Fiona Macaulay
Toward a World of Opportunity
Innovations Case Narrative:
Making Cents International
One evening in 1997, I sat in a shack in Khayelitsha Township outside of Cape
Ciudad, South Africa, and looked around at the ten adults who were about to be my
students in a microenterprise course. Some were unemployed, others were just
starting businesses, most were illiterate—and all were struggling mightily. The mix
of eagerness and uncertainty I felt was reflected back to me in the eyes of my stu-
abolladuras.
Putting my feelings aside, I dove into running the business simulation, describ-
ing a virtual marketplace in which the participants operate fictitious businesses.
Things started a bit slowly, but within half an hour, we were all engaged and con-
nected—and excited. These women and men grasped and increasingly mastered
the interplay of costing and pricing, analyzing the risks of selling on credit, y el
benefits of developing a negotiation strategy. We were all involved in this virtual
marketplace. Participants bartered and boasted as they finalized sales and tallied
their profits.
The debrief was momentous for me. After only two hours of interactive train-
En g, the participants confidently demonstrated a deep understanding of micro-
business management concepts. Why develop a negotiation strategy? To get a bet-
ter price! How do we do this? Understand your maximum and minimum price,
consider the other person’s point of view, and keep the relationship positive so you
can do business again tomorrow. Though they still had plenty to learn, the trainees
were ready to return home, draw on their experiences from the simulation, y
apply their new skills to making money the next morning, saving more wisely and
investing more strategically.
On my drive home, still feeling exuberant, I reflected on how crucial an expe-
riential learning approach is for teaching practical microenterprise and entrepre-
Fiona M. Macaulay is founder and CEO of Making Cents International, which finds
practical, yet innovative, solutions to development challenges and works closely and
respectfully with local partners. She was honored as a D.C. “40 under 40” Leader in
International Development and her work has appeared in the New York Times. Ella
is a board member of CAMFED. She has been a guest lecturer at Columbia
University’s School of International Public Affairs and Johns Hopkins’ School for
Advanced International Studies.
© 2013 Fiona Macaulay
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neurial skills. I realized this method had the potential to change lives: it allowed the
participants to build on what they knew, based on the premise that, given the right
tools and knowledge, people can learn more than they—or others—think they can.
The course capitalized on this, allowing participants to experiment and take the
risks involved in running a business while staying within the safe confines of a
aula. They were also re-enforcing or developing attitudes, learning skills, y
building confidence—all key to achieving personal and professional goals.
The next morning I woke up feeling despondent. It struck me that I had taught
ten people the day before, but nearly half of the population in South Africa was
unemployed. Además, cerca de 75% of the population was under 35, and I knew
that many of the world’s 1.4 billion young people between the ages of 13 y 28
would lead lives like those unemployed adults in Khayelitsha, because their school
systems are failing and they lack opportunities in and outside of home to learn how
to earn, save, and invest in the education that would lead to jobs.1
Pero, Pensé, what if we could equip young people on a massive scale with
entrepreneurial life skills like problem solving and planning, the confidence to do
things in new ways, and business management skills—and couple it with knowl-
edge about how to manage their money and save it in a safe place. Could that break
the cycle of chronic unemployment and limited economic choices? The seed was
planted. I knew I was going to focus on increasing economic opportunities for oth-
ers, especially children and teenagers. I recognized the need to reach young people
as early as possible with these crucial skills, using a method that made learning fun,
yet effective. I also saw how crucial it was to support the teachers and trainers on
the front lines of this new kind of experiential education. This faith in experiential
aprendiendo, joined by an understanding of the crucial need for local capacity build-
ing and practical responses to complex problems, underscored my approach to
serving youth, and more recently to developing the field of youth economic oppor-
tunity (YEO).
Two years later, en 1999, at age 26, I was ready to return to my family in North
America. I had seen how an experiential learning model effectively delivered
entrepreneurship training to low-income people in South Africa, and I was sure
the approach was applicable in many other contexts. And I couldn’t find any
organization doing anything similar using an effective and affordable model. So I
started one.
I looked for an approachable name for my organization that wouldn’t become
a meaningless acronym. I wanted the name to speak to the most important
clients—low-income youth and adults—and I wanted it to tell our collaborators
what we are about: helping people make, save, and invest their money, and our
belief that these are “must have” capacities. To me, it just made sense. And the
name of the organization was born: “Making Cents”!
Inspired, I was ready to roll my plan out to the world. But how? Which entity
could I partner with? The United Nations looked like my best option: it works
globally and appears to have a shared mandate, so I assumed people there would
be interested. I moved to New York City, in part to be near the UN headquarters,
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Toward a World of Opportunity
rented a small apartment, and called a toll-free number to register my new non-
profit. They told me the process would take 10 months.2 What? I want to start my
work tomorrow! So, the next day, I founded Making Cents International as a for-
profit social enterprise.
STARTING MAKING CENTS
It turns out that the UN is an impenetrable bunker for those who are inexperi-
enced, naïve, and unwise about the ways of the international development indus-
intentar. So, turning to other avenues, I presented my methodology to countless inter-
national NGOs, funders (corporate and private foundations, international overseas
development agencies such as USAID), and international development consulting
firms. I also introduced our curriculum to U.S. schools and programs serving
inner-city kids and to microenterprise organizations that serve adults.
In its first year, Making Cents was hired to equip organizations to offer basic
microenterprise training to low-income adult micro-entrepreneurs and teenage
students in vocational training programs in Guinea, Ghana, Tanzania, and Haiti.
People in Bolivia picked up our methodology and tools and used them to comple-
ment a training program for women learning technical skills to make handicrafts
for export to North America. And in New York City, an inspiring teacher, working
with high school dropouts who could not learn through the traditional chalk-and-
talk method, developed an employability course based on our practical learning
methods and curriculum. In Colorado, our tools were used to enhance a training
and lending program for young people. In Mexico, we developed a partnership
with a leading foundation whose founder and I shared a passion to bring entrepre-
neurial content to all low-income children and teenagers, both inside and outside
of the school system, so we can seed the next generation with crucial business and
entrepreneurial skills.
