n.V5-5.05| SHOW ME THE IMPACT

01| You can write, talk and visualise all you want. At some point somebody says: show me the numbers. In our film the line is show me the impact, and until we can answer it, everything in the previous chapters is a sales presentation with no product behind it.

02| But showing our impact in isolation is useless, and so is everyone else's. In any competitive environment the question is not whether you are good but whether you are better than the alternatives. If somebody else produces more impact per dollar over the same period, the money should go to them and we should be honest enough to say so. What we need is not a scorecard. It is a comparison tool.

03| The building block is the social asset. Every programme produces things: trained people, changed behaviours, new capabilities, protected lives. A senior Maveriq is an asset. A child who finishes secondary school is an asset. A block of clean streets, held for a year, is an asset. Each can carry a price.

04| Prices are not discovered here, they are declared. What is a Tesla worth? What the marginal buyer pays today given his beliefs about the future. What is a Basquiat worth? What one person decided that specific canvas was worth to him. Asset price is always perceived future value × buyer's capacity × buyer's urgency × buyer's alternatives, and social assets obey the same arithmetic. A trained changemaker is worth what the most motivated buyer will pay to produce one.

05| We deliberately refuse market-derived pricing — training costs, earnings differentials, replacement costs. Those numbers are objective and they encode the inequality we are trying to break. Valuing a community health worker at a tenth of a doctor because the labour market does is not neutrality; it is agreeing with the existing world view. So the buyer sets the prices himself, and the table he produces is a statement of his values. A far-right government prices soldiers high and barrio changemakers near zero. A pacifist inverts it. Neither table is wrong. Both are revealing.

06| The rule that makes the tool honest is consistency. Whatever price you assign to an asset, it applies identically to every programme being compared. This separates two questions the sector permanently confuses. What is this asset worth — a values question with no wrong answers. Which programme produces more of it per dollar — a structural question with a defensible answer, given an agreed price. The framework keeps them apart.

07| Three adjustments keep it from being propaganda. First, a quality coefficient. A peer-trained asset is not identical to a professionally trained one, so fidelity decays across generations — 1.00 for the professionally trained seed, then roughly 0.85, 0.72, 0.61 as the training passes down the line. This makes our own peer-replication model look worse on paper, deliberately. It also turns the coefficient into a measurable performance indicator for us: a platform whose standards hold fidelity across generations can prove it.

08| Second, negative prices. Programmes produce liabilities as well as assets. Train a hundred doctors and export eighty to rich countries: that is a brain-drain liability. Give away free services for five years and withdraw, having flattened the local providers: that is a dependency liability. Train people for work that does not exist: stranded assets. Net social output = (assets × quality coefficient × asset price) − (liabilities × liability price). Nobody hides a broken model behind a headline count any more.

09| Third, run it at every plausible price, not your favourite one. If a programme wins at $10,000 per changemaker and at $35,000 and at $100,000, the valuation is not producing the answer — the structure is. That robustness is the finding. If the advantage appears only at one convenient number, it is fragile, and the fragility is itself worth knowing. This is ordinary practice among serious investors, who stress-test at 5%, 8% and 12% rather than arguing about the discount rate.

10| A revealed-preference check keeps everyone honest. If a state spends $250,000 producing an upper-middle-class child through schooling, healthcare, nutrition and a safe street, and $10,000 on a child in the barrio, the pricing table is already written. Nobody announced the 25:1 ratio. The budget announced it.

11| The tool settles nothing about what matters most in human development — that debate is Jordan versus LeBron, permanent and unwinnable. What it does is force the argument to be concrete, comparable and falsifiable instead of rhetorical and endless. IkoCiti's claim is that we produce substantially more impact per dollar over ten years than a professional NGO strategy. If we cannot show that inside a model whose inputs the buyer controls, we lose the argument before it starts — and we should.