Fundi Bots: Solomon King and Mary Helda Akongo on the Importance of Experimenting and Learning Along the Way

Sanne Breimer: Please tell me the story of your venture. What’s distinctive about your approach?

Solomon King: Sure. I’m the founder and executive director of Fundi Bots. Fundi Bots is a science education initiative. We create innovative solutions for science education, and our mission is to accelerate science learning for African children. To achieve that mission is to create non-traditional and orthodox learning methodologies that allow students to thrive inside and outside of the classroom, especially as they join the workforce and become innovators and change makers, as well as skillful employed citizens of the continent.

Fundi Bots began as a hobby. In 2010, 2011, I met a lady who was part of a conference being organized by a friend. When she heard I was making robots in my spare time in a spare room in my house, she became very curious and invited me to speak to students. She was running a program called Café Scientifique.

Café Scientifique was going around schools in Uganda, and the goal was to teach non-traditional science education. She asked me to come and speak about the robots I was building, and then, because I combined practical learning and good scientific explanations, I became a favorite of her students in the many schools across Uganda.

I began going to more and more schools, and that was the time when I was like, you know what? It’s time to create an organization. In 2011, 2012, we got our first grant from Google. At that time, Google had a program called RISE, which stood for Roots in Science and Education.

We didn’t get any money for a while. We had a couple of on-and-off partners who would take us to different schools in the northern region, but we didn’t have any serious money of our own. In 2014, I became an Echoing Green Fellow and an Ashoka Fellow. Both of those fellowships allowed me to dedicate full-time resources to the organization. I was able to rent an office, hire a staff, and work on this full time.

Sanne Breimer: How do you measure and track the impact and the success of what you’ve created?

Solomon King: We have two learning models. What we started with was pure robotics, which was extracurricular learning. We would go to classes and schools and teach kids for a fixed amount of time outside of the classroom hours, either afternoons or weekends, or holidays. That’s still ongoing. It was our core program offering.

The second model is something that we decided to pursue around 2017, 2018, and we call it the Enhanced Science Curriculum. It’s embedded into the national curriculum and used by teachers during class. If they’re teaching a science subject on any topic that we’ve provided tools for, they will use our tools and turn the classroom from a theory-driven exercise to a highly interactive student-centered exercise.

How do we measure the outcomes of both? The Enhanced Science Curriculum has stronger, more objective outcomes because we are working directly with teachers in class, and so we use academic performance. The goal is that any student or school that is using our tools should be able to see a significant change in student performance, student aptitudes, student projects, student interest in sciences, etc. All of those are things that we track in different ways. It’s performance, aptitude, and teacher knowledge. We don’t track it as religiously as performance, but we know we are improving how teachers are teaching and also improving their knowledge.

The Enhanced Science Curriculum has very strong linkages to performance. The beauty about performance is that it can be objectively measured against a national, school-based, or regional baseline. For robotics, it’s a little bit more ambiguous and amorphous because it’s such a long-term engagement. Any sort of short-term measurements cannot be explicitly attributed to us. You can say that you’re helping in academic performances, but there’s nothing that you’re doing that has a direct correlation to what they’re learning in class.

If you’re building a robot, you’re learning about electronics, electricity, hardware programming, etc., but much of that is not taught at the same level of depth that we cover in the school system. The robotics classes are more interactive and intense than any of the subject matter that they’ll study in school. It’s hard to create a correlation between the students studying robotics outside of class and their performance in school.

We have some anecdotal evidence, but it’s not strong enough for us to lean on it. For that, we mostly focus on problem solving, an ability to innovate, and a change in career aspirations, like if they find science is more exciting because of this robotics program. This year, though, we plan to do a longitudinal study. The longitudinal study is designed to go back and track the students that we’ve worked with over the last 13 years and see what they’re doing now, and if their interaction with Fundi Bots was helpful. 

Sanne Breimer: What is the context of your longitudinal study? 

Solomon King: We do a lot of internal assessments ourselves. They’re not as extensive, and of course, we don’t use them a lot when we are trying to get partners. However, we do have an intermediate sort of study where we do our internal assessments that are then supported by an external consultant or a small group of people outside. For the longitudinal study, we will do a hybrid of an internal assessment, alongside a consultant that we use, but we also want to partner with a university.