The organizations that hired Making Cents liked our commitment to building
local capacity and encouraging local ownership within development program-
ming. Both our training materials and our training-of-trainers (TOT) methods
were effective, fun, and invigorating for participants as they learned new skills.
Making Cents received enthusiastic reviews. For the trainers, the TOT developed
facilitation skills, trained them in planning and delivery, and taught them to adapt
the course to the needs of clients: out-of-school teenagers, farmers, microfinance
borrowers. The trainers said they were learning skills they could apply in their reg-
ular jobs, making them more valuable employees. To supplement their income,
many of the trainers already had small income-generating activities in addition to
their salaried jobs and they were excited about the additional business skills they
picked up. Juntos, the tools and the know-how equipped front-line staff of voca-
tional training institutions, women’s development NGOs, and microfinance insti-
tutions to deliver basic microenterprise skills to low-income, poorly-educated peo-
ple aged 15 and over. The training tool was high quality, durable, and affordable
and the trainer skills program was a one-time cost; this let our clients lower their
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Fiona Macaulay
per-person costs significantly while they increased the quality of the product they
were delivering.
GROWING PAINS
Mientras tanto, as a micro-entrepreneur myself—and de facto head of technical assis-
tance, marketing, operaciones, and finance—operating my business out of my apart-
ment with the sporadic help of family, I was facing some business management
challenges.
The first was the question of how to scale my work and position Making Cents
in the international development sector. At the time, Grameen Bank in
Bangladesh, a pioneer in microfinance, era 20 years old and the idea of support-
ing micro-entrepreneurs through access to credit for the poor had good traction.
At the first Microcredit Summit, en 1997, First Lady Hillary Clinton said that
microcredit was a paradigm breakthrough that had gotten people out of the “con-
ventional box of thinking about the poor. “ In the United States, many internation-
al NGOs and private voluntary organizations working in international economic
development adhered to the policy of reaching the largest number of low-income
people at the lowest cost. They saw additional services as cost-prohibitive or
unnecessary. That prevailing mindset didn’t match with what I was seeing and
what micro-entrepreneurs told me they needed.
También, as an entrepreneur learning to keep my own books, identify the best
sources of financing for my business, and make decisions about where to invest my
time and money, I had first-hand experience of the challenges of business owner-
barco. I was living the reality of what I was teaching: starting and growing a business
required business and financial skills, access to markets, mentoring, and a network
of other business owners facing similar challenges.
In meetings with youth-serving organizations, people sometimes questioned
me about the ethics of teaching teenagers and children about money: how to earn
it and think entrepreneurially. Was it appropriate to teach microenterprise skills to
people under 18? Few seemed to understand the reality: most school-aged youth
around the globe are in fact both “learning and earning.”
I also struggled to understand my place in the market. In this niche, I sought
to shape the dialogue about the need to support micro-entrepreneurs, y el
form that support should take. For children and teenagers, I advocated using
entrepreneurship and experiential learning to make school-based programs more
relevant and to bring essential knowledge, habilidades, and attitude development to low-
income communities so that these young people would be employable, or could
start and grow a business, whether by choice or necessity.
A second issue was being a for-profit organization. In the offices of bilateral
agencies and the oak-paneled meeting rooms of international not-for-profit organ-
izations, people viewed this type of work as pertaining exclusively to the non-prof-
it domain. I was offering an excellent product—my workshops—at a competitive
price, and I was committed. So why were they concerned about my status with the
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Toward a World of Opportunity
Senegalese women learn basic record-keeping
Internal Revenue Service? No one was getting rich here. De hecho, I considered bring-
ing my balance sheet to meetings, but decided that showing I was not making
money would also reflect poorly on me. When people asked if I was a “for-profit,"
I began to answer “not yet!” Clearly we needed to scale up Making Cents so that
we could hire more staff and find more clients who valued our approach.
Making Cents’ cash flow—and my motivation—were sustained by some mean-
ingful opportunities that allowed us to innovate. The Barbados Ministry of
Education hired us to mainstream entrepreneurship content into the school sys-
tema, as employers increasingly struggled to find workers with the appropriate work
ethic, attitudes, and basic skills to take advantage of training. This fit with a new
government policy and a new approach to workplace training: foster an entrepre-
neurial climate and empower young people to start businesses that will help their
communities and their nation develop. We developed a long-term contract with
the ministry. We would provide curricula and develop teacher know-how
to improve students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills and increase their
business acumen—and would transfer that capacity to the government employees
managing the program.
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Fiona Macaulay
FROM START-UP TO SCALE-UP
The year 2001 brought a breakthrough for Making Cents, as a Senegalese delega-
tion of microfinance providers came to Washington, D.C. They had hands-on
experience with our tools and were interested in taking the model to Senegal for
adults and young people. I developed close professional and personal relationships
with committed Senegalese experts in community economic growth. We learned
from each other and adapted our curriculum and delivered trainings to 850 peo-
ple who in turned trained thousands. This was applied research on steroids. Cada
night, week after week, we would tweak our plans for the next day and after each
course we would work through the weekend to improve our methods for the next
week. We were driven to make the training relevant for every individual—client,
farmer, borrower, student—and to deliver it in an appropriate way. A small USAID
subcontract became a large multi-year one.
