took shape as a pro-peacebuilding investor network plus a Gao-based business incubator and Micro-Finance Institution (MFI).
Major Zach Watson, who spent 12 years as an Army strategist and intel officer and holds a master's degree in development economics, proposed the name ‘Gao Together’ for the social enterprise. "We designed the proposed business model to achieve financial sustainability through Returns on Investment (RoI) from interest and equity," Zach explained. "Our team had the diversity of backgrounds in systems thinking, social impact, economics, and conflict to develop this model. Pairing our experience with Motive’s structured tools and methods allowed us to rapidly understand the wicked problems in northern Mali and chart a way forward towards systemic, sustainable change."
To measure the expected impacts of Gao Together, we defined indicators that tracked to each stage of our ToC using a pyramid of change model (pictured below).
“I think we all walked away from the Impactathon with sharpened skills and a broader perspective,” reflected Ms. Vanderburg, who serves as Motive’s Community Engagement Lead and is also a trained design thinker, U.S. Marine Corps veteran, and social entrepreneur. “Motive is committed to investing in continued learning for our course graduates and bringing stakeholders together in service to our mission. This event was a unique way to do both.”
The CA Staff Sergeant on our team described the experience as “very insightful” and said it exposed him to analytic tools he plans to utilize for future endeavors like mission analysis and planning. “I am truly grateful for the opportunity to have been part of this event,” he said.
To take our impact to the next level, Motive welcomes interest from civil society, investor, or government partners positioned to build on our analysis and consider launching our “Gao Together” business model as part of a cross-sector stability initiative.
Are you a TCS or GOV graduate interested in refreshing or sharpening the skills you learned in our courses? Contact us to explore opportunities like the one featured in this article.