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Welcome to the Future of Business podcast produced by Oxford MBA students.
My name is Angus and I'll be your host for today's episode.
Today, we will hear what it is like to work in the impact consulting space for my fellow classmates.
Chris, welcome to the podcast. Chris. Thank you for having me.
I'm very excited to be here. So we're going to start with a question that we ask all of our guests on the podcast.
So what is a preconception that you may have had before coming to Oxford or the business school that has since changed?
That is a tough one. I will say that I did a bit of research before coming here, so I didn't have a lot of preconception.
But I, I think coming into this MBA program and the main reason why I chose it was that I knew that it has a strong focus on impact.
And I had a sense that a proportion of my classmates would be sort of people who are interested in having purpose driven careers.
And I would say coming here, I was surprised the extent to which that is actually true and the number of students who,
based on my interactions, seem to really care a lot about having a purpose driven career.
And so I will say I sort of expected it, but I didn't realise to what extent it will be true when I got here.
And it's been so inspiring learning about what my classmates did pre MBA or they what they want to do post the MBA and just seeing people
really getting engaged in different co-curricular activities across Oxford that sort of have a tie back to this question or point on impact.
So yeah, awesome. And of course you have a background in impact.
I don't know if you could maybe share a bit about your experience, what you studied at university,
how that led you to where you are today and of course, the impact experience that you've had back in Africa.
Yeah. So I sort of born and raised in Kenya. I went to high school there and then I had the opportunity to go study undergrad in the U.S.
And so I studied economics at Harvard with a bit of focus on international development.
And so I knew that post my undergraduate degree, I did want to explore working within the development space.
And I ended up coming across this firm called Dahlberg.
That essentially is a strategy consulting firm that mostly works with what we've traditionally called development clients or social impact clients,
ranging from governments, different government agencies, bilateral, multilateral foundations.
And so we essentially advise this institutions on the design, the strategy,
evaluation of different development programs with a strong focus on sub-Saharan Africa as well as Asia, and a bit of work in LatAm.
So that's what I have been doing for the last seven years. Before joining the MBA program, I spent about four and a half in client service,
so started off as an analyst creating a lot of PowerPoint decks and doing a lot of desk research,
which is essentially what you spend a majority of your time doing as a consultant.
And then the last two and a half years before I joined the MBA program,
I actually switched from the client facing role, and I worked as chief of staff for the firm,
which meant I worked really closely with our leadership team in sort of helping with the day to day management of the firm.
So that's that's been my journey to to here. So it's safe to say that in terms of impact, you have a pretty good grasp of what impact is.
Oh, well, that sounds like a very existential question because there's so many things that fall within the realm of impact.
And I would say that the way we define impact has definitely shifted over the years.
I think before working in impact for a lot of people meant either working in in government, in public service or working in an NGO.
And now that's shifting as the world of business, the world of public service, and this question of sustainability,
equality and building institutions that have this values embedded within them.
Increasingly, these things are emerging.
And so it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between when does when is your job impactful occurs and when is it not,
as businesses and different institutions increasingly sort of develop a focus on this areas?
And so, yes, I guess I've I've done a bit of worked in impact impact,
but I think increasingly for all of us, whatever we work, our jobs sort of have a thread back to impact.
Yeah. It's an it's an interesting point that you make because we are we're increasingly
moving to a world where people are not solely focussed on what they do,
but also focussed on the meaning and the purpose behind it.
So do you think I suppose on that note, that impact is something that's becoming ingrained in business,
or is it still something that we need to explicitly strive for on top of what we do in our normal daily jobs?
I think a bit of both. It's very inspiring to see younger people, not even our generation, like the folks who are a bit younger than us.
And seeing young people really seek opportunities or jobs where they feel there's a purpose
to what they do and demanding that from their employers and organisations and companies,
realising that you can get better talent by being a values driven or a purpose driven organisation.
And so. Increasingly, I think folks are demanding more from what they do on a day to day basis and, and, and organisations are responding.
I, I think like taking a step back a bit again.
When I was getting into the world of impact seven years ago, I think a lot of it was grounded around.
What we called international development. And so aid programs, a lot of the work that institutions like the world bank do or w.h.o. or the u.n.
Around alleviating poverty, promoting good public health outcomes, good education outcomes, or providing access to just basic goods and services.