In Senegal, over a three-year period, I watched the local organizations absorb
the microenterprise and entrepreneurship training tools and acumen. Vocational
training institutions, working with people aged 16 a 25, added business skills to
their technical skills training. Schools reported that students saw these courses as
more relevant; the entrepreneurial content showed them how—and why—to apply
math skills and to write clearly. The Senegalese National Federation of Women’s
Groups, the Federation Nationale or FNGPF, working with women 18 and older,
built a national training program around these tools. Those women who had
shown themselves to be the most talented trainers, with the strongest grasp of busi-
ness concepts, were designated as in-house facilitators. As a benefit of being two
steps ahead of the other women, they could provide relevant training and mentor-
ing to their peers; the roughly $8 US per training sessions that they charged their peers made the business worthwhile to them and affordable for the other women. The FNGPF members reported that they could manage their resources better and strike a better balance between saving, investing in their business, and personal spending. Through the work in Senegal and with other clients, we honed two character- istics of our approach: experiential learning and capacity building for individuals, grupos, and organizations using a model of knowledge transfer and accompani- mento. We looked more and more closely at how we could prepare trainers to train others using a cascade model, at how groups develop strategies, and how to plan projects in a demand-driven way. Clients’ solutions are often complex and unfold over a period of time; they cannot learn every piece of information or skill they need in one workshop. So, beyond one-time training, Making Cents began to accompany the client and to provide training, mentoring, coaching, and advice at appropriate points in the project cycle. In the early days of Making Cents, I likened our training packages to a four- wheel drive vehicle. It worked great in the roughest conditions: overcrowded class- rooms, poorly trained instructors, and a lack of information. But put it on a paved road with good infrastructure and it could really take off! I was both right and 122 innovaciones / Youth and Economic Opportunities Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/itgg/article-pdf/8/1-2/117/705045/inov_a_00169.pdf by guest on 07 Septiembre 2023 Toward a World of Opportunity Making Cents’ MicroEnterprise Fundamentals curriculum is adapted to incor- porate local value chains wrong. Steeped in experiential learning, the training materials could work very well in many settings. But the trainer, to succeed, also needed support. Many of the community-based trainers—who were often the most willing and affordable, and best positioned to deliver training and coaching to other low- income people—were only a step or two ahead of the people they were training. I increasingly understood that we needed more strategies to support them after they left our training program. We also needed to involve “the boss” in the training so he or she would feel ownership over the new approach. Without this, we found that many motivated trainers or loan officers returned to their organization only to hear, “Just tell them what they need to know in an hour; they don’t need to take time to talk about their businesses.” And teachers, who were looked to as business coaches, often lacked entrepreneurial attitudes and understanding of basic busi- ness concepts. In Senegal, to address these deficits, we tried an experiment. On the first day of a TOT, we ran the teachers through an accelerated business start-up course that culminated in selecting a simple food-based manufacturing business. They had five days to develop and implement a basic business plan for an enterprise they could start, run, and close in five days, with a maximum investment of $10 US.
They came up with jus du bissap (cold hibiscus flower tea, the national drink of
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Fiona Macaulay
A piece from Making Cents’ Agricultural Enterprise curriculum, used to
increase farmer’s income.
Senegal), confiture (jam), and beignets (small donuts). We told them they had to
focus on their training courses when we were in session. But outside of that—dur-
ing breaks, lunch, and before or after the training—they were free to, and expect-
ed to, operate their businesses and generate a profit. The trainers didn’t think we
were serious. The second day we urged them on. On the third day it all took off:
the training room and hotel lobby became a buzzing marketplace, and we had to
start issuing a small fine to any teacher “conducting business” while we were deliv-
ering the training content. When I arrived at the hotel breakfast buffet on the fifth
and final day of the training, I found it contained a silver urn full of jus du bissap.
Clearly my students had found a lucrative market! This focus on equipping the
implementers with the necessary information and motivation would continue to
resurface and drive the direction of Making Cents.
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Toward a World of Opportunity
FROM SCALE-UP TO EXPANSION
For our first 5 años, Making Cents added about one new employee per year. Estos
people brought new expertise and allowed the company to expand from our exclu-
sive focus on training to offer a broader suite of services, but still rooted in our core
emphasis on local capacity building, operating as equals, hands-on learning, y
concrete outcomes. In Jordan, we supported the development of a local not-for-
profit to help women who wanted to grow their businesses, formalize them, devel-
op a business network, and spread the idea of women owning businesses through
exposure in the mainstream media.
In Armenia we offered similar support to business owners; we developed a
business registration roadmap to help new business owners navigate the 19 steps
required to register a business. We also helped them navigate through the corrup-
tion around them because they could now point to an official document that
explained the process including where fees should not be charged, and advocate to
the government to simplify the process.
In Nigeria, we used our approach to teach small-scale farmers about key busi-
ness concepts: predicting and preparing for risks, developing strategies for periods
of high and low cash availability, and understanding the value chain to get more
profit out of their farming activities. Making Cents worked through the project
cycle with them, beginning with market research and then designing programs,
building capacity, and developing monitoring and evaluation systems.
Por 2004, we had provided technical assistance in 39 countries in the Middle
East, North Africa, África, Latin America and the Caribbean, and North America.
We had adapted 25 curricula into a total of 25 languages including Arabic, Francés,
Español, Russian, and six indigenous African languages. And we had strengthened
the capacity of more than 2,000 people and 200 organizaciones.
IDENTIFYING GAPS
The large, long-term economic growth programs we were working on all focused
on adults. I was pleased with the results of our work with low-income people but
we were still far from my dream of economically empowering young people on a
large scale.
Along with other Making Cents staff and our local partners, I started asking
how we could better equip young people with the ecosystem of support that was
being offered to adults. Informalmente, we began to link small, disparate groups work-
ing on youth economic development. The Ministry of Education in the Mariana
Islands wanted to learn from other governments experimenting with bringing
entrepreneurship into the classroom, so we introduced them to our colleagues in
Barbados. A group in Colorado wanted to know who else had experience bringing
banks into schools, so we introduced them to a seasoned children’s bank in Sri
Lanka. The more we linked organizations, the more I discovered a growing
demand for information—and a very small supply of it.