We are looking at a local university here called Makerere University. Ashoka also recently sent us some resources, so we’ll be looking for some partnerships with those universities. Then one of our funders mentioned that there are universities in the US [United States] that are typically looking to do studies like this. 

Sanne Breimer: How did you become an Ashoka Fellow? 

Solomon King: I became an Echoing Green Fellow, then an Ashoka Fellow in 2014. Those two provided support in different ways. I like to mention them in tandem because they’re friendly competitors with each other, but I also want to acknowledge the role that they play. Ashoka primarily focuses on the individual. They’ll say, how much money do you need over the next three years to focus on this full time? They’ll give you a stipend that’s equivalent to a full-time salary.

Echoing Green gives you a fixed $80,000 grant over two years, so every 6 months, you get $20,000 to run your work. Those two created the catalyst that I needed to, one, step away from the other businesses I was doing, because I was running two full-time businesses in the tech space. Ashoka allowed me to then focus all my energy on Fundi Bots, and Echoing Green gave the resources for Fundi Bots to grow.

One catered to my ability to say, I’m not going to do anything else. I’m just going to get my salary from Fundi Bots and build the organization. Then Echoing Green or the other said, what does Fundi Bots need now that you are sorted? That’s the dynamic that helped it grow. Otherwise, I would’ve had to get my salary from Echoing Green, or I would’ve had to use my salary from Ashoka if I didn’t get one or the other. 

Sanne Breimer: How has your funding developed from that point and also diversified over the years?

Solomon King: Fundraising was very difficult at the start. I am an introvert, and so it was very hard for me to get out of that comfort zone to go and, I like to call it, beg for money, because when you are doing business, it’s easy to provide a service and you get paid for it. In the nonprofit space, you’re technically asking someone to give you money for free.

Fundraising was very difficult at the start.

– Solomon King

It had been stigmatized in such a way that all nonprofits or social enterprises that were fundraising were being labeled as going to beg for some money. In my mind, it had a very negative connotation. What I kept doing was trying to hire consultants to do the fundraising. The Echoing Green applications and Ashoka applications were easy because I just applied, did the interviews, and got the money. But the actual fundraising after that, the donor development, cultivation, relations, etc., was a little more complex for me.

However, and this was 2017, just as we were starting to run out of resources, one of my advisors told me that the only person who could fundraise effectively for Fundi Bots would be me, and I should stop hiring consultants and grant writers, and all those people. I was not only an introvert, but also very technical. I enjoyed the technical side of our work, the teaching, the building of robots, etc., but the fundraising was more on the managerial side.

Sanne Breimer: Why did this person say that you were the perfect person to do the fundraising?

Solomon King: When nonprofits are small, especially locally led nonprofits, the most compelling message always comes from the founder because the people that are giving money are giving small ticket sizes, they’re more interested in the story of the organization versus the data. Right now, at our stage with a much larger budget, most of the people that we speak to are no longer interested in the story. They’re more about the impact, the data, evidence, etc., but at the beginning, they want to meet the founder of the organization, talk to them, understand their passions, motivations, etc.

Another fellowship in 2017, called the African Visionary Fellowship from the Segal Family Foundation, was another catalyst that helped Fundi Bots streamline messaging, donor relations, communications, etc. That fellowship was targeted towards developing locally led organizations to truly capitalize on their strengths to maximize the revenue they could get from grants and foundations.

Between 2017 and 2021, I was leading most of the fundraising efforts. Thankfully, because I’m a really good learner and enjoy building connections as an introvert, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I was able to form really strong, meaningful relationships with our potential funders. It turned out to be very successful, and so we grew quite significantly during that period. Then 2021, 2022, we began building a fundraising team to help us expand more on the reach that we had, but also the number and consistency of fundraising that we could leverage. 