And so when you thought about impact, that is typically what you would think about this aid programs.
And increasingly, people are starting to recognise the power of using market solutions to spark economic growth and ideally in the process,
also to reduce inequality. And I think the world has made a lot of progress.
I mean, I think looking at the sustainable development goals again there,
this huge audacious goals that sometimes can feel impossible to ever achieve.
But for each of these goals, when you actually look at the data, you can see that people's lives are improving.
We're pulling people out of poverty in some context.
Inequality is declining, but in other ways we are also regressing.
And the issue of climate change is the perfect example where every single day we are
living in this planet like things are getting worse unless we make super drastic changes.
And so I think on the one hand, there's a lot to celebrate in terms of the progress we've been able to make as humanity,
while at the same time recognising that we have such a huge way to go and increasingly we need to see this.
Problems are not just problems happening in in other places in in the developing world.
Rather, these are actually problems in our backyard.
Issues of inequalities are do not just exist in sub-Sahara Africa.
They exist everywhere. They exist in in in San Francisco with issues of affordable housing, for instance.
And one of the things one of the developments I noticed working in this space was increasingly specifically at the firm I worked at.
We would try to figure out what are the lessons we can pull for other regions that we've learned that we can then bring back to,
let's say, for instance, the U.S. in tackling issues of of of access to education or access to affordable housing.
And so increasingly we need to recognise that question of impact and development are everywhere, either in our backyard.
And so everyone has a role to play. What I think I found particularly interesting is when you mentioned that you're taking lessons
from one country and using it to apply to situations that may be similar in another country.
And going back to impact consulting as an industry, we also, of course, have impact investing.
And I'd love if you could share more about what are the kind of mandates you experience and impact consulting,
and how does that compare to something like Impact Investing,
where it's almost at the discretion of the funds where they want to put their effort into?
Yeah. So the main difference between those two sectors and I think it's great that you bring
it up because a lot of student ssbs are very interested in this to career tracks.
So impact consulting again it's it's very similar to regular consulting in terms of your day to day experience as an analyst, as a consultant,
as a project manager, what you're doing is very, very similar as you would be doing and another manager and consulting firm.
The main difference being the kinds of problems that you're tackling and who your clients are.
And so actually the best example that I can give to contextualise what we do within impact consulting is the go to project.
And so the kind of cases that we're encountering,
the issues we're addressing or the problems we're trying to solve within that
particular course are would be what you would be working on as an impact consulting.
So to give a specific example, this course, I'm taking the blended finance track within Goto,
and I was super excited to choose that particular class because I remember about seven years ago when I was starting out in Impact Consulting,
we had to advice one of the bilateral aid agencies in terms of their blended finance strategy,
which essentially meant that they wanted to increasingly use their funding not just to find and programs,
rather to figure out how can they use some of their funding to catalyse more private investments in developing countries or in emerging markets?
And so whether that ranges from investing in funds, in park funds by taking or expecting a lower return in order to attract more commercial investors.
And that is one path to to sort of promoting change or to achieving the change you want to see.
So, for instance, whether you want to promote the growth of SMEs in South Africa, for instance, and as bilateral agency or an aid agency,
you can choose to use some of your funding to co-invest alongside the banks in order
to incentivise banks to give funding to small and growing businesses in South Africa.
And ideally, by investing in those businesses, your aspiring economic activity and your generating jobs,
you're providing essential goods and services. And so, again, this is a particular thing we're doing within Cotu,
and it's a project that I a very similar project I did when I started off working in Impact Consulting.
And so, again, whether you're tackling issues within finance or issues within health or issues
to do with affordable housing or even issues to deal with climate change,
the whole idea of impact consulting is you're dealing with sometimes what feels
like intractable problems and you have to bring a systems thinking to it like it.
It you always have to take like what we typically call the multi stakeholder lens to solving problems.
It can't just be like one organisation of one company.
And as I maybe example I can give is we were trying to figure out how we can give access to clean energy, cooking energy for households in Kenya.
And I remember we had to think about how can we engage the Ministry of Energy to figure out ways where they can make clean energy more affordable?
And similarly, you have to think about how do you engage energy companies to invest in some of the innovative solutions that are coming up.
And at the same time, how can you invest in young and upcoming entrepreneurs that are coming up with really good technological ideas?
