IDEMS Social Enterprise Impact Bonds
To fund critical day-to-day activities, IDEMS is introducing Social Enterprise Impact Bonds, offering mission-aligned investors a practical route to supporting impact alongside fair returns.
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IDEMS Social Enterprise Impact Bonds are an investment offer for working capital loans for six years at a fixed interest rate. Aligned with the timeline and interest rate of impact loans in the UK, Social Enterprise Impact Bonds allow IDEMS to secure capital from mission-aligned individual investors.
While our ability to secure and repay cash flow loans has built our confidence in offering this financial instrument to investors, investment in IDEMS is a form of unsecured debt with inherent risk. IDEMS Social Enterprise Impact Bonds cannot be readily traded (as with listed stocks) and are not covered by statutory guarantee or compensation schemes.
Amount raised of £411,675 target
Overview
Data and sensemaking siloes, gaps and power imbalances are among the most significant impediments to delivering impact in local contexts and to scaling impact globally, as needed to address UN SDGs and bring millions of low-resource and “left behind” communities into equitable systemic participation. Yet by design, existing digital technologies not only fail to address, but often reinforce and exacerbate, these siloes, gaps and imbalances.
IDEMS impact mathematical scientists are developing the groundbreaking digital frameworks, infrastructure and products that meet and match (rather than reduce, flatten and “optimise”) offline social complexity to address these local and systemic data gaps, siloes and imbalances.
Our team members embed in Impact Innovation Collaboratories, expert multidisciplinary collaborations focused on addressing systemic grand challenges. In this context, we develop an understanding of the barriers to, and needs for, data sharing, capture, governance, and sensemaking for scaling impact. We map how these challenges play out across complex global and local social networks, relationships, and behaviours, and the consequences for global and local impact programmes.
In this applied context, the IDEMS team conceives, develops, pilots pioneering human-centring digital innovation to cost-effectively, sustainably deliver and scale impact in and across variable contexts and communities globally. With partners, we conduct research trials to gather ongoing evidence of innovation impact.
Across Collaboratories, IDEMS gains insight into common gaps and needs, which helps us conceive and develop foundational impact-enabling digital infrastructure.
IDEMS currently participates in collaborations through grant-funded contracts secured with expert academic researchers and implementing NGO teams. Enabling innovation R&D is indirectly funded by these grants—and by the reinvestment of any surplus IDEMS financial or team resources—in service of protecting the social mission of transformative technology.
Unsurprisingly, our lean and efficient applied impact innovation model leaves little room to manoeuvre, particularly given the pay-on-delivery (or later) aspect of many contracts. Having the equivalent of four months of cashflow would be transformative enabling better strategic decision making.
IDEMS Social Enterprise Impact Bonds are a mechanism for raising mission-aligned working capital to absorb the cash-flow challenges that emerge from impact grant funding. This funding is often released either on completion of impact deliverables (for small contracts) or quarterly in arrears (for larger contracts).
Social Enterprise Impact Bonds are conceived as working capital loans that fund IDEMS’ day-to-day operations, freeing up any organisational surpluses to be reliably invested in original innovation R&D and advancing our ambitious growth agenda. In particular SEIBs will enable IDEMS to support key strategic areas.
Staff recruitment and retention
As we increasingly gain evidence of impact and demand for our prototype and pilot innovations, we see the need to build organisational capacity in preparation for future growth. We are continuously developing relationships with current PhD students and postdoctoral talent to enable us to recruit new rare talent.
SEIBs will enable us to proceed with strategic recruitment in advance of future needs.
Continued collaboration development
Existing Impact Innovation Collaboratories have given our team unprecedented access to field-leading experts, multidisciplinary collaboration, and implementation partners and community stakeholders around the world as needed to research, conceptualise, develop and pilot transformative impact-enabling technology. In this context, our research and NGO partners are essential and invaluable, leading RCTs, publishing validating evidence of impact, and helping scale digital impact programming, as made possible by our innovation, into new contexts around the world.
SEIBs will enable us to consistently support active Collaboratories despite the natural ebbs and flows of external funding.
Directed growth through product development
As we successfully prototype and pilot innovations, and validate their impact, we’re beginning to develop user-friendly impact products and services, enabling innovation to more easily be picked up, locally adapted, and iteratively evolved by non-technology experts partners and local community stakeholders.
SEIBs will enable us to put time in to grant and other funding applications to pursue strategic directed product development.