Mary Helda Akongo [Donor Relations Manager, Fundi Bots]: For the past few years, we’ve been improving the skills of the team to enable us to write applications and connect better with funders or prospects we are talking to. Right now, as it stands, I’d say about 93% of our funding is unrestricted, and more than 80% is multi-year. The team is doing an amazing job of bringing in the right kind of partnerships. A large majority of our funders are also very supportive and high-trust, which makes it easy for us to, one, build relationships with new prospects because they’re constantly opening doors for us to talk to other people, and two, have great working relationships with the people who are supporting us.

As a growing organization, we have different challenges, and one of them is talent management and creating culture. We’ve seen some partners step in. Examples are Rippleworks and Personio Foundation, which are constantly stepping in to help us solve these challenges. Right now, we are actively working on diversifying our fundraising portfolio. Traditionally, we’ve been funded by philanthropic organizations like Segal Family Foundation, Imago Dei Fund, but as we grow, we’d like to bring on different types of funders, and a category that we’re looking at is high-net-worth individuals. 

Our work speaks for itself. It’s incredibly impactful, and with the data that we constantly share with donors, partners, and the community, you can see that we are doing a great job. I’d say we are both very charismatic, so even Solomon, who keeps saying that he’s an introvert, connects easily with people. It makes it easier for us to connect and to have these conversations.

Sanne Breimer: What has been most helpful to scale your business?

Solomon King: We are at the stage where we need really deep technical expertise. The challenge is that a lot of us nonprofit founders see a problem in a community, and we don’t even think of our deficiencies. We just say, okay, there’s a problem, and I could do something about it. Then you realize that building a company, building an organization, and scaling interventions is significantly more complex than you anticipated.

We are always working with partners and especially funders to figure out what resource gaps we need. The really important thing is that we are currently working on a project with Rippleworks, and it’s about financial modeling. Essentially, in the space of six months, we’ve likely gotten tens of thousands of dollars in consultancy hours at no cost. The output of this specific project has opened up my eyes to so many things about how we are looking at scale.

The beauty about it is that it reduces a lot of line items and a lot of moving pieces to just numbers that you can plug and play and see what scale could look like in different scenarios. It also shows what the largest pain points financially are, etc, and so you can hypothesize a scenario where if you’re scaling to new countries or new schools or new regions, you can move those numbers around to give you a relatively strong indicator of how your work would scale well.

We’ve got a support similar to that, not as extensive as Rippleworks, but the kind of support that brings consultants to teach you in depth about board governance, about communication, about product development, about monitoring and evaluation, and in this case, about financial modeling. All of these are powerful catalysts for an organization that’s serious about efficiency and scale but also serious about expanding the scope of its interventions.

Outside of the finances, that highly focused and highly tolerated issue area advice and guidance, especially if it’s a long-term engagement with a consultant, not just a one time workshop, for me, it could also be recency bias because we are going through that, and it’s very visceral for me at the moment. It’s donor support that provides strong clarity around the impact of your work. 

Mary Helda Akongo: As we grow, we are facing certain challenges that we may or may not have anticipated. When you are coming up with a risk analysis, you’ll probably say, because of Uganda’s history and political climate, you will face corruption, but you don’t know how that is going to play out.

As we’ve grown, building culture, building teams, operations, and building a production and research and development department, certain things come up that we need to work on, and we’ve been blessed to have great partners that have come on board to support that growth and to support problem-solving. On the one hand, many funders do not provide support for things like mental health and capacity building, but we’ve had partners like Imago Dei Fund and Personio Foundation who have come in to provide that support.

Imago Dei has, in the past, supported us in organizing a retreat that brought together more than 100 people for 3 days, and it was amazing because that was the first time that a lot of us were meeting in person, and we’ve been working together for years. It was great just to bring everyone together for people to know who they’re working with, to see each other in person, for us to reiterate our vision and our mission, and where we are going as an organization.

Additionally, Imago Dei has funded mental health support through the Keep the Spark Alive Fund, and we’ve hired a mental health specialist to provide mental health support to the team. On the one side, they provide one-on-one counselling or therapy, and also they provide great group counselling. Right now, we are facing a couple of challenges, but with spaces like that, the team can sit down, share, and just hold each other and support each other as we grow as an organization.