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Fiona Macaulay
En 2004, you could attend a learning event on adult microenterprise every
week. But if you were looking for conferences on international youth economic
desarrollo, you’d find a barren landscape: no conferences, no research agendas,
no donor coordination, no working groups. Not even informal gatherings. The few
learning events for stakeholders tended to be narrow in scope (p.ej. conferences for
researchers in youth entrepreneurship), internal to organizations, or geared to
serve specific program purposes, rather than the entire community of youth eco-
nomic stakeholders. There was little coordination or collaboration, and few tried
to build others’ capacity through hands-on sharing of lessons learned, promising
practicas, or field-tested tools.
How was the international development community going to learn how to
increase economic opportunity for young people? How could I strengthen and
expand Making Cents’ technical services? Without venues and vehicles to manage
knowledge on this topic, various organizations kept making the same mistakes as
others had before them: operating on a small scale, wasting resources, and failing
to create partnerships that could enable them to efficiently achieve their program
and policy objectives. I was also surprised that no one seemed to know about youth
demographics. Where I did find information, it often had an alarming tone about
the impending “youth problem.” This was frustrating! Instead of looking at the
scale of the problem, could we look at the scale of the opportunity?
I started talking to my Making Cents colleagues about organizing a global
forum for people focused on youth and microenterprise, one that would bring
together a range of diverse actors whose work affected the opportunities young
people had or lacked. But I was daunted by the size of the vision we needed.
Wouldn’t USAID or the World Bank be a more appropriate organization to con-
vene international actors on a large scale, rather than Making Cents International,
which was then a six-person operation?
Two years later, in October 2006, I was given the push I needed. I won a com-
petition and was accepted into a program designed to take growth-oriented U.S.
women business owners to the next level, by helping them focus on their vision
and how to achieve it. I felt on top of the world, until I had a crucial conversation
with the head business coach.
Coach: What is your vision, and what are you doing to achieve it?
Me: My vision is for every young person the in world to learn entrepre-
neurial skills so they have a greater chance to succeed personally and pro-
fessionally and achieve their full potential. I want to connect every organ-
ization in the world that cares about this topic together to share experi-
ences so we can reach more young people faster and better.
Coach: What are you doing to achieve it?
Me: Um, nothing.
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Toward a World of Opportunity
As those words left my mouth, I felt deeply embarrassed and felt I had let myself
abajo; I was jolted into action. Al día siguiente, I returned to my office to create the
conference I had always wanted to attend: a global learning forum focused on
increasing youth economic opportunities. Suddenly I was following those famous
words of Mahatma Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
BE THE CHANGE
I hired staff to coordinate the conference and drew up an advisory committee.
Whitney Harrelson, an advisory committee member, became the manager of our
conference, and together we conducted a global consultation to identify the prior-
ity issues. We put out a call for session proposals, invited leading stakeholders to
be plenary speakers, announced the conference program, and built partnerships
with funders to finance the learning agenda.
Just as our technical approach focused on facilitating knowledge transfer
between individuals, our conference would facilitate knowledge transfer between
organizaciones, panels and break-out sessions would provide hands-on and con-
crete interactive learning opportunities. We coached speakers not to simply
describe what they did, but to dissect their programs and explain why something
worked or what they learned when something did not go as planned. We asked
everyone participating in the conference to share their expertise and play the role
of capacity builder and mentor to their peers. We hoped that creating a neutral
playing field would help participants move past “success stories,” to explore chal-
lenges and opportunities to make our work more effective.
The Making Cents team worked hard to ensure we had representation from a
cross-section of stakeholders. We invited implementers, investigadores, profesores, fun-
ders, consultants, youth, and people from private-sector companies, financial
institutions, escuelas, ONG, and consulting firms. These were not just voices from
economic development, but also from areas that influence, and are impacted by,
youth as workers, empresarios, savers, and borrowers—including representatives
from the worlds of health and education, democracy and governance, and conflict
prevention. We prioritized meaningful youth participation and funded scholar-
ships so young people could attend and influence these discussions that affected
a ellos.
We also thought about evaluation. Our technical services people knew all too
well about the scarcity of resources and strategies to measure the effectiveness of
nuestro trabajo. Of course we could count the number of trainers and end beneficiaries
we reached, and we did qualitative follow up, but that told us little about what real-
ly mattered. How many of the ultimate recipients of our training started their own
enterprises? How many of those enterprises were still around three years later?
Were our trainees succeeding in raising their incomes? If Making Cents was hav-
ing trouble answering these questions, we reasoned, our colleagues must be too. So
monitoring and evaluation (METRO&mi) became a priority area for discussion at the
conference.
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Fiona Macaulay
Making Cents International team at the 2007 Conferencia.
Gender was also high on our agenda. How did girls need to be served so they
would not become disadvantaged women? I was deeply influenced by the research
of the Population Council and the evidence that a lot of youth programming
wound up targeting better-off boys and young men because they were the “low-
hanging fruit”: easier to reach than girls. In my role as chair of the CAMFED USA
Base, I witnessed the unique and deliberate work CAMFED was doing to
educate girls and support young women to help tackle poverty in rural communi-
ties through a variety of economic activities.
The Making Cents staff members poured their hearts, souls, and weekends
into organizing the conference and announcing it to the world. Then anxiety set
en. What if no one registered? What if the conference was just us and the 15 advi-
sory committee members sitting in a conference ballroom staring at each other?
We subsidized the conference planning with revenues from our technical services.
I began to worry that I wouldn’t receive a salary for the fourth quarter and might
even bankrupt the company.
But September of 2007 saw the first-ever global conference on youth and
microenterprise. We attracted close to 300 people from 28 countries who wanted
to invest their time and money to learn, compartir, and network with others working
on these youth issues. USAID and a number of forward-looking international
NGOs and private-sector companies helped underwrite our costs.
The results of the conference began filtering back even before people left. Nuevo
partnerships were started; senior staff planned to revamp the M&E in their organ-
izations; funders and future grantees found each other. In our survey, 98 por ciento de
people said they were satisfied or very satisfied, calling it a “different kind of learn-
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Toward a World of Opportunity
El 2012 edition of Making Cents International’s State of the Field
publicación.
ing event” and 70 percent wanted to return again next year. We agreed, and com-
mitted to organizing the second Global Youth Economic Opportunities
Conference the next year. A significant number of people commented on how
interesting it was to see the diversity of people who considered themselves part of
the youth microenterprise field. Thinking back, this was a signal about how far the
sector needed to move to embrace cross-sectoral youth programming.
