Our approach to sustainable impact is to evaluate, measure and review each project from three important perspectives:
Let’s get greener
The African Impact Foundation firmly believes that uplifting, empowering and improving communities should not have a negative impact on the planet. Being ‘greener’ is a new – but important – goal of ours, and we are in the process of designing and implementing measures to minimize the impact of our projects on the environment.
It can be a challenge finding the right balance between fulfilling the immediate needs of a community and ensuring that a project has a minimal impact on the environment. Sometimes the greener route is also the more expensive route, which means that it takes longer to raise the funds. This in turn means that communities need to wait longer to have their needs met. It is important that beneficiaries understand why this is, so educating them about the long term benefits that greener options can have for both them and the environment is vital.
Project pre-assessment
Using a detailed scorecard, we thoroughly evaluate each potential project. In addition, we analyse the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a project (SWOT). Finally, we examine the estimated costs and calculate a detailed budget.
This groundwork helps us to plan the best approach to setting up the project and allows us to identify any potential problems that we may need to overcome before detailed planning and fundraising can begin.
Removing our active involvement
Because self-sufficiency is an important aspect of true empowerment, it’s important to us that our beneficiaries do not stay dependent on the African Impact Foundation in the long term. Our project plans always look at how and when an individual, family or school will be ready to move forward without our active involvement. This structured removal of our involvement at the appropriate time enables beneficiaries to benefit from our involvement but also to eventually move forward independently.
However, even once we are no longer actively involved we continue to monitor beneficiaries’ progress and remain available for support and guidance if needed.