Aflatoun is a Dutch non-profit organization focused on social and financial education for children between the ages of 6-14 years. The Aflatoun program is currently operational in 22 countries reaching over 500,000 children (approximately 200,000 of which have started either individual or group savings accounts), and program materials have been translated into 11 languages.

As we’ve grown, we have struggled to find a meaningful, accurate and cost-reasonable way of measuring our work and our impacts. That process is the subject of this post.

Aflatoun's aim is to help children learn to believe in themselves, understand their rights and responsibilities, save money, plan and budget, and even start their own school-based social and micro enterprises. We take a multi-faceted approach: providing our partners an educational programme for children, advocating for policy change in the area of Child Social and Financial Education, and coordinating a network of like-minded organizations and stakeholders.

In our early days, we tried a number of conventional evaluation techniques to track and measure our effectiveness but became increasingly frustrated with them. We didn’t feel these tools were able to properly disaggregate the value of the different streams of work we were doing. In response, we began exploring the emerging field of Social Return on Investment (SROI), because it seemed to offer a common format for analysing and valuing different endeavours. We’ve now been working to complete a SROI calculation for our work since 2005.

What we see as the key innovation here – and how this differs from a cost-benefit analysis approach – is that SROI aims to capture and value the social benefits of a particular intervention and report these in relation to more conventional financial returns. For example, SROI ratio of 2:1 indicates that for every dollar invested by an organisation two dollars of value – economic and social – are generated. Pretty appealing concept, huh?

It’s not easy to execute though. The historic difficult with using SROI analysis has been twofold:

• How to do the actual calculation of a Social Return on Investment

• How to do methodologically sound valuations of social returns

Since 2005, we have committed ourselves to overcoming these, working in partnership with two initiatives based in the Netherlands: socialevaluator.eu, a new social venture developing a web-based SROI calculation tool and Context International Cooperation, which has been doing pilot evaluations with 10 NGOs in developing countries using community members to do SROI calculations (an approach we like because it enables target beneficiaries to value programmes).

When we began working on our SROI calculation, it was an early attempt to put a value on the different types of work that we were doing and to analyse them in a common format. The process now allows all our work to be assessed based on the inputs that we put in. This contribution-based approach has required us to both budget and manage our organizational efforts in line with a well-defined strategic plan. In essence, the activities and cost structure of the organization have had to be aligned with the activities that are actually being performed. This gives us a clear idea of all our inputs, both in terms of both finance and labour, towards all of our organizational goals. It has also required us to keep track of the costs of implementation for our partners on a per child basis.

In the coming months, we will be doing a SROI calculation for both our work as a secretariat with socialevaluator.eu and adapting the participatory approach developed with Context for our partners to do for their programmes, starting with International Child Support this summer.

We expect these experiments to go well and enable us to improve our performance monitoring and better understand the different value we create through our work for both our partners and the children they support. We hope to be able to update CYES as we progress and, in the mean time, would be excited to hear from others working with similar tools and are happy to help anyone moving into this area.