I made a last-minute decision to leverage the contribution of each speaker by
capturing, analyzing, and synthesizing their presentations in a publication entitled
Youth Microenterprise and Livelihoods: State of the Field.3 The publication was
downloaded in 100 countries. It became an annual series and Plan International
wrote that it set “a new standard for conference reports in its comprehensiveness,
readability and usefulness.”4 And a professor at American University uses the pub-
lication every year in a course on youth in international development course; she
says “it provides a wealth of perspectives and initiatives that have both theoretical
and practical implications… It helps students understand the role that internation-
al actors play in engaging the global development and policy communities on crit-
ical issues.”5
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One particular finding from the conference survey influenced us in our new
role of helping to fill in knowledge gaps in the youth development field: stakehold-
ers recognized the importance of developing and delivering appropriate financial
products and services to young people, but they did not know how. We knew we
had to address this at the next conference. But when we reviewed the research, nosotros
found very little on this topic—and even fewer experts. What we did find was pio-
neering organizations that were independently piloting youth-inclusive or youth-
specific financial products.
THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
Apparently, we needed more than just a conference to close the enormous knowl-
edge gap between young people and appropriate financial products and services.
How do you develop a learning event when no one knows enough to teach it—or
has sufficient content to cobble together course materials? Our answer was to host
a seminar course: we invited the pioneers in the sector to share their work around
a series of learning questions. From this laboratory setting, the direct outcome was
“Emerging Guidelines for Linking Youth to Financial Services,” which is summa-
rized in Figure 1.6 The guidelines were published in Enterprise Development and
Microfinance.7 They also formed part of a briefing paper and presentation for the
2011 Microcredit Summit, the largest microfinance gathering in the world. Y
key lessons were highlighted in an article on cultivating the new generation of
young clients published in the Journal of Social Business.8 Financial institutions
reported that these resources helped them to understand an untapped market and
to meet both their financial and social bottom lines.9
Using this same approach, and involving many of the original organizations
and people, Making Cents went on to facilitate the process that led to three open-
source tools for youth-inclusive financial services that are now being used by
organizations including the Tunisian NGO Enda Inter-Arabe, Save the Children,
Freedom from Hunger, MicroSave, PEACE Ethiopia, and the Young Entrepreneurs
Program in Kosovo.
Por 2012, Making Cents International’s youth-inclusive financial services and
learning resources had reached over 200 institutions and more than 2,500 individ-
uals through direct training and technical assistance; we had reached thousands
more via websites, conferences, and other events. These learning products have
influenced the development of over 30 financial products delivered to an estimat-
ed 1.5 million youth in the developing world.10
Mientras tanto, our knowledge management (KM) activities informed the techni-
cal services side of the company. Making Cents focused more and more on finan-
cial inclusion—a top concern among the stakeholders we work with. By shifting
our focus, we made the inclusion process more accessible and value-added.
Advocacy-oriented interest groups had long focused on why the historically
underserved groups should be better integrated into projects that would ensure
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broader economic growth. En cambio, we focus on how inclusion could actually work
en la práctica.
Hoy, financial institutions seek us out to help make their products more
accessible to young people, and to prepare these young consumers to use the prod-
ucts to improve their livelihoods and well-being. Thus we have one foot in the door
of both the financial services and non-financial services sectors. This lets us act as
an honest broker, or market maker, between traditional actors in micro-enterprise
and microfinance who want to better understand how to make their products
more accessible to youth consumers. The market research approaches and pro-
gram design methods that we have developed create opportunities for two types of
grupos: the advocates and the micro-enterprise organizers. They can each feed into
the work on access and readiness that the other is doing. Ahora, instead of each side
being standoffish and frustrated by the other, they have shifted to being practical
allies and partners.
RAPID GROWTH OF A SECTOR
The three years between 2008 y 2011 saw an explosion of interest in the North
American international development sector and in funding for youth economic
desarrollo. Many different actors and donors entered the field. Suddenly, youth
employment had jumped to the top of the international development agenda, especialmente-
cially for those working to stabilize fragile states. Then a wider consciousness
developed about meeting the needs of young people and helping them become
economic citizens.
Helping drive this consciousness was the World Bank’s 2007 report on devel-
opment and the next generation.11 Its analysis of the demographic dividend was
crucial. It explained that yes, today’s world includes a greater proportion of young
people than ever before, and they need a lot of services. But it saw this phenome-
non as a potential advantage. These large populations of young potential workers
are the engine behind rapid economic growth: now that the dependent populations
(children and the elderly) are relatively smaller, especially in the developing world,
surplus earnings can go into investments that drive productivity. But if this work-
ing population is to be productive they must learn skills and find or create employ-
ment within a specific window of time—when they need to be healthy, educated,
empleado, and working in a favorable policy environment. If not, an enormous
uneducated and disenfranchised population could become a liability. Many devel-
opment professionals were shocked to learn that for some countries, this window
has closed, and for many others, it would be closing within ten years.
Then the 2008 global financial crises put a spotlight on jobs, habilidades, y juventud
unemployment. Y 2010 saw the advent of the Arab Spring and the influence of
the largest-ever population of young people. Private-sector companies interested
in investing in emerging economies flagged a key barrier: a lack of qualified
employees. Soon, public-private partnerships popped up to address this problem.
And the year from August 2010 to August 2011 was declared the United Nations
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Emerging Guidelines for Designing and Implementing Youth-Inclusive
Financial Services
To achieve the desired impact on youth and be able to offer quality integrated
financial services at scale and on a sustainable basis, financial services providers
should take seven actions:
Involve youth in market research and product development. Paying atten-
tion to the particularities of the youth market and involving youth in product
development processes may lead to simple yet critical changes to new and exist-
ing products and delivery channels.
