Cohort 2 Business Performance Evaluation Report: SPRING Monitoring and Evaluation – March 2018

The programme is being implemented by a consortium of partners led by Palladium, involving brand and industrial design experts, global thematic experts, and affiliated country managers. The programme will support four cohorts of businesses to reach vulnerable girls in nine countries spread throughout East Africa and South Asia. The Cohort 2 Business Performance Evaluation (BPE) report provides an evaluation of the business performance of SPRING's 18 Cohort 2 businesses. The report aims to respond to the pertinent questions in the SPRING Evaluation Framework, which relate to the effect of participation in the SPRING accelerator programme on the businesses. The BPE will test part of SPRING's Theory of Change, with a focus on the outcome-level changes of how business performance might be adapting as a result of SPRING. The report draws on the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) data for all 18 businesses, detailed case studies with six businesses, participant surveys from Bootcamp 1, Bootcamp 2, and the End of Cohort (EoC) event, and an analysis of existing background documents shared by Implementing Partner (IP). The findings indicate that SPRING businesses continue to target girls within the prescribed SPRING parameters (10-19 years old) but do not do so exclusively, often targeting the same product or service to girls outside this age bracket. Girls' access to economic resources to purchase the businesses' products or services has been a further challenge. The report also highlights the effectiveness of Human Centred Design (HCD) in helping businesses refine their SPRING product, service, or business model. The introduction of a second bootcamp in Cohort 2 allowed businesses to learn, implement, and reflect on their HCD experience and its application to their business prototype. The bootcamps are separated by a business-focused HCD research process applied to businesses' prototypes. Both these changes have improved the SPRING businesses' experience of SPRING and supported their understanding and application of HCD as a research and design methodology. Businesses used HCD as a research methodology to explore a myriad of issues related to their prototypes, including pricing, girls' aspirations, branding, and user experience. The process assisted businesses in both proving and disproving assumptions they held about their prototypes and adolescent girls. For some businesses, this meant a significant redesign of their proposed prototype. For others, this meant a pivoting away from girls as a potential market. The report also examines the extent to which businesses have achieved their SPRING development goals. SPRING has defined the launch of a business prototype as an indicator of the business achieving its SPRING programme goals. An assumption within the SPRING Theory of Change is that 12 months will be sufficient for a business to engage with SPRING and launch a prototype. For one third of the Cohort 2 businesses, this assumption did not hold true. Two of these six businesses are expected to launch prototypes outside the 12-month window, and four are not expected to launch at all. These same four received no prototype funding from SPRING, with two of them effectively disengaging from SPRING. The report concludes that while achieving the donor targets associated with girl reach and business scale, it is too early to tell whether reaching the girl as end user has an equitable impact as placing the girl within the value chain. The report provides lessons learned and recommendations for future cohorts, highlighting the importance of HCD in helping businesses refine their SPRING product, service, or business model.