As a Matter of Impact: Scaling LivelyHoods. This scaling toolkit analyzes critical success factors for LivelyHoods’ expansion both domestically and internationally. These factors are analyzed in tandem with a menu of business strategies LivelyHoods can implement to facilitate the scaling of the enterprise. The business strategy menu will include a matrix and explanations to optimize revenue streams and reduce costs of LivelyHoods’ operations.

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Partnership evaluation toolkit. These partnership evaluations provide LivelyHoods with an assessment of its current partnerships throughout Tanzania and Uganda. These assessments include a SWOT analysis of business and impact models to determine potential synergies and opportunities in LivelyHoods’ current and future partners. 

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Mission

LivelyHoods creates job opportunities for youth and women in slums so they can work their way out of poverty and realize their potential.

Challenge

Evaluate the impact and success of LivelyHoods’ expansion initiative.

Research Activities

To assess LivelyHoods’ current operations and scale-out initiative, we travelled to urban and rural areas throughout Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda and met with leadership staff, sales agents, customers, and partners. We conducted 36 interviews to understand the enterprise’s operational strengths, challenges, and opportunities as related to expansion. We also observed sales-agent training sessions, consulted with four partner organizations, and attended the first Global Distributors Collective Conference to compare LivelyHoods’ operations with industry best practices. We identified critical success factors to scaling and gained key insights into LivelyHoods’ partnership activities.

Key Findings:

1. 1. International partnerships delimit markets for future expansion. Partnership activities have the potential to mitigate risk and cost in entering new markets. With the right implementation strategy, partnership activities can evaluate new geographies without significant expansion costs.
   2. Trust networks are integral to LivelyHoods’ model. Trust is a key factor in driving a branch’s sales as well as reducing agent turnover. Trust networks are informally utilized throughout LivelyHoods’ business and impact models, but have yet to be codified into official operations and sales agent training.
   3. Sales agent retention rate documentation is critical to LivelyHoods’ triple bottom line. Measuring sales agent retention effectively will facilitate the process of synthesizing and implementing strategic business decisions.

Working with the GSB Fellows program was a complete net positive! It required very little resources on our part as the Miller Center staff and fellows took great care to understand our needs, scope out the project, and take on all logistics and planning for the engagement. The fellows were very well prepared, flexible, and dedicated to providing useful deliverables with valuable insights.

–Claire Baker, Director of Development LivelyHoods

2019
Social Enterprise:
LivelyHoods

Fellows:
Richie Garger
Economics, Environmental Studies
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Skyler Kriese
Environmental Studies
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Blog

Faculty Research Mentor:
Stephen Carroll, English