Develop products and services that reflect the diversity of youth. El
youth market contains sub-segments related to age (legal age), life cycle stage
(marital and parental status), género, education, employment status, and vulner-
capacidad. Consider these differences when designing and delivering products.
Ensure that youth have safe and supportive spaces. Safe spaces help build
young people’s confidence and enable them to take advantage of opportunities.
This may involve infrastructure considerations, delivery mechanisms, and social
redes.
Provide complementary non-financial services for youth, or link youth to
a ellos. Such services include mentoring, financial literacy, cultivating a savings
cultura, life-skills training, and support in livelihoods and workforce develop-
mento.
Focus on core competencies by utilizing partnerships. Assess and comple-
ment institutional strengths and weaknesses by collaborating with youth-serving
organizaciones, escuelas, training institutes, and other entities, particularly in pro-
viding safe spaces and non-financial services.
Involve community. Include family, escuelas, profesores, and other local
grupos, to mutually reinforce and enhance the effectiveness of financial and
non-financial services.
Establish institutional readiness. Establish a strategic rationale for serving
youth, and institutional readiness, including adaptable policies and appropriate
staff capacity.
Year of Youth.
In response to these developments, we were both shaping the times and adapt-
ing to them. We changed the name of our conference to the Global Youth
Economic Opportunities Conference so we could include, and reflect the impor-
tance of, cross-sector youth programming, and could welcome stakeholders
focused on workforce readiness.
At our fifth anniversary conference in 2011, we looked back: five years earlier,
no one could have imagined how far we had come. In my opening remarks I noted
three developments.
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Thanks to the determination of key funders and dedicated practitioners, nosotros
can now quantify the return on investment of investing in adolescent girls: cuando
girls’ school attendance increases 10 por ciento, a country’s economy grows by 3 por-
cent.12
We have moved from recognizing the immediacy of the issues to arming stu-
dents with the skill sets to enter the present and future workforce. Por ejemplo, en
Liberia, universities are working with private- and public-sector partners to create
Centers of Excellence in engineering and agriculture that will produce graduates
prepared to meet the country’s most pressing development needs.13
Youth represent a viable, low-risk, and growing market. Organizations around
the world are serving young people with minimal reported risk to their portfolios,
que van desde .03 percent to a maximum of 3 por ciento. Young people are showing
that they may be less risky clients than adults, given the right combination of finan-
cial and non-financial services.
Our annual conference was well-regarded; USAID designated it a “go-to”
annual event, as did other leading funders and international NGOs. We were told
that the conference plays a unique role in bringing together disparate, yet essential,
actors in the YEO world. Pero, I had to ask myself, how do we know we are accom-
plishing enough?
IS IT WORKING?
We needed to find out if more young people were getting jobs or starting business-
es as a result of our learning initiatives that provided stakeholders with new knowl-
borde, herramientas, and resources. In the business sector, companies can clearly assess the
impact of KM: they can calculate cost savings, efficiency improvements, y
increased profits. But when we use KM for international development, our bottom
line is program impact. How do you structure an M&E framework to measure that
kind of impact? The international development community has yet to reach con-
sensus on a standard approach for measuring and evaluating KM activities, y
often groups don’t do it at all.
Making Cents makes it a top priority to evaluate our knowledge-exchange and
partnership- building initiatives. We want to ensure we are facilitating high-
impacto, scalable, and sustainable programs. We use the Ripple Model, cual
includes a four-level approach, to evaluate each of our initiatives.14 The Ripple
Model recognizes the type of contributions KM can make in initiatives for socio-
economic development, producing a series of “ripple” effects, each of which grows
in its potential to influence. This model is based on the concept that knowledge
exchange catalyzes change at various levels, as shown in the four-circle diagram.
Like a stone thrown into a pond, the delivery of a knowledge-sharing activity
or tool is the first level of impact, called Knowledge Exchange. A multiplier effect
activates a second ripple, Knowledge Capital, increasing the impact with the tan-
gible and intangible results of the activity or tool (p.ej., documentos, habilidades, inspira-
ción, relaciones, procedures, etc.). En este punto, the impact has the potential to
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Cifra 1. The Making Cents Knowledge Management M&E framework.
reach those who did not attend the event or did not have access to a document
before it was shared. As individuals and organizations learn from one another,
they begin to change the way they do things, deepening their impact on the third
ripple: Changed Practices. Finalmente, people change their practices, and performance
mejora, leading to profound impact. We refer to this stage as Performance
Improvement.
To monitor the first two levels of the framework, we collect quantitative and
qualitative data through surveys and interviews with members of the YEO com-
munity. We know the reach of the conference through the number of participants
and the countries they come from. We can also understand how the information
being exchanged is affecting programming.
To assess the highest level of impact – improved practices and growth in pro-
gram scale and sustainability and strengthened partnerships – we also collect anec-
dotal evidence. Por ejemplo, from a survey we conducted after the 2009 conferir-
ence, we learned that BRAC, the Bangladesh-based NGO, connected with Intel at
our conference. The partnership they formed brought Intel computers into girls’
clubs in Bangladesh. This enabled the young women whom BRAC supports to
learn IT skills that boost their employability. Through interviews after the 2011
conference, we learned that World Vision applied new knowledge gained at the
conference to improve its youth programming. It also gained access to organiza-
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tions that provided the information it needed to develop evidence-based program-
ming. Finalmente, at the 2012 conference, Fundación E of Mexico received concrete
feedback on its model that supports Mexican immigrants living in the United
States who hope to invest in Mexican businesses. This was vitally important to the
grupo, as one of the first examples of a national government investing in young
immigrants in the United States.
Making Cents continues to learn about learning and we plan to update and
share our M&E framework as we explore the best way to do this.