On the other hand, Personio Foundation is helping us to build culture. They are having weekly conversations with the human resource team. This week we have an online quiz activity with the rest of the team, and they’re helping us with that as well. They’ve been very supportive in building culture for the organization.

Sanne Breimer: Can you be more specific about how that advice was helpful, specifically to your venture?

Solomon King: I had a good background in business development, but most people, I would say the majority of people who start nonprofits, do not have a background in business development. As an organization that’s planning to address a really large problem, there are some fundamentals and foundational knowledge pieces that need to be in place.

It might seem something as simple as mental health support for your team, but as the organization grows, you realize that there are a lot more issues on the human resource side than on the technical side. If you’re not able to resolve those issues at an early stage, then it doesn’t matter what you scale; you’re going to be scaling chaos. If you don’t have good HR systems, if you don’t have good financial systems, if you don’t have a good production pipeline, like us who are making all these tools, if you don’t have a good communication strategy, all of this is only going to scale in its current problematic state. If it’s a problem when you’re 10 people, it’s going to be an even bigger problem when you’re 100 people.

Even though questions like this that focus on scale, normally they talk about systems, they talk about efficiency, they talk about capital allocation, they may talk about money management and all that, but the real challenge is how do you effectively build and nurture a strongly cohesive team of people to implement the work that you’re doing. Yes, there are hierarchies. Probably at the top of that hierarchy is how efficient your model is, what’s your cost per beneficiary, but none of that is going to be effective if your team is not efficient, if you’re struggling with human resource issues, and all that. 

Sanne Breimer: The support you got from Rippleworks was the Leaders Studio, the project support, and the Expert Office Hours. What did that look like? 

Solomon King:. The projects were executed fairly well. The biggest gap is that it’s a remote engagement, you can’t always have local consultants. It’s a three to six-month engagement during which you identify a problem, they recruit a consultant, the consultant works with you over an extensive period, depending on the complexity of your work. They provide everything that the consultant needs, including possibly coming to visit your place and seeing your work firsthand.

We’ve done two projects so far. One was around production efficiency, which was working with our team to streamline how things move from an idea to a physical product, and the second was one on financial modeling. Both are designed to help us be more effective and efficient as an organization. The goal was that if we could understand what our data looks like, we could understand what pieces are impacting our ability to scale. Also, if we are writing larger proposals, we would have the technical and analytical data needed to provide a strong case for why our work is critically important. 

Mary Helda Akongo: We’ve had three expert officers so far. We’ve done two on gender strategy, reporting to find a consultant to help us review and improve our gender strategy, which we’re currently working on. We’ve not yet done the other two. We are going to do one on leadership this week, and then we have one coming up on capital or fundraising that’s going to be happening in the next few weeks.

For the leader’s support, we’ve constantly recommended that both junior and senior managers attend leadership training sessions that have been put together by Rippleworks, and those have been amazing. The team has great things to say about them. In the past, I’d say four weeks, we’ve been doing lesson sharing where two of our managers who did a session on growing yourself put together their learnings and have been doing weekend sessions for the rest of the team. It’s amazing to see that the knowledge is being passed on from the people who are attending to the rest of the team that have not been able to attend those sessions. I’d say maybe I need to get the number right, but 6 to 10 people have done trainings so far with Rippleworks.

Sanne Breimer: Was there anything that you wished you had but didn’t? 

Solomon King: I admire how much they invest in their partners. It almost feels like you are the only grantee they are working with. That kind of support and the depth of support that they provide is very rare, because for a lot of other funders that provide this support, typically, they’ll bring you into a room to do a workshop, and it’s like 20 organizations of different stages of growth.

If they’re teaching you something, there’s an organization that’s grown way beyond what they’re teaching. Then another organization’s still too early to be taught that thing. The way that Rippleworks approaches, especially Projects and Expert Office Hours, is that it’s very highly tailored towards your specific needs. That has been a game changer for us because then we can reach out to them and say, hey, we need support on this. Do you have an expert that we can talk to?

We love how dedicated they are to the individual organizations as opposed to many other funders who look at it as they’re proud of their portfolio because of that diversity, but Rippleworks somehow feels very specialized, very hyper-focused. That gives us very good trust in them as an organization, but also it lets us know that they are listening to the organizations that they work with, and they’re looking to improve the level of support.