And so when you're thinking about solving a problem like access to clean energy, clean cooking energy, it can't just be about what can one company do,
but it's what can government do, what can policymakers do, what can donor funders do, and what can other other companies within the ecosystem do?
So that that is impact consulting, where you are playing this advisory role and really bringing together different actors.
Impact investing is very specific because it's just about placing capital in in different contexts.
And so the main difference being with impact and again impact investing is a spectrum.
You go all the way from sort of ESG investing to investors that are sort of really taking a
lot of risk with their with their funding to to sort of promote new and innovative ideas.
So, for instance, when you think about some of the investments that the Gates Foundation does, which is something you would call venture philanthropy,
it's like using their own philanthropic funding to fund ideas that maybe governments might not be able to find or ideas that
are too high risk that a commercial investor might not be willing to take that level of risk or the market feels very nascent.
And so that's where philanthropic funders like Gates can come in and say, we'll use our own philanthropic funding to invest in this space.
And you've seen them doing a lot of that within health,
whether that's vaccine development within energy as well, the development of nuclear energy as a power source.
And so yeah, so very interconnected. Those two spaces are very interconnected.
But on the one hand you are devising institutions, on the other hand, you're actually placing capital in ideas and businesses.
I particularly like the example of the go to project and for those listening,
the go to project is the global opportunities and threats assignment that has been given to the MBA cohort.
And what I love to know is, from your experience within the space, how how important is finance?
Actually, because especially from the African example,
we we live on a continent that does not have the same access to financial flows as other countries.
And whether you're in impact consulting or in venture capital, how crucial is it to getting these funds to where they need to be?
Finance and access to capital is sort of very, very, very critical to sort of development development journey or promoting economic growth.
And I think traditionally the way we've thought about development or economic growth has.
Been very focussed on what policies can government put in place to support the business environment for instance,
or what programs can donors find to improve health outcomes or education outcomes?
But what people are realising is that you need market solutions as well, which you cannot constantly rely on aid funding.
You need to figure out how to sustainable, sustainably produce affordable products that lower income households can afford.
Great. And so the only way you do that is by finding entrepreneurs, finding people with innovative ideas and funding them,
which then makes this idea of the flow of capital really critical.
You have a place like Silicon Valley that is awash with funding, like there's always an investor willing to invest in the next app idea or tech idea.
Some of them, again, have been very revolutionary.
And some of them we just they feel like playing I don't want to say plain stupid, but I think investors who invest in anything,
they just come up with with a slide deck and walk around Silicon Valley and they'll be an investor willing
to invest in your idea whether or not it's transforming people's lives or making people's lives better.
And so what if you could actually find a way to bridge the gap between supply of capital and where the demand sits?
Right. And where you really have the opportunity to transform a lot of people's lives,
where you have the opportunity to start bridging the gap with the Sustainable Development Goals.
And so the issue of finance and flow of capital becomes very important.
And so if you work in the impact space, there's no way that you can ignore how capital flows.
And you have to hold yourself accountable to learning how the world works.
And in a way, figure out how to bridge those gaps. And so I would say that I think it's very relevant that a lot of our go to
project has have a finance element to it because money makes the world go round.
Going back to to what you said about looking at this at the system with a systems lens.
One of the big things and the questions is, does the work you do impact actually lead to long term sustainability and behaviour change?
Have you been able to been able to look back at the projects you've done and been able to confirm whether you know,
okay, well we did this project and it has actually led to sustainable long term change.
Or is there still some work to be done in terms of creating solutions that really last?
I would say so I, I did a lot of work.
In the access to clean energy space during my time I Dahlberg and that ranges all the way from
promoting access to clean cookstoves for low income households to promoting access to clean fuels.
And so for those who don't have context, a lot of households still use fuel such as firewood or charcoal or kerosene,
which tend to be sort of dirtier, more polluting fuels.
And the impact of using this fuels or kind of this cookstoves that are not as clean is that you have a wide range of issues impacting that household,
ranging from the amount of time you might spend, for instance, trying to find firewood,
and which is typically a role that's normally played by women and girls.
And so they're losing time to do other things to health outcomes.
Again, using this fuels in your household can really impact the quality of air within the household.
And so it leads to a lot of household air pollution, which leads to poorer health outcomes.