THE NEXT GENERATION OF COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AND ACTION
En 2012, as Making Cents and the Global Youth Economic Opportunities
Conference continued to grow and change lives, I started feeling restless again. El
conference is a valuable venue for growing the YEO field, and people gain so much
momentum there, but they tend to lose it with the friction of time.
More and more people asked our leadership team to do more: extend the con-
versations, build relationships, and continue sharing throughout the year. Y,
once we took a step back to consider our knowledge generation work, we renamed
our KM practice area. It is now the Collaborative Learning and Action for Youth
Economic Opportunities Institute, or Co-Lab. Co-Lab’s strategy for 2013 a 2015
includes six activities.
1. Develop multi-year learning agendas. Actualmente, Co-Lab has two multi-
year learning agendas that focus on technology and youth, and on economic
opportunities for youth in rural areas. For the technology agenda, we are seeking
answers on how the synchronous emergence of mobile technology, ubiquitous
access to high-powered tools, and powerful data analytics can widen or converge
inequalities across regions and between generations. Our strategy to answer these
questions involves engaging the founders of companies involved in “positive dis-
ruptive” technology, including Indiegogo, Bkash, Souktel, Digital Divide Data, y
SamaSource, as well as representatives of Microsoft, Facebook and others. The Citi
Foundation is an instrumental funding partner in this effort, contributing field
knowledge and experience gleaned from other partnerships and posing key ques-
tions to promote dialog and encourage testing new program in the broader youth
development field.
Our second multi-year learning topic is intentional and informed program-
ming for rural youth, a neglected segment of the population, along with awareness
of research, herramientas, and proven methods for applying knowledge to one’s own pro-
gram. The MasterCard Foundation is supporting the collaborative learning and
action agenda we call Opportunities for Youth in Rural Areas.
2. Support applications. How many times have you read a report, listened to
a presentation, or met someone at a conference that inspired you to improve your
work – and then didn’t follow through? Making Cents is increasing our support to
our stakeholders by sharing information in ways that others can adopt and adapt;
we have launched a series of learning events we call Apply It.
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3. Scale up and involve new stakeholders. Especially in developing countries,
stakeholders often do not have a voice in, or participate in, the traditional KM
activities, such as attending conferences, or publishing and broadly disseminating
their work. So we are expanding the ways we give a microphone to these people,
significantly aided by the global trends of increasingly ubiquitous and affordable
internet access and lower cost hardware and software.
4. Leverage technology to help accomplish all of these goals. We manage
www.YouthEconomicOpportunities.org to serve as a central repository and town square
to share knowledge. Making Cents’ Co-Lab use complementary technology to cre-
ate high-tech learning opportunities that complement or supplement “high-touch”
in-person events. Por ejemplo, at our 2012 conference, the Enterprise Uganda
Foundation presented a replicable approach to youth entrepreneurship develop-
mento. People ranked the session highly and asked for more information about how
to bring it into their own organizations. En respuesta, Making Cents organized an
“Apply It!” webinar to bring this tool to a global audience.
5. Focus on innovation. Innovation is the root of Co-Lab’s work, part of our
DNA. We are still experimenting. We are intrigued by examples of crowdsourcing
and by its speed, but we have seen YEO actors fail in several attempts at online
crowdsourcing. So we decided to try a high-touch approach. Walmart asked us
how it could lower the cost of crucial soft-skills training and make it more avail-
able and accessible to those who truly need it to find work. The diverse individu-
als we invited to answer that question held an exciting three hours of exchange that
involved drawing, debate, head-shaking, and some Ah-ha! moments. Como resultado,
Walmart is continuing to explore the question with partners including Mozilla and
the Khan Academy. It has now commissioned a survey of interested companies to
develop a common baseline for core soft skills.
6. Use what’s in our DNA. In our internal 2013 Co-Lab strategy session, nosotros
reviewed seven years of feedback from our global network of learning partners. Nosotros
wanted to understand which of our offerings keep our partners contributing and
consuming information, given the demands on their time and resources. Nosotros
boiled it down to nine characteristics on a flip chart—as shown in the photo below.
After seven years of facilitating partnerships and interactive learning between
stakeholders working in a range of sectors, Making Cents has established a reputa-
tion as trusted convener, knowledge hub, facilitator of dialogue, and honest broker
of information and new partnerships. This lets us ask the crucial questions and
elicit the honest answers that inform the development of more effective YEO pro-
gramming.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
En 2013, youth are on the radar screen of private sector, bi-lateral, and multi-later-
al organizations. We all know we need to equip young people to achieve their
potencial. The question is how to put meat on the bones of good intentions and sta-
tistics. The YEO field acknowledges that young people need 21st-century skills, bet-
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Why is the Co-Lab Effective?
ter education to prepare them for employment, and access to financial services.
And more and more programming addresses the needs of girls and young women.
Technology is increasingly being used to supplement or complement activities. Como
a sector, our job is to build on what we know works and shift the question to how
we implement good policy and practice.
It’s exciting and important to have multiple organizations working to increase
economic opportunities for young people; they have an important role to play. Pero
we also see churning and confusion about the role of each actor. I propose that we
organize ourselves better so we can work more cohesively, perhaps through nation-
al and regional strategies. Our sector needs established measurement practices and
standards so we can compare apples to apples—not apples to pineapples. Hoy,
the YEO field is where the basic education field was ten years ago: la gente es más
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Fiona Macaulay
aware of our importance but they need to harness the urgency of the cause with
more evidence-based efforts that achieve measurable results, escala, and sustain-
ability.15
Youth Mainstreaming Practices
Our day-to-day work as an organization is more closely linked to practitioners in
the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors than to global policy makers. Thus Making
Cents is well aware of what we will need if we are to effectively include youth: ambos
innovation in technical approaches and intervention design, and excellent public
policy direction and incentives. De hecho, our Co-Lab experience shows us when and
why we get the genuine breakthroughs in youth inclusion: they happen less often
because someone finds that investing in a given program is a good solution for
youth, and more often because smart investments in youth solve a given social
challenge that governments or markets want to see addressed.