Mary Helda Akongo: Everyone that we’ve interacted with and worked with at Rippleworks has been amazing. I suspect, of course, through the experiences or the connections that we’ve had with the team, that they hire the best people to be part of their team. Whenever we meet someone, we are like, this is our new favorite person. This is her favorite person, but everyone is now our favorite person because of how amazing and dedicated the team is. That’s something that I love about Rippleworks.

Solomon King: The local context is helpful for some people, but in our case, it’ll be very difficult because the first consultant that we got, there was no equivalent person in East Africa, and probably the African continent because it was a very technical consultancy that involved an intersection between engineering and education and mass production. Not a lot of Ugandan or East African people had done that. Local context is helpful, but what they thrive at is finding you the right person, regardless of where they live.

Local context is helpful, but what they thrive at is finding you the right person.

– Solomon King

Sanne Breimer: Regarding your sustainability and your financial model, what is your ideal picture of your financial future? 

Solomon King: At the very highest level is the financial sustainability of our intervention. Enhanced Science Curriculum, where the ideal payer or the ideal funder at scale for the Enhanced Science Curriculum is either a government organization, a multilateral organization, or a multinational organization. If we can create a solution that has strong enough evidence to be adopted by any government, then essentially the next stage for that product would be for a government to fund its implementation in the country.

We do not have the resources, capacity, or interest in implementing this ourselves because it’s designed to be implemented by teachers in schools. If we were to do it ourselves, we would probably need to hire tens or even hundreds of thousands of teachers, which is unsustainable. Then internally, we are building additional sustainability models. We have a model that has been generating a bit of revenue, and so we want to expand further and see if we can move towards increasing self-sustainability.

Sanne Breimer: What is that model?

Solomon King: It’s the robotics model. There’s a demographic of wealthy parents who take their kids to private schools that pay for the robotics program. It’s a small percentage of our audience, but it generates a disproportionate amount of revenue for a student. If we can build that as a for-profit entity, then we can move into self-sustainability and a bunch of other things.

Our sustainability goal is to find a way for the organization to have its core costs covered. By that, I mean the cost of keeping the office open, a core payroll team, research team, some leadership, etc, and then whichever funding that we get is funding towards expansion and scale projects. That way, we are not saddled with the financial and human resource burden of thousands of employees consistently, but we work on a project-based basis where we recruit for a four-year cycle for a new project, and then, when the project ends, we contract back to our initial size.

That’s how we think about self-sustainability. A hybrid of very lean operational capacity when we are not scaling, and then revenue generation in a very aggressive for-profit model. Then, for scaling, that has to be in partnerships with large-scale actors, governments, multinationals, etc.

Sanne Breimer: What advice would you give to funders who want to help social ventures like yours be successful?

Mary Helda Akongo: It’s important to sit and listen to the organizations that you are working with or supporting, rather, and to also create an environment where we can easily approach and have certain conversations without fear of repercussions or that something might happen if we have an honest or transparent conversation with them. That makes for a healthier working relationship. Funders come with their goals, but we also have our goals. Ultimately, we want the same things, but sometimes we differ in process.

Funders come with their goals, but we also have our goals.

– Mary Helda Akongo

Solomon King: For us, because of how we’ve grown and how our values are structured, we appreciate high-trust environments. Even when we have conversations with funders, potential existing or future, we tend to be very open and honest about the challenges that we are facing, the support that we need, the areas that we could use some guidance on, and things like that. A lot of funders sometimes come with a superiority mentality.

What this means is that you’re not meeting on equal footing, and yet, ideally, you are all trying to solve the same problem. I have a solution to a problem. You have the money to help us fund that solution. Let’s figure out a way to work together. Unfortunately, in a lot of instances, especially for African-led founders, there are several assumptions around. Are you knowledgeable enough? Do you know what you’re doing? Have you done it before? Maybe someone else could do it better than you, as opposed to investing in the growth of that organization.

