Assessing the effectiveness, outcomes and learning from the piloting of an online mentoring programme alongside Mowgli’s traditional in-person approach.
Mowgli Mentoring is a specialist mentoring organisation aiming to drive economic progress and social change. In 2018, Argidius partnered with Mowgli, providing a grant to strengthen Mowgli’s financial sustainability, by supporting the testing of digital delivery to bring down the cost per entrepreneur and make the program most attractive for funders and other clients. The 2.5 year project ran an online program, and a regular offline program, concurrently across 3 Kenyan cities. 27 entrepreneurs completed mentoring engagements online and 34 entrepreneurs were mentored in person. The COVID pandemic struck during implementation resulting in the in-person cohort finishing their mentoring engagements online. Across 2020 and 2021, an evaluation was conducted to understand the effectiveness, outcomes and learning from the piloting of an online mentoring programme alongside Mowgli Mentoring’s traditional in-person facilitated programme approach.
Key findings
- Mentoring relationships played a key role in helping entrepreneurs overcome a variety of challenges. Despite the pandemic, 50% entrepreneurs grew between 2019 and 2020.
- The support provided by mentors ranged, depending on each entrepreneur’s needs, from providing advice and technical assistance (on topics such as financial management, HR, regulation and marketing); to developing their mentees’ soft skills and capabilities (such as by shifting mindsets, improving confidence, and enabling objective decision making)
- Mentored entrepreneurs reported putting in place improved business structures and processes; better understanding customer needs; identifying new and bigger clients and markets; and taking advantage of new business opportunities they otherwise would not have seen.
- 93% enterprises remained in operation, including several where closure was being considered. An additional 6% dropped out of the program.
- Digitalising didn’t reduce costs as much as expected (28% vs projected 40%). While there is some potential to reduce costs further by addressing vairous implementation challenges, Mowgli concluded that a blended/hybrid model is optimal.
- The programme team had to adapt the online delivery to include more staff and facilitator time and resource to address falling engagement and momentum. The online track ended up costing £3k per enterprise in comparison to £4.5k for the in-person delivery.
- The evaluators pointed out that mentoring is still a relatively new concept in Kenya and awareness needs to be built to drive more uptake.
- Chronus, one of the chosen platforms, was found to be clunky and not user-friendly. Participants switched to established channels such as WhatsApp, Skype and phone calls.
- Participants in the online mentor training struggled with the NovoEd platform. Going forward self-directed online learning needs better orientation and needs to be supplemented with live virtual training, accompaniment or peer-to-peer.
- Despite the challenges, an engaged and lean Mowgli team adapted well. Other success factors include a robust mentor selection process, solid mentor capabilities, and a good matching process which meant that entrepreneurs were consistently supported to solve their particular problems. Mentors too reported improvements in soft skills and 95% would like to mentor again.
- However the first year ROTI was limited to 0.65. Participating enterprises were much smaller than originally envisaged, with a median annual revenue of $2k prior to commencing the programme. The evaluators pointed out that mentoring is still a relatively new concept in Kenya and awareness needs to be built to drive more uptake.