Where and how SEIBs allow IDEMS to work
IDEMS Impact Innovation Collaboratories provide the foundations for deeply technical R&D and practical application deployment that includes iterative, multi-context adaption with local stakeholders and field-leading experts. Expert-led research trials not only ensure that our innovation is doing no harm, but that it is significantly, measurably improving outcomes.
At the heart of our innovation model is the understanding that impact scales sustainably and affordably when a range of experts and affected stakeholders are empowered to own, control and iteratively evolve impact programming, as is relevant to their knowledge, expertise and social networks.
Experts continuously research and iteratively evolve programming and enabling innovation based on systemic data and insights. Local stakeholders adapt, control, and iteratively evolve that programming for their communities and contexts based on local data and insights. All are supported by pioneering technical innovation that makes data-based digital systems transparent, deeply interoperable, and easily adaptable by non-technologist stakeholders across complex, highly variable global systems.
Mission-aligned funded for Impact Innovation Collaboratories allow IDEMS to break with the prevailing “move fast and break things” model normalised by Silicon Valley. Despite all its known harms, this model continues to shape the direction of frontier digital innovation, irresponsibly centring technology (at the expense of valuable social structures, norms and behaviours) and introducing new harms with costly, long-term societal consequences.
In contrast, IDEMS innovation takes shape deliberately, responsibly, and with clear evidence of impact for a new, alternative model of transparent, accountable, inclusive and scalable digital innovation that centres societal interests and works with valuable, pro-social offline best practices.
Active Impact Innovation Collaboratories
Active Collaboratories work across highly variable grand challenges, all of which stand at the intersection of multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals. Although focused on different categories of impact, all share common global-local data and enabling technology challenges.
The following represent our most established Collaboraties.
Public Health Collaboratory
The Grand Challenge:
Children at Risk Around the World
250 million children (43%) under the age of 5 in low- and middle-income countries are at risk of not reaching their full potential. It’s estimated that as many as 1 billion children worldwide aged 2 to 17 have faced physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect within the last year.
Implementation Partners: Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH), UNICEF, WHO
The Impact Innovation Challenge: Adaptive, inclusive, and cost-effective digitally-enabled scaling of an evidence-based, in-person playful parenting program, designed to empower parents to nurture children’s potential—and proven to prevent child abuse and neglect.
Enabling Innovation: Pioneering digital infrastructure innovation (currently in MVP after multiyear R&D) that, in conjunction with AI agents, enables the essential low-skill architecture, functionality and content adaptation and customisation needed to create context-relevant versions of digital application and chatbot programmes within a single intervention architecture.
At work in: PHILIPPINES | MALAYSIA | JAMAICA | SOUTH AFRICA | CHINA | MEXICO | KUWAIT | CURACAO | TANZANIA | UGANDA | COLOMBIA |THAILAND | PALESTINE | AFGHANISTAN | KENYA | GHANA | SRI LANKA | PANAMA | UKRAINE | ROMANIA | GEORGIA
Climate Services Collaboratory
The Grand Challenge:
Community Climate Resilience
Smallholder farmers produce at least a third of the world’s food, but increasingly unpredictable weather is making it harder for farmers to know what crops to plant and when. Without actionable, accurate local climate-based data and insights, farmers are unable to assess risk and make informed farming decisions in the face of climate change.
Network & Implementation Partners: World Metereological Organization, UK Met Office, In-Country Met Offices, Agricultural Extension, International NGOs (e.g. Oxfam), Local NGOs and Farmer Organizations
The Impact Innovation Challenge: Digital conceptualistion of the offline Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA) programme, built for adaptive scaling, local climate data integration and embedded research.
Enabling Innovation: EPICSA, a scalable digital program that 1) enables localized, direct-to-farmer programs that don’t require trained facilitators, and 2) overcomes challenges of delivering relevant local historic weather data analysis and insights to local farmers. EPICSA is supported by the integration of R-Instat, and innovative statistical analysis software infrastructure that supports low-skill data cleaning and analysis with adaptation for a local context. R-Instat enables and incentivises local Met Office teams to become climate/weather data service providers to global research partners and NGOs to sustainably, reliably provide EPICSA with essential local climate analysis.