And then there's also sort of time wasted, the amount of time you're spending, both finding the fuel or collecting the fuel and cooking as well.
And so there's an opportunity to really transform or have immense positive impact on a household by helping them transition to clean, clean cooking.
And it's it's not just the households that benefit.
It's also the community and the world at large, because, again, this fuel tend to be very polluting.
And so they're also contributing to green greenhouse emissions and effectively contributing to climate change.
So there's so many benefits you can have by helping households like typically low income households transition to clean fuels.
One of the very first projects they did, I remember working,
we were working for the World Bank to help them create an advocacy toolkit which they
would then essentially use to advocate for lowering of tariffs or taxes on clean cooking,
clean cookstoves that are being imported into different sub-Saharan African countries.
And ideally, by eliminating the top of the taxes, then you're making the cookstoves more affordable for households.
And I will say that having done that project back in 2015, I can see that there's been a lot of positive progress within the clean cooking space.
So, for instance, in Kenya in particular, there are a lot of households that have transitioned to using cleaner fuels,
to using cleaner cookstoves, because this items have become more affordable.
And it's not just an affordability question, but it's also raising awareness in telling people, hey,
actually, there are a lot of negative impacts from from from using some of the fuel options that you use.
And what if you could be able to afford an alternative source of energy that is not that much more expensive than what you use today?
Would you consider that? Right.
And so there's an element of education, awareness raising and just making this product available because there's also the question of availability,
like households would be willing to use cleaner fuels if there were more available to them.
And so if you're a rural household and the only thing that's available to you is charcoal and firewood,
like even if you could potentially afford an alternative source of energy, then you can't use it because it's not available to you.
And so I can say over the seven years I've worked in this space and I've done it to different variations of projects around clean energy,
access to clean energy, and I've seen so much progress happening.
I would say East Africa is actually a melting pot of innovation,
just different innovations that are happening to bring affordable products to households,
whether that's like, for instance, solar home systems as well, is is one of the innovations that have really caught on within within East Africa.
And those are some of the projects I worked on, like how do we bring funding to such entrepreneurs?
How do we bridge the policy gap? How do we go and lobby the government to lower taxes so that households can afford this product?
And so that's that's one example of an area I did a lot of work in.
And I can genuinely say I've observed the change happening like more and more households in Kenya using LPG cooking gas instead of, of, of wood fuels.
And so. Yeah, that's a very long winded answer, but I, I can genuinely say I've observed the impact of what we do on people's lives.
No, it's, it's it's amazing to hear.
And I think it's, you know, reassuring for everyone out there that the projects that are happening in the space are really making a long term impact.
And this being said, you've had the opportunity to experience these conversations from a wide range of views.
So, for example, you know, you you've you you're born and raised in Kenya.
You went to Harvard, you worked in the impact space.
Now you're in the U.K. You've managed to be in so many different locations that are at the range of development, so different to one another.
One thing that's always spoken about in Africa is. Does.
Can Africa afford to make that sacrifice in terms of being more sustainable than in the operations as opposed to other developed nations,
which didn't really have a constraint on things like fossil fuels?
Yeah. Or do you believe in the alternative side of the story,
which is African Africa can really be built from the ground up using sustainable
practices and be a beacon to the world and how you achieve economic growth.
Yeah, I would love to know your thoughts and if you have any experience in how this has been done.
I hope so. I, I hold the optimistic view that we can actually be.
And by we, I guess, I mean, I think as a continent or different African countries be a pacesetter in terms of positive innovation.
And the reason why I believe that is because we don't have a lot of legacy infrastructure that already exists, that then we have to transform.
Rather, we're starting from scratch. We have a blank slate to do things and build things in a better way from how it's been done in the past.
And I think there's so much innovation that we've seen coming out of the continent that
people would like sort of typically see has leapfrogged the sort of development trajectory.
I mean, one perfect example, I know this comes up so many times,
but it's such an inspiring innovation or an innovation that we're really proud of back in Kenya.
And it's so interesting when you see the rest of the world catching up, including the developed world,
like finally catching up when it comes to fintech or the use of mobile money.
And we're like, Yeah, we've been doing that in Kenya for 20 years and like everyone,
including my grandma, like can easily use you use mobile money and they use it on a day to day basis.