A good example of this is Making Cents’ current focus on youth in rural
areas—which has arisen largely because donor policy has shifted towards specifi-
cally including youth in rural development (particularly agricultural) programa-
ming. Early work by youth advocates in this area focused more on what youth
wanted or aspired to, and the education and training opportunities they needed to
achieve that—so the resulting programs have seen youth as beneficiaries or clients
of necessary social investments. Because of this perspective, the emphasis on social
inclusion was often pitted against the need to be competitive: people thought that
one could be achieved only at the expense of the other. Making Cents adopted a
different approach: by asking instead how youth inclusion can enhance competi-
tiveness, we are exploring not only constraints to youth inclusion but also the con-
straints that we can help to alleviate by including youth. Making Cents worked to
integrate a rigorous youth lens into activities that assess value chains. We ask ques-
tions like these: How can youth inclusion address clear gaps in the value chain in
areas such as service provision or transport? What are the binding constraints to
this participation? This approach results in strategies that improve value chains.
These strategies are both oriented to the market and focused on including youth.
Youth participation strengthens the entire value chain, and young people are seen
as full-fledged economic actors and stakeholders. As a result of mainstreaming,
over the past seven years, the issue of involving youth in meaningful ways and
shaping economic opportunities to serve them has moved from being nearly invis-
ible, to being front and center.
Youth Engagement
Four teenagers in Sierra Leone taught me a lesson: how crucial it is to have youth
at the table when deciding what is best for them. En 2006, Plan International held
a planning workshop for a West African group developing a strategy on youth
financial inclusion and skills development. During the workshop, the adult
“experts” dismissed the idea that the definition of youth be extended beyond age
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24. The teens from Sierra Leone jumped up horrified, waving their arms. Ellos
went on to educate us about why we needed to consider the definition of youth
more carefully, and country by country. They used their country as an example. En
Sierra Leone, those who are now in their late 20s were living through civil war dur-
ing the years they should have been in secondary school. Programs like those the
Plan offered were their second— and last—chance.
Afortunadamente, far more youth are having their voices and preferences heard.
Foundations, corporations, gobiernos, and civil society organizations prioritize
meaningful youth participation. Youth are engaging in, and leading, activities
across the spectrum of youth development. Julio 16, 2013 saw the United Nations
Youth Takeover. The floor was given to Pakistani teen Malala Yousafzai, whose key
message was that education is a right—and that young people demand that right
be fulfilled.16 Decisions about what to fund, who to involve, and how to implement
are no longer the exclusive domain of “experts” such as government ministers,
CEOs, and teachers. Youth activists demand the services and opportunities that
they know they, their families, and their communities need to succeed in the 21st
siglo.
BACK TO THE BEGINNING
As I reflect on my 18 years in economic development, my most fulfilling experi-
ences, through our Co-Lab Institute and our technical services, have been working
as part of a team of teams that provides grease, glue, and fuel to drive the YEO sec-
colina.
Khayelitsha was that Cape Town township where I led my first training using
the Making Cents model. This year, Sizewe Nzima, a young man operating his
business in Khayelitsha, was named by Forbes magazine as one of Africa’s best
young entrepreneurs under 30. I am encouraged to see that entrepreneurs and
social entrepreneurs are beginning to thrive in areas where operating conditions
were traditionally difficult if not impossible and few had the chance to learn entre-
preneurial and employability skills. If Sizewe can come this far, imagine what the
rest of the world’s 1.8 billion young men and women can do. Making Cents will
accompany them on their journey. Join us!
1. Jane Battersby, “The State of Urban Food Insecurity in Cape Town,” Urban Food Security Series no.
11: Kingston and Cape Town: Queen’s University and AFSUN, 2011.
2. En los Estados Unidos, an organization that wants not-for-profit status must first register as a com-
pany and then submit an application for tax-exempt status to the Internal Revenue Services (IRS).
I misunderstood the process: the organization can operate while it waits for the IRS response on
its application.
3. Available at http://www.youtheconomicopportunities.org/state-of-the-field
4. Plan International. Encuesta posterior a la conferencia. 2011.
5. Hanna, Loubna. Email message to Fiona Macaulay. Junio 6, 2013.
6. Making Cents International, 2008 State of the Field in Youth Enterprise, Employment and
Livelihoods Development. Washington, corriente continua: Making Cents International, 2008. .
7. Storm, Lara, Beth Porter, and Fiona Macaulay. “Emerging Guidelines for Linking Youth to
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Financial Services”. Enterprise Development and Microfinance. December 2010: 1755- 1986.
8. Lara Storm and Fiona Macaulay, “Growing Potential: Microfinance-Plus Approaches to
Cultivating the New Generation of Young Clients,” The Journal of Social Business 1 No. 3 (2011):
80-101.
9. The National Confederation of Cooperatives in the Philippines reported that our youth-inclusive
financial services training gave them “the chance to understand an untapped and huge market”
and to meet their “financial and social bottom lines.” Post-conference survey. 2008.
10. Making Cents International, report to the MasterCard Foundation, Enero 2012. (Private report
based on results of phone interviews with partner institutions.)
11. World Bank, World Development Report 2007: Development and the Next Generation.
Washington, corriente continua: Banco mundial, 2007.
12. The Girl Effect, Girl Effect Factsheet, 2013. http://www.girleffect.org/about/
13. This work is being performed by the USAID/Liberia Excellence in Higher Education for
Liberian Development (EHELD) proyecto, implemented by RTI International.
14. Mark Turpin, Joitske Hulsebosch, and Sibrenne Wagenaar, “Monitoring and Evaluating
Knowledge Management Strategies,” IKM background paper; Bonn: IKM, 2010.
15. I thank Clare Ignatowski for this point, made in a recent conversation.
16. Yousafazi entered the media spotlight in 2012, after she survived a Taliban assassination attempt.
She was targeted for her advocacy for girls education.
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