Continuing my visit to impactful African startups, yesterday my fellow Investors Circle [and SEAD partner] members met with three (very different) startups tackling global health.
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First was MicroEnsure, an established, multi-country startup that is working in a very difficult space, selling insurance to the bottom of the pyramid.  The key learnings from the meeting were the successful channels for reaching that market, including partnering with mobile operators, the challenges of working and scaling across multiple countries, and most importantly, proof that it is possible to successfully and profitably sell products to that populace, even when the revenues are just $0.30/mo/customer.

Next stop was access.mobile, a SaaS company selling back-end logistics software to African hospitals and clinics.  Based in Kampala, Uganda, their Nairobi office was nestled in a gorgeous co-working space which felt just like an African Impact Hub.

​Society’s most pressing needs - improved healthcare, education, and environmental safety - are some of the largest untapped markets in today’s global economy. Social enterprises are trying to address these issues with sustainable solutions that can also drive profits. With 7 billion potential customers, where I see the greatest potential for impact is undoubtedly in global health. Technology has produced incredible solutions that can dramatically improve health, but the key is finding out how these solutions can actually reach populations and inspire behavior change.

Innovative technology by itself is not enough. How do we get people to actually use these tools? How do we circumnavigate the obstacles that prevent people from making better health decisions? The leading causes of death in the world are preventable chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, that are caused by lifestyle choices. Improving health requires improving day-to-day decision-making behaviors, such as choosing to visit a doctor or taking prescribed medications.

In the decades ahead, the most game-changing social enterprises will be the ones that incorporate behavioral design into their solutions. We have to start thinking about the cost of traveling to the doctor and the hassle of remembering to take daily medications.

The most successful social enterprises are designing creative ways to get their solutions to customers. The winner of the 2014 Hult Prize, the world’s largest social entrepreneurship competition that awards $1 million in seed funding, was NanoHealth, a company that tackles chronic diseases in urban slums through a combination of technology and human behavioral insights. The premise behind the company is that millions of patients go undiagnosed because they are either unwilling or unable to go visit a doctor. NanoHealth developed a low-cost diagnostic tool for chronic disease management and equips a network of community health workers to deliver care straight to their patients’ doorstep. Technologies like these can be iterated and distributed at nominally low increasing costs, but bringing the solution right to the patient was the key to widespread adoption.

Even the most innovative, easy-to-use technologies won’t be effective if they aren’t reaching their consumer base. Getting people to adopt new technology and sustain behavior change requires an understanding of incentives. Habits are powerful, and human beings are inherently averse to change. We require daily reminders and motivators to adopt a new tool or habit. Incorporating these strategies can help social enterprises embrace behavioral insights to design better solutions.

Behavioral design is enabling technology to have a huge impact on chronic disease improvement across the globe. In China, a public-private partnership created a cardiovascular monitoring system that allows patients to self-administer electrocardiograms and transmit data to specialists who can suggest treatments by phone. To increase treatment compliance, a program in Mozambique sends text messages to remind patients to take their medications on time and show up for doctor appointments.

There is incredible potential for technology to help people work toward the behavior change that’s central to improving health. The most challenging global issues demand creativity and resourcefulness. Social enterprises that want to solve health issues must create solutions with intrinsic behavioral design components. Only then will we begin to see technology really make an impact.

Follow Kayla Falk on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kaylacfalk

This post was written by CASE Executive-in-Residence and Sproxil Co-Founder Alden Zecha. He has over 25 years of experience in more than 35 countries and has founded several companies, including SEAD Innovator Sproxil, Inc., a social venture that provides a consumer SMS and app product verification service to help consumers avoid purchasing counterfeit products.

Based on my own work founding a social enterprise and my experience collaborating and networking with many other social entrepreneurs, I recently developed and delivered a workshop for Fuqua MBA students about launching a social venture. At the core of the workshop I shared three questions that I believe every social entrepreneur should ask himself or herself prior to launching a new venture. If we each honestly answer these questions prior to launch, I believe we can significantly increase the likelihood that our ventures will succeed.

1. Who are you actually serving?
   In many social ventures, there is often a distinction between who will pay you and who is your actual target beneficiary or end user. Both are critical but, in my experience, really understanding who you are serving and their true needs is core to your model. Do you plan to serve consumers, businesses, government, or society at large?
   
   A venture can serve many or even all of these, but each has its own specific needs.  The more you add to your venture’s targets the more complex your business model will need to be – and the more difficult it will be to execute the business well. You should carefully and deliberately choose which one(s) you want to serve and ensure that you don’t inadvertently plan to serve others.
   
   
   When we started Sproxil, we determined that our target beneficiaries would be both individual consumers and businesses. Although we would also provide notable benefits to government and societies at large, we felt that by focusing on the former two we would best achieve the impact we were seeking, which was to reduce the effect of counterfeit goods in the marketplace.
   

1. Will you serve more through indirect or direct means?
   When the goal of a social venture is to have an impact, the means to achieve that can be more nuanced than in a commercial venture where increasing numbers of customers or revenue is the direct path to sustainability and scale. A given social venture can potentially impact millions of lives, but to do so means that you can’t realistically directly contact and serve each person.
   
   This is a traditional dilemma social entrepreneurs face. Should your venture scale indirectly to broaden its reach and impact the most possible people, or go deep and serve people directly? Either is an honorable and admirable path; they just differ and those differences will deeply affect your business model and how you execute against your business plans.
   
   At Sproxil, we felt that we could best scale indirectly by affiliating ourselves with others so that we could leverage our joint strengths to maximize our impact. We recognized that by joining with others we could incorporate already well developed telecommunications solutions and focus on the most challenging parts of the problems we were working to solve.
   In my new venture, We Scale Impact, we have taken a similar approach as we advise clients on healthcare issues. We know that we don’t have all the answers and so welcome partnering with other consultants and practitioners to jointly work together to address difficult issues.
   

1. What defines success for your venture and why are you pursuing this venture?
   Building and growing a social venture is hard work and being clear about your own goals and motivations can steer you through the inevitable setbacks along the way. The definition of your venture’s success is likely defined in large part by your answers to the first two questions.
   
   But just as important is clearly understanding your personal motivations for launching the enterprise. Are you seeking to purely serve others, tour the world, gain fame, profit financially, become an expert on a topic or some combination of those? And what is your personal time horizon to achieve those goals? You need to see if there is alignment between your venture’s goals and your own personal ones (and those of any co-founders).
   
   For example, at We Scale Impact our venture’s goal is to improve healthcare globally by sharing our knowledge, experiences and skills with others. My personal goals are to continue to be intellectually stimulated by solving challenging issues, to work with interesting, intelligent and passionate people and to earn a reasonable income to contribute to my family’s wellbeing. These sets of goals are not the same, but they are also not in conflict.
   
   Goal misalignment doesn’t mean your goals are inappropriate or you are a bad person for not prioritizing what is best for the enterprise but it likely means that you aren’t the best person to run the venture long-term. Social ventures progress through multiple stages of growth and it often takes different people with different motivations and skillsets to carry the venture through those stages.
   

Answering the above three questions thoroughly and honestly will help you have a strong articulation of your organizational vision and help you to formulate a business model that is most likely to achieve success. Taking time to go through this process will also help you better define your personal role in launching the venture and when and where you might need to garner support from others.