At Work in: BURKINA FASO | MALI | NIGER | BENIN | GHANA | GUINEA | KENYA | LESOTHO | MALAWI | MOZAMBIQUE | RWANDA | SENEGAL | TOGO / TANZANIA | ZAMBIA | ZIMBABWE | BANGLADESH | COLOMBIA | DOMINICA | GUATEMALA | GUYANA | HAITI | HONDURAS | NICARAGUA
STEM Education Collaboratory
The Grand Challenge:
Secondary School & University STEM Education
With 70% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 30, the UN has identified Africa as a global locus of innovation and economic growth. A mathematically-skilled workforce is essential to achieving economic inclusion and for developing innovative solutions to the most pressing social and environmental challenges.
Expert Research Partner: University of Edinburgh
Implementation Partners: Maseno University of Kenya, African STACK Conference, the Open University of Kenya
The Impact Innovation Challenge: Validating that proven impact innovation STACK online maths assessment (developed by the University of Edinburgh and now in use by more than 2000 universities) can be easily used in African contexts, and making the technology adaptable and useful across African countries to improve student achievement in STEM subjects across variable, often limited, local digital, human and economic resources.
Enabling Innovation: Open, adaptive maths textbooks, built on the foundations of STACK and integrated with PreTeXt, an open-source textbooks creation and markup software. The novel design enables local contexts and educators to develop their own custom textbooks (and assessment and feedback materials), as needed to meet the demands of local curriculums and practices, out of a continuously evolving materials bank developed and maintained by expert educators around the world. Textbooks can be interactive or available offline to ensure access even in low-connectivity contexts.
At Work in: ETHIOPIA | UGANDA | KENYA | GHANA | CAMEROON | TANZANIA | SOMALIA | SOUTH SUDAN | NAMIBIA | NIGERIA | RWANDA | ITALY | UK | USA
Agroecology Collaboratory
Resilient Food Systems
Climate change, unreliable external dependencies, misguided farming practices, and other forces have normalized food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa. Ensuring reliable access to nutritious food depends on production by local communities with the support of farmer groups, research institutions, development organizations and others.
Expert Research Partners: The Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems (CRFS), McKnight Foundation, Cornell University
Network & Implementation Partners: Manor House (Kenya), Farmer Organizations, Local CBOs and NGOs
The Impact Innovation Challenge: Farmer Research Network programming empowers smallholder farmers to be part of research collaborations by putting them at the center of research in a variety of different ways, in contrast to conventional on-farm research. Existing technologies and tools don’t enable local farmer data and research ownership and collaborative research practice with external experts.
Enabling Innovation: IDEMS innovation combines developing local skills and introducing socio-technical practices and tools to support farmer-led innovation of research methods. The innovation overcomes historic power dynamics through intersectional human-centring innovation that brings low-skill, low-resource farmers and representative farmer organizations into all stages of research, including conceptualization, design, decision making and sensemaking.
At Work in: NIGER | BURKINA FASO | MALI | KENYA
Biodiversity Collaboratory
The Grand Challenge:
Protecting Biodiversity & Food Systems
Novel biological change, as driven by climate change and human behaviors, is creating costly food security, public health, and biodiversity loss risks and consequences. Innovation to accurately can help experts and local communities predict, manage and mitigate the risks of novel environmental change.
Expert Research Partners: CASAS Global (emerging from University of California Berkeley), Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA); Topos Institute
Network & Implementation Partners: [in development, including the McKnight Foundation’s CRFS, Postsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, ETH Zurich, mundialis]
The Impact Innovation Challenge: Physiologically Based Demographic Models (PBDMs), validated by nearly 50 years of research, overcome the limitations of the existing state-of-the-field to produce reliable predictions about species change in unprecedented climate and environmental conditions. PBDMs’ groundbreaking bioeconomic modelling innovation introduces the foundations for showing the relationship between all biological life on Earth, as shaped by finite resources, but the complex modelling practice, requiring rare expertise, has been unable to scale beyond a small expert team.
Enabling Innovation: The IDEMS team developed a new software, psymple, built on mathematical category theory, that enables the development of hybrid complex system models and modelling frameworks that bring together siloed data and models from within and across disciplines (e.g., biology, public health, agriculture, economics). The innovation lays the groundwork for predictive ecosystem simulations, or biological “digital twins”, that allow non-expert users (from global policymakers to local farmer organisations) to identify, mitigate and manage the effects of novel climate and human-driven change on food systems and biodiversity in their regions and communities.
At Work in: GLOBAL