[MUSIC] We will be using the framework of due diligence. Due diligence traditionally is defined as a comprehensive assessment of a business undertaken by a prospective buyer. In this case, you're not assessing the strength and weaknesses of a business but rather, developing a clear understanding of the problem landscape and mapping the solution landscape in your issue area. This will allow you to uncover the barriers or factors that prevent us from achieving the desired outcomes. Good due diligence starts with a clearly defined problem and outcomes. Once these have been defined, the next step is to understand the factors that cause or create the issue. For example, if your issue area us low enrollment of girls in universities in Kenya, your goal is to understand the barriers that prevent or make it difficult for this girls to enroll in university. Is it because they're not aware of the opportunity to go to university, or can't they afford to pay university fees? Or is it because their school results do not meet university requirements? All of these questions seek to uncover the why of the problem. By answering these questions you will be mapping the problem landscape. There are a number of approaches you can use to answer these questions. The first approach is interacting with people who have experienced the problem. In this case, it is girls who have not been able to enroll in university in Kenya. This will start giving you ideas on why the problem exists. The challenge with this approach is that you are likely to be only able to ask a small group of people whose experiences may not be representative of the problems faced by the population of all Kenyan girls. Even if you ask 50 girls, their answers may be influenced by the fact that they come from the same area in Kenya whose circumstances and challenges may be different to the rest of the country. The goal here is to try and find a representative sample of girls whose barriers for enrolling in university is an accurate representation to the general population of young girls in Kenya. Engaging with people who have a lived experience of the challenge is a great way to get rich insights. Later, we will introduce the concept of design thinking, which is a powerful tool you can use to approach this engagement effectively. Now, whether you're going door to door or gathering your data through a survey, trying to get a representative sample can be quite difficult and time-consuming. However, in many cases, someone has already done this research, which you can consult. This leads us to the second approach, which involves looking at existing data and reports which have been published about this particular challenge. This involves drawing on research and reports that specifically looked at Kenyan girls. Those looking at similar countries may also be useful. Identifying research done on a large enough sample would be important in order to draw representative conclusions. In most cases, these reports or research publications will outline the data they have used and what factors they believe create or perpetuate the issue. The last approach is seeking the opinion of an expert on this issue. Most social and environmental issues have been studied for decades, if not hundreds of years, and there are experts, such as academics, researchers, and entrepreneurs, who have dedicated their work to understanding these issues. These subject experts can offer their opinions on the issue area based on experience. It is important to contrast these expert opinions with either existing reports and/or opinions from someone with a lived experience of the challenge. Who knows, you may uncover a subtle insight which has eluded experts for some time. In some cases, the second approach, drawing on previous research, has enough data for you to determine the key factors that cause or create the issue. In other cases, you have to use a combination of all three sources of information to get a clear picture. The ultimate outcome is that you will have an understanding of the social, economic, corporate, environmental, cultural, and political forces maintaining the status quo. The underlying assumption here is that if we tackle these factors, we might be able to achieve our outcome. That is, improving the enrollment of girls in university in Kenya. The purpose of the solution landscape is to understand who is already working to tackle the problem. What are they trying? What has worked and what hasn't? Answering these questions will reveal the resources which have already been dedicated to tackling the issue area and where the opportunity for further intervention may be. Your solution landscape builds on your problem landscape. In the problem landscape, you uncovered the key factors that create or contribute to your challenge. Now you start mapping the organizations and the projects that tackle that challenge. You can group these based on the approach they use to tackle the challenge. The approaches used to map the problem can be applied to map existing solutions. A critical piece of solution mapping is mapping which interventions work and which don't. Here, it is important to, as much as possible, focus on evidence, not just hearsay or opinions. For each solution or intervention you uncover, ask the question, what evidence do we have that this intervention leads to the desired or targeted outcomes? By mapping things that have worked and those that haven't, you'll be in a much better position to see where there are opportunities for new approaches and partnership in tackling your issue. The next question to ask is, what is missing from the solution landscape? Are there any market opportunities, missing links or actionable responses? What role do you see for future private, public, and social sector interventions or collaborations? This is where you start to explore what you believe are the missing links in the landscape. A useful tool to guide your thought process is the Impact Gaps Canvas, designed by Daniela Papi-Thornton. The canvas encourages you to ask what the gaps are at each level of your mapping. Key questions include unaddressed obstacles. What is missing or not working in each of the existing models? What are the unintended consequences of these efforts? After going through the due diligence process, you hopefully emerge with key insights about the obstacles of achieving impact in your chosen area. Additionally, you emerge knowing some of what has been tried, what has worked and what hasn't. And this should start sparking some ideas about new approaches or partnerships, which can unlock more impact. Some problems may seem simple, but a thorough due diligence process ensures that you test your assumptions, frame the challenge correctly, and avoid reinventing the wheel. Later, we will introduce design thinking, a tool which can help you have an effective and insightful due diligence process. [MUSIC]
