Yesterday Doab Development hosted a webinar about social franchising. “Social franchising for scaling up” was one of our four original initiatives when we started almost a year ago, but it has risen as a higher priority this past month as the international development industry has changed so drastically. As USAID has been defunded and other bilateral, multilateral, foundation, and corporate investors have slowed their new obligations, development professionals and the communities we have served have been in a tailspin to grapple with the new reality.
The only issue that has become abundantly clear is that historical development will never be the same. For good or for bad, organizations and people who are still interested in supporting others in need around the world will have to reimagine their approaches. In the spirit of optimism (if not in actual sentiment at the moment), this disruption creates opportunities for innovation and new thinking. This includes the opportunity to make future efforts more demand-driven and locally led than historical grants and contracts have allowed.
One consideration for reimagining historical projects is social franchising, an approach that takes the commercial franchising model of replicating successful businesses with standardized procedures, centralized support, and quality control, as well as local demand for products and services. This approach has the power to make social activities more responsive to local needs, sustainable, and less beholden to large-scale government-supported grants and contracts.
Social franchising is not a silver bullet, though, and it does not make sense for every kind of project or even every development sub-sector. Scaling an effective commercial enterprise is very difficult to do. Scaling an effective business with social goals as well as financial goals is even more difficult. Add to this complexity the conversion of a historical bilateral project into a social franchise framework is exponentially more difficult still.
However, challenging times require bold new solutions, so this webinar was meant to generate some new thinking about the possible application of social franchising for historically successful projects. This webinar was an initial, exploratory step. Please click on the link here or photo above to hear the presentation, and reach out with comments and questions if you would like to join the conversation.
