Project description

Existing implementations of impact certificates (like hypercerts, social impact bonds or this ACX mini-grant) struggle with verification and valuation of outcomes. Awarding funding based on fraudulent or outlandish claims can jeopardise the integrity of this financing mechanism.

With this project, I plan to use the evaluation techniques of outcome harvesting and relentless monetisation to:

1. Identify beneficial outcomes that a nonprofit has helped produce

2. Calculate the cost incurred to create the outcome
   

3. Quantify the benefit to society from the outcome (using formulas developed by Robin Hood foundation: https://www.robinhood.org/what-we-do/metrics/)

By August-end, I will publish our findings on the benefit cost ratio of 3 nonprofits across the domain of environment, nutrition and education in Auroville (India). This project is a small step towards cross-comparability of social programs in different sectors, a necessary prerequisite for a social stock market or an impact token.

What is your track record on similar projects?

Our team consists of qualified researchers with a track record of media articles and papers in top peer reviewed conferences. The project lead Devansh Mehta is an investigative journalist with the ability to go deep into the rabbit hole and emerge with new knowledge.

1. Impact evaluation of the nonprofit media outlet CGNet Swara and their work during the COVID-19 lockdowns in India
   
   

   Paper:https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3530190.3534827
   

   Article: https://idronline.org/article/programme/crisis-relief-where-we-failed-and-what-we-learnt/
   
   

2. Collection and evaluation of data collected in Gondi (a low resource tribal language) to build a machine translation system
   
   
   Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16172
   
   

3. Investigation into an airline with ties to Azerbaijan's dictator receiving Pentagon contracts and loan guarantees from U.S. Export-Import Bank.
   
   
   Article: https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/8493-airline-once-linked-to-azerbaijan-s-ruling-family-got-us-loan-guarantees-military-contracts-planes

All peer reviewed publications can be accessed here: https://scholar.google.com/citationsuser=OaX2N8AAAAAJ&hl=en

How will you spend your funding?

To make this a success, we are requesting at least $4250 in funding to be allocated in the following manner:

$1250 as a prize for the nonprofit having the highest benefit cost ratio. Adding an element of competition will ensure there is full cooperation (and some gamification) of our evaluation exercise

$3000 in salaries for evaluators from April to August ($600 x 5 months). Verifying and quantifying outcomes is a non-trivial task looking at proof of outcomes created through interviews/records, calculating cost per outcome using past budgets, employing data science techniques to estimate an outcomes benefit to society and considering the counterfactual case (if the nonprofit didn't exist, how much impact would still have happened?).