That’s why I like the Segal Family Foundation. They’ve made their vision and their mission to support locally led organizations, because they know that when push comes to shove, when the worst comes to the worst, the locally led organizations are the ones that will still be in the communities even as the experts leave because of a pandemic, because of a war, etc. It’s important for funders to acknowledge and support the agency that locally led organizations have, especially their leaders, to provide support in areas of deficiency.

We have mentioned that almost all of our funders have supported us in one way or another, whether it’s to improve how we communicate about our work or how we measure our impact, all that is necessary, but it should be met with a certain level of mutual respect, acknowledgement of agency, and the knowledge that at the end of the day, this person is going to continue building their community, whether they have the money or not. They’re the right horse to bet on.

Mary Helda Akongo: A lot of funders and people who work in the nonprofit space are doing it out of necessity and need. It’s not about the money. It’s about solving challenges because most of us have experienced these challenges. We may not necessarily have the right skills to solve these problems, but we’re extremely passionate and we’re open to learning. We appreciate the partners who give us the room to grow, to learn, and to experiment.

At its core, Fundi Bots is a science and tech organization, so we are constantly experimenting and learning. One of the things that has allowed us to grow is people who come on earlier to support the organization. They’re like, okay, you’ve not piloted, you’ve not done this before, but we are going to give you the money and the support that you need to go and experiment and to get this work done. Two things will happen. One, it’s either going to be successful or it’ll not be successful, but we are here with you. We’re supporting you. 

That’s important, just funders coming on early on, or rather supporting organizations that are experimenting on certain solutions and being patient with them on that journey, holding their hand, and just making sure that they have all the support that they need to get their work done.

Sanne Breimer: Do these funders come with a superiority mentality?

Mary Helda Akongo: Some do, some don’t. In our experience, most of them have been amazing. The ones that we’ve had, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, Echoing Green, Ashoka, Segal Family Foundation, and they’ve been excellent, they’ve been amazing with providing their support.

Sanne Breimer: What are the top three things that you need to unlock your ability to scale and sustain? 

Solomon King: I think all of them can be solved through money.

Sanne Breimer: More specifically about money, then, is there a certain amount that you need?

Solomon King: We want to raise about $7.5 to $10 million in the next 3 years. The goal for that is to, one, we are concluding the Enhanced Science Curriculum pilot this year, and so we want to package that for scale, and that money will help us build a package. More importantly, it’ll help us establish a pathway to engage the governments to set up support facilities in new countries, which also means that it’ll help us to hire a much more senior level of leadership that will allow us to scale into those countries.

One critical role that is missing from our current repertoire is the leadership that can engage directly with governments, because it’s not a strength of mine. We need someone to help with policy, advocacy, growth across the continent, and things like that. Roles like that tend to be fairly costly. We need to build our leadership bench even deeper, and so for that, we need money. Establishing a presence across the continent, which means conversations that we’ve started with the Rwandan government, potential conversations in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, etc, all those require resources.

One thing that we are working on right now is to be as lean and efficient as possible. The financial modeling, financial data is all very timely, but also the follow-on to that is building a robust pipeline of inventory materials, the sales pipeline for schools, for-profit work, leadership development, etc. We are doing a lot to move those discussions forward, but the bottom line is we need to significantly increase our budget. That’s number one: increase our budget.

Number two would be to build and strengthen our leadership capacity. Number three is that we are actually looking to put a lot of this material online, and so we are looking for resources to set up an online platform that can be accessed by hundreds, if not thousands, or hundreds of thousands of students and teachers across the African continent.

Sanne Breimer: It was a pleasure speaking with you both.

Sanne Breimer (she/her) is a freelance journalism trainer, project manager and adviser for international media organizations including SembraMedia, Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF), European Journalism Centre, Thibi, and the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU). She founded Inclusive Journalism, aiming to educate (primarily) Western journalists about media representation and decolonisation through a weekly newsletter, online courses and retreats. Sanne works remotely and divides her time between Europe and South East Asia. Before moving into training, Sanne worked at a managerial level in national public broadcasting in the Netherlands for almost 13 years, focusing on radio, digital media and innovation. She is Dutch with Frisian roots.

* This interview has been edited and condensed.

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