Since 2016, Social Impact (SI) has provided management consulting services in strategy, Monitoring, Learning & Evaluation (MLE), Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI), organization development, and capacity strengthening to various country offices and strategy teams within the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Who is our client?
With over 1800 employees, the Gates Foundation provides grants to organizations partnering to generate impact on health, nutrition, agriculture, education, and other development outcomes to save and improve lives globally. With a special focus in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in particular, Ethiopia and Nigeria, the Foundation has established several country offices and works hand-in-hand with federal and sub-national governments, as well as regional and continental partners across Africa.

Social Impact’s Work
As a trusted advisor to the Foundation for seven years, SI has worked with three country-regional offices (i.e., Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Africa Regional Office) and three different strategy teams (i.e., Global Education, Primary Healthcare, and Immunization) based in Seattle. Through repeat work over the years, SI has developed a practice with multiple, concurrent projects and client teams designed to deeply engage with countries through various forms of support. Our work has ranged from developing country plans and health strategies, designing and implementing portfolio-level MEL solutions like results frameworks, theories of change, data analytics, and dashboards to coaching leaders, program officers, and grantees. SI has supported leaders and program officers within the Foundation to better articulate their work and successes, understand their gaps and challenges, and link their work to country-level impact.

Our Results
To date, SI has completed more than 8 different forms of learning assessments and evaluations, developed three different country-level strategies and plans, designed more than 50 portfolio-level RFs, and packaged countless leadership slides and reports with health analytics, learnings. Today, we have more than 17 internal staff and senior consultants deployed across various geographies and workstreams leading the work and with innovation in mind. Recently, SI has begun to develop creative solutions, like performance dashboards to accelerate data visibility and learning within and across portfolios, and has deployed innovative approaches, like contribution analysis and throughlines, to help the Foundation tell its impact story.

Over the years, SI has deployed a highly responsive consulting practice that leads with human-centered design approach, integrates elements of co-creation, testing, and iterative solution design, while balancing our role as partner and trusted advisor to Foundation leaders to help them make sense of complexities in the contexts in which they operate and help them lead their teams. Thanks to our high-quality engagement, our work continues to expand in both services provided and geographies—with continued visibility of our products and solutions to drive Foundation leadership decision-making and programmatic impact for those in need.