Contributor: Kristina Mani, WG’22
To learn more about Kristina and the WGHV Team, click here.
Image Courtesy of Uganda Village Project Website
In a year of no travel and even limited Penn campus exploration, a group of HCM students joined together through Wharton Global Health Volunteers to expand outside the virtual classroom of our living rooms. We started a consulting engagement with Uganda Village Project in January 2021, at a critical juncture in the organization’s development and after a year of unexpected ups and downs.
Uganda Village Project (UVP) is a grassroots non-profit organization working in the Iganga District since 2003. They promote public health and sustainable development in the rural communities of southeast Uganda, through improved access, education, and prevention.
UVP has a unique model focused on bringing sustainable solutions to local communities in Iganga. UVP identifies communities that fall into the lowest quartile in sanitation and access to clean water. They then work in those villages for three years, building relationships, strengthening connections to existing infrastructure, and providing education that prioritizes prevention over treatment. This focus on prevention can ultimately help to stabilize a family’s income and, in turn, allow them to grow their wealth, invest in their children’s education, and be an even more productive part of their community. With a strong local presence on the ground, UVP serves as a trusted partner and provides reliable programming, with core program areas addressing HIV, malaria, water and sanitation, and reproductive health. Compared to other villages in Iganga, UVP has demonstrated a 13% increase in positive health behavior practices within villages they have worked.
UVP’s structure includes a small local staff as well as a US-based Board of Directors. They are uniquely strategic relative to other non-profits, as demonstrated in their development of 3-year strategic plans. As UVP prepares to draft its next strategic plan this upcoming fall, they engaged the Wharton team to help inform the planning process. Our remit was to identify the most effective growth strategies and prioritize areas of investment for the next 3-5 years.
Our team of HCM students, with varying backgrounds in healthcare and public health, worked with a core team at UVP throughout the semester to understand the inner workings of the organization and serve as a strategic partner in this planning process. We first developed an understanding of the industry-accepted lifecycle for non-profit organizations. While UVP has strong leadership and a strong local presence in Iganga communities, it still has the ability to grow significantly in revenue, operations, and brand awareness before it reaches the “mature stage” of a non-profit.
In order to advance the organization to this next stage, we recommended several steps UVP could take in the near future. This included further development of monitoring and evaluation techniques, building out local board capacity, and creating promotional videos to promote brand awareness, among other tactics. Furthermore, for its size, UVP’s finances consist of a relatively large proportion of funding from income-generating activities, highlighting the sustainability and independence of the organization. This ultimately led us to recommend specific opportunities to both grow existing and generate new revenue streams, while still focusing on expanding grant funding to secure reliable support in the near-term.
UVP’s income generation stems from an intern program, in which they recruit groups of international interns to work in Iganga for a fee every year. This contributes to both revenue and personnel resources, as interns are integrated into UVP staff. Yet, we recommended that UVP focus additional efforts on grant funding in order to diversify their revenue streams. With an initial focus on program-specific grants and funding sources of similarly sized non-profits, we are optimistic that UVP can grow its budget over the next few years to a point that would signal financial stability to donors. At that point, they will ideally be able to attract more prominent donors/investors and leverage their branding to conduct more effective, structured fundraising campaigns.
Additionally, our team conducted a robust evaluation of various growth opportunities UVP could consider exploring, ranging from growing their core programs to expanding geographically within Africa. We ultimately focused on potential opportunities to grow ancillary services, given this could leverage UVP’s existing expertise and align strategically to their current mission, while still being feasible from a cost investment and resource bandwidth perspective.
After evaluating a number of different opportunities, we recommended that UVP move forward with two key areas. First, we suggested they expand their intern program, building on their historical success. Increasing the size of their summer classes, running off-season internships, or even implementing U.S.-based internships for students interested in non-profit management all represent potential opportunities to generate additional revenue. We also wanted to find a way to monetize UVP’s unique operational and managerial expertise. To capitalize on this, we recommended that UVP pursue e-learning as a revenue generation mechanism. UVP could develop educational content on topics ranging from effective communication in cross-cultural teams to program monitoring and evaluation to working in Uganda. They could then explore pathways to distribute these learnings, whether through online courses, in partnership with universities and other non-profits, or even through a podcast. This opportunity would not only leverage UVP’s existing knowledge to generate revenue but also help with promoting overall brand awareness, perhaps driving future donations as well.
Overall, the UVP Board members were pleased with our research and recommendations. Working with this non-profit, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, a key learning was understanding their resource limitations. Operating within their budget to identify new opportunities for growth presented a challenge. We consistently kept this in the forefront of our minds to ensure our recommendations would be tactical and feasible. We are eager to see how UVP incorporates our findings into their strategic plan and works to implement our recommended programming over the next few years.
After working closely with UVP this semester, we are inspired by their vision of a future in which all Ugandan communities will have the means to effectively create and implement their own health and development solutions. We are humbled and grateful for the opportunity to have worked with them and contributed toward furthering these goals. We encourage our Wharton healthcare community to follow UVP on social media and even consider donating to the cause.
UVP’s Donation Page: https://ugandavillageproject.org/donate/
Contact Kristina at: [email protected]
Contact:
- Anna Chou Irving – [email protected]
- Lucas Sullivan – [email protected]
- Ben Sataloff – [email protected]
- Cindy Zhao – [email protected]
- Drew Guerra – [email protected]