Aflatoun International

A New Strategic Plan

Introduction

Aflatoun started in Mumbai, India, in 1991 as an action research project to bring rich and poor children together to learn about each other’s lives. Headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands, The Aflatoun programmes, are currently implemented in 116 countries and reaches over 4 million children and young people every year. It has been extremely successful since its inception in disseminating an evidence-based curriculum that provides children with social and financial education, through its innovative social franchise model.

However, in 2016, they were at an inflection point in their development, facing three main challenges:

• Capacity shortage at the Aflatoun headquarters in Amsterdam combined with a slow-down in the growth of their outreach
• Limited growth in brand awareness and brand authority
• Funding challenges

The objective of the project was to help the client address those three challenges in a new strategic plan, alongside creating a donor communications pack that presented the NGO in its new strategic light.

Scope

In 2016, Oliver Wyman Amsterdam was asked to help design a new strategic direction that would help Aflatoun past their inflection point and on to a path of continued growth, reaching their new strategic target of reaching 20 million children by 2020.

Over a period of six weeks, Oliver Wyman Amsterdam prepared two main deliverables:

• An external communications pack (to be used for donor pitches and supporting the refreshed funding approach)
• An internal strategy document to align the management team on the new strategy

Impact

Externally, the strategy design helped the organization clarify its brand messaging, and contour a coherent future strategy that appealed to potential donors, helping them in starting engaged conversations and in convincing donors to contribute.

Internally, the project’s results were used to align on growth objectives, as well as to reorganize the NGO in order to deliver on those objectives more effectively. For instance, the work identified capacity bottlenecks in the quality assurance, partner management and partner acquisition processes. Moreover, the new strategy was presented at the bi-annual global conference for the international partner group of Aflatoun.