Our 100 crore commitment: the Social Impact Fund and beyond
Our 100 crore commitment: the Social Impact Fund and beyond
Our goal has always been to support organisations that are solving some of our most complex societal challenges. We take an evidence-based approach to identify organisations that can demonstrate measurable and scalable impact. To further our mission, we are committing a total of Rs. 100 crore over three years with the aim of accelerating irreversible large scale social impact. Our core principles on which we intend to continue to operate remain the same as it has always been:
- Empathy – a key aspect of how we source opportunities, provide funding, and engage with our portfolio
- Evidence – a data-driven approach to maximising our impact
- Problem-Solving – a culture of driving irreversible positive impact
The first initiative under this commitment is the Social Impact Fund (SIF) where we will provide grant capital to non-profit organisations working at the intersection of technology, policy and impact. The SIF was the outcome of our learnings from years of being out in the field as an implementing organisation and making philanthropic investments. It quickly became apparent to us that the size of the task at hand could not be achieved alone – any issue in any given sector is likely to be the result of a complex confluence of factors. The SIF enables us to accelerate and expand our grants programme by offering multi-year unrestricted grant capital of up to Rs. 1 crore per year to organisations.
The SIF is just the latest step in our efforts to accelerate our impact – we have also been working on effective public service delivery directly with the government. Beginning with the implementation of the State Rural Livelihood Missions (SRLM) in Rajasthan and Haryana, we now intend to scale our SRLM work to other states.
These efforts working directly with governments brought us to another realisation – that the best way to maximise the implementation impact of governmental policies is sometimes to work on improving the policy itself. Their effectiveness can often be drastically improved by incorporating data and feedback from the ground to make sure measures have their intended effects. This is also not a one-time activity, but a continuous process of re-iteration that is constantly looking to improve the design and implementation of government policies. We are looking to leverage our experience liaising with governments and bring our principles of empathy, evidence and problem solving to the design of government policies.
India is at a unique moment in history. The government has to balance longstanding development goals like lifting millions out of poverty, providing job opportunities and increasing standards of living with responses to the existential threat of climate change. The government has set out ambitious targets and policies to achieve these two goals simultaneously. We intend to collaborate with both the government and non-profit organisations to best achieve these goals and fast track progress.