Entrepreneurs who focus on providing affordable and sustainable housing need data to verify the adoption of their product/service to survive and impact data to scale. One such example is a social enterprise focused on affordable housing. Having built more than 80 homes and created more than 2000 jobs in Uganda, it identified a need for leveraging impact insight to make strategic business decisions and scale.
Smart Havens Africa’s data was disconnected across various sources, such as CRMs and other survey platforms. It needed integrated data for business intelligence.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Consolidating all data into a single pipeline is complicated and expensive.
- Sopact addressed the data integration challenge efficiently to save time and money for Smart Havens Africa.
- Smart Havens Africa has successfully connected data sources and has a dynamic live dashboard for internal and external use.
Need for Affordable Housing
According to the United Nations, the absolute number of people living in slums or informal settlements grew to over 1 billion, with 80 percent attributed to three regions: Eastern and South-Eastern Asia (370 million), sub-Saharan Africa (238 million), and Central and Southern Asia (227 million). It is estimated that around 40% - in some cases, 75% - of the population of fast-growing cities in developing countries is housed in squatter settlements without basic services. Adequate housing is a human right, and the absence of it negatively affects urban equity and inclusion, health and safety, and livelihood opportunities.
Traditionally in a developing country such as Uganda, people build incrementally as their resources allow, so housing is a process, not a product. As a result, Uganda’s housing situation is characterized by inadequate quality and quantity in rural and urban areas. By 2022, Uganda’s population is projected to be about 48 million. The population growth is expected to require more than 3 million more housing units. This massive gap denies people opportunities such as higher education, health, and economic development.
The founder of Smart Havens Africa, Anne Rweyora K., and Will Broad believes the home is more than bricks and mortar. It is the ticket to the education they could not receive because their parents spent most of their earnings on a roof over their heads. This rent poverty is a key reason for them to start Smart Havens Africa, a sustainable social enterprise providing affordable housing in Uganda. They especially reach out to women because they believe a safe, high-quality, affordable home transforms lives.
Just intention is insufficient for a social enterprise such as Smart Havens Africa. Social enterprises struggle to not only demonstrate the impact of affordable housing on families and communities but use impact data to make strategic business decisions. Sopact has helped bring Silicon Valley technology to impact management and measurement for affordable housing social enterprises.
Impact Investing Housing
Smart Havens Africa (SHA) is a social enterprise committed to transforming lives and building communities. They provide high-quality, affordable housing to historically disadvantaged clients. Based in Uganda, Smart Havens Africa focuses on providing a pathway to homeownership for low-income families, particularly those headed by women. Smart Haven Africa also engages women as their construction worker employees. It provides safe, well-paying, and dignified employment to women who may also become homeowners. Thus SHA has two sets of stakeholders. Construction workers and homeowners. SHA wants to see if its efforts in improving the lifestyle of homebuyers and construction workers are working. What is changing?
Smart Havens Africa collaborates with impact investors to secure essential impact capital, focusing on defining and implementing an effective impact strategy. This strategy is developed in partnership with Sopact and Miller Center. For data collection and impact reporting, the organization leverages a blend of stakeholder feedback, gathered through Sopact Survey's offline features, and combines this with sales and financial data sourced from Salesforce. The synthesis of this information is skillfully managed using Sopact's Impact Dashboard and Impact Reports, ensuring a comprehensive and insightful approach to impact analysis.
With the support of the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, Smart Havens Africa partnered with Sopact to start its Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) journey.
Smart Haven Africa had a very basic Salesforce system that they manage internally with occasional customization with expensive external consultants. It collects some of the demographic and financial data on Salesforce. Its goal was to build a single system to help collect data from homeowners and construction workers and understand their services' efficacy. To achieve this, they needed to:
- Build out data strategy.
- Prioritize outcomes
- Identify what data to collect.
- Integrate all data into a single platform (SHA was unaware of this challenge but, it was an ultimate price as part of Sopact engagement)
Access to quality housing is transformative. This transformation begins at an individual level and radiates to families, communities, and beyond. The two earliest challenges that organizations working to bring transformative change face are: (1) not enough data or (2) disconnected data.
Sopact helped Smart Havens Africa overcome both of these challenges.
Data Solutions
Identifying and Filling Data Gaps
When Smart Haven Africa built a comprehensive strategy and selected metrics to learn the business and impact insight, it soon realized some data gaps. When an organization takes an Outcome journey, available operational and financial data is insufficient. Outcome metrics also require stakeholder sentiment. To fill this data gap, a survey with carefully chosen questions was created and executed by Sopact. It helps achieve the ultimate goal for Smart Haven Africa to use, have a complete impact on learning, and grow what is working.
Having the right IMM system in place doesn’t just demonstrate impact but helps social enterprises identify, fill, and learn data gaps to scale.
Connecting Disconnected Data
Smart Haven Africa uses the Salesforce system to collect operational data like many sustainable social enterprises. Often such a system collects demographic information at the time of application. To learn the complete causality of Smart Haven Africa’s affordable housing work, analyzing only survey data or operational data in silos is not enough. We needed to put all the survey and operational data together to have a single source of truth to learn,
- Is SHA improving standards of living through homeownership?
- Do SHA’s stakeholders continue owning their homes by following healthy financial habits?
- Has SHA improved the stability of the homeowners?
- What is the impact of homeownership on the safety of their lives?
Image: 2021 Data snapshot from the impact dashboard
The Sopact team connected all the data sources for SHA to overcome the challenges of dynamically calculating NPS scoring and having all the outcomes insight on the dynamic dashboard for strategic decision-making. Making such connections requires immense in-house technical expertise or an expensive external data team. Such capacity for social enterprises does not exist but is very critical for their survival. It is a significant contribution of the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship to provide unique support by partnering with Sopact.
Social Impact of Social Enterprise
Integrated data for business intelligence.
Consolidating into a single data pipeline is complicated and is typically quite expensive. Sopact directly addresses the challenge of data integration. Smart Havens Africa has successfully connected their data sources and has a dynamic live dashboard.
CEO Anne Rweyora says it “has reduced the effort of continuously measuring impact from a very time-consuming manual process to seamlessly receiving data directly…” An integrated system allows Smart Havens to use technology to learn continuously from their data and make strategic business decisions. This is something that for-profit businesses have prioritized for some time due to greater devoted resources. Sopact is leading the charge to bring this technology to social enterprises and nonprofits.
Investors are supporting data collection.
Sopact’s partnership with Smart Havens Africa resulted from an initiative by the social enterprise accelerator, the Miller Center for Social Enterprise. This initiative highlights that accelerators and other investors can guide social enterprises by prioritizing impact management and measurement. Providing social enterprises like Smart Havens Africa with the resources to manage data collection fosters learning capacity and growth.
Social enterprise impact
As a result, Smart Havens Africa can confidently demonstrate their impact with clients reporting improved health, safety, wealth, and skills.
Image: 2021 Data snapshot from the impact dashboard
- 77% of stakeholders started saving after joining SHA
- 96% of home buyers can afford the desired lifestyle
- 85% portfolio retention
- 100% first-time homeowners
This significant social impact shows Smart Havens Africa is truly changing lives.
Affordable housing is a global issue. As we have seen in our work with other organizations, such as Capital Plus Financial, social enterprises that measure and manage their impact can help eliminate this social problem.
Photo: Smart Havens Africa, construction workers.