So that's one, for instance, perfect example of innovation.
And in this case, of course, I'm talking about M-Pesa that that that a few people have heard about,
which is this idea that anyone with a mobile phone and it doesn't even have to be a smartphone,
you could literally transfer money from your mobile phone to someone else's mobile phone and you can also use the money to purchase items.
So essentially, you have a bank account in your in your in your pocket.
And it's it's almost synonymous with day to day life in Kenya.
Right. And it's been around for so long and it's really revolutionise a lot of things.
And so that is one perfect example.
So I hope, as I said, I hope the optimistic view of we are definitely have the potential to be at the forefront of innovation.
We have the potential to be the pacesetter because we don't have to deal with legacy infrastructure.
Yeah. And it's a it's quite also reassuring to know that the talent that is being showcased on the African continent is getting recognised by,
by organisations around the world. And I think the most important thing is to, you know, really back ourselves when we say, you know,
we are not constrained by these issues, we can reframe these positively and we can showcase our tenant to the world.
So tying things back to impact consulting. How is the impact industry approaching these opportunities and what are some of
the actions the big firms are taking to make meaningful purpose driven change?
Yeah. So over the last couple of years, a lot of the big consulting firms have actually ended up opening offices across across Africa.
And. Some of what they do is impact consulting.
I think it's very difficult to. Two separate, just regular doing business in Africa from creating positive social change or inspiring economic growth,
which then in turn pulls people out of poverty and in turns like increases people income levels, secures people's livelihoods.
And so when I think about impact consulting or people who want to break into this space,
it doesn't have to be going to work for a philanthropic institution or a organisation that specifically focuses on, quote unquote, impact.
You can go work at a McKinsey in South Africa or in Ethiopia,
and you're working very closely with government to help them with their, I guess, agriculture policy rate.
And so their opportunities to break into this space by also following the traditional routes.
And so I would encourage anyone not to be restricted when they think about how can I work in the impact space?
I think you can do that by just following the traditional career paths that other people have followed,
just recognising that when you work in some of this markets, you have again to think about problems from a systems perspective.
And that's really why impact consulting or working in impact means it's it just
means that you're not just thinking about how to improve the company's bottom line.
You're also thinking about or what are what is the quality of jobs that the company is actually providing to the community?
Are the goods are the companies providing actually affordable to people?
Are not are they feeling a gap?
And so I would encourage anyone who is interested in the space to just figure out what they personally would want to be doing on a day to day basis,
and then really casting the net wide in terms of what companies that they can
actually work at and still achieve the goals that they have for themselves.
I agree. And I think that really goes back to the beginning of the episode when you
said impact is really becoming ingrained in what we do on a day to day basis.
And I hope this really inspires the people that don't know their next move and they aspire to a career, an impact,
but on maybe worried whether it's for them or not and to know that there's lots of
businesses involved in the impact space at the moment and it's just about reaching out,
I think set a good example of what we think business can be.
And just the end of this is a question we are asking all of our guests on the podcast this year.
What will the future of business look like in 100 years? Ooh, that is a good one.
I think we will be having fewer debates about sort of business responsibility to society.
And just like because we will be living in a very different society and from sort of feeling the impacts of what's what's happening today,
I think increasingly businesses will need to be providing products and services that are essential to and what you need to see our survival.
And so I think we'll have to move away from what is the purpose of a business?
Is it just to generate profit to what products and services are businesses creating and how are they impacting our lives?
Are they useful or not? Are they useful to our survival?
Because I think, unfortunately, unless things drastically change a hundred years from now, we might be living in a very survival mode type world.
And so the role of business would be to provide essential goods and services to ensure our survival.
Well, I hope we do get there. But Chris, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to come and join us today.
I've certainly learned so much about the impact consulting space, what it's like to have a career.
And I really hope people are inspired by what you have to give us and all the experience you brought.
And, you know, we're very lucky to have you in the cohort and I really look forward to following your career journey over the next few years.
Thank you so much for having me and I feel very lucky to be part of this year's cohort as well.
It's amazing. And this brings our episode to close a warm thanks to Grace for joining us today and the
insights we have learned from her career and impact consulting if you've enjoyed this episode.
Please feel free to subscribe so you can receive many more.
I've been your host, Angus, and we'll see you for the next episode from the Future of Business podcast.