It started, as many good things do, with food ! 🙂
Lobo bribed me. Not in the shady way – I mean Soam, Britannia & Co., berry pulav and all. That kind of bribe. Between bites, we ended up talking about tough questions, hard truths, and all the usual Tech4Dev soul-searching. You know, the stuff like: “What are we really doing here?”, “Is this impact?”, “Are we just automating some things and calling it transformation?”
This trip was a swirl of meetings – from Educate Girls to Magic Bus to Jai Vakil, with folks from Omidyar, Dasra, and ATE Chandra Foundation thrown in for good measure. It was a lot. Good people, big ideas, thoughtful pushbacks. But if there was a thread running through it all in resonance with prior discussions over food and drinks as well, it was this: What does impact really look like for Tech4Dev? Because let’s be honest – in my mind this has always been a thorny one. We’re not the ones running the programs on the ground. We don’t teach the kids, help folks with their health issues, or skill the youth. So what are we measuring? Is it just the number of NGOs we work with or that use our platforms? The features in our platforms and what it may enable? The “fractional CxO” count of NGOs we work with and some esoteric notions of innovation, efficiency etc.?
It can’t just be reach, right ? That feels shallow. To me it’s got to be deeper. Is it – are we helping create organizations that learn? That adapt based on what the data tells them? That experiment, evaluate, and evolve faster? Are we helping close the loop between impact and intervention? Because if tech, data, and AI aren’t enabling that kind of feedback loop – well, what are we doing here?
The most exciting chats were with teams that had started to crack this – like Magic Bus. Their use of tech isn’t flashy, it’s foundational. Monitoring, evaluating, learning, tweaking and all feeding into their larger goal of equipping young people to thrive, work, and contribute meaningfully. It’s the wiring that makes the loop possible. Seeing their growth in program scale, people and funding over the last four years makes one think that this is possible. Of course, for the “funders won’t fund this” wall. But honestly? That’s a false binary. Yes, funders want programs and projects. But they also want impact. If we can show how tech and data help improve programs, adapt them, measure them better — why wouldn’t that be fundable? We just need to tell that story better. Build that mindset across orgs. Gather the ones who’ve made this leap — in education, health, skilling, youth development — and get them to talk. Share. Reflect. Repeat. Not a one-and-done. More like a running series of talks that maybe we can hope to contribute towards – this had a lot of synergies with multiple folks we talked to and definitely an action for us at Tech4Dev to move this along.
Then thinking deeper about the Fractional CxO program. How do we measure impact there? Level jumps? CSAT scores? Those are easy, and maybe too easy. What we really want to see is transformation – smoother monitoring, faster evaluation, bolder experiments. That’s harder to track. But far more important. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say maybe 25% of the orgs we work with are getting close to this. Pessimistic-me thinks that. Optimistic-me thinks maybe, just maybe, we’re laying the right stepping stones for the rest. Lobo and I went back and forth on this with Lobo being the optimist 🙂
And yes, some of the Mumbai team had no idea what Britannia & Co. was. Tragic. Can’t believe that the new generations (dating myself here) are missing out on these iconic restaurants.
Also, if anyone can figure out the cash-only setup in the restaurant involving a guy sitting on a chair outside who you GPay to and get the cash (ala human ATM) with no commission fee… is this a hawala scheme? Whitewashing money for the whole neighborhood? A social experiment? We spent a a bit of time on the multitude of ways this could make sense. But that’s the thing. Like the mystery of the Britannia cashier or the elusive metric of “real impact,” we may not have the full answer yet. But we’re asking better questions, and we’re in good company while we ask them.
And that’s not a bad place to be.
Photo Credit: Kanad Sanyal
