This year, the UNICEF Venture Fund celebrates five graduating companies from a recent investment round. For the first time, many of these companies are exiting from the Venture Fund having already earned recognition as Digital Public Goods (DPGs). With the support of a cross-sectional team of mentors, these graduating companies worked to achieve compliance with the DPG Standard.

The Digital Public Good Standard offers a nine-point baseline for evaluation and recognition of Open Source software, content, data, and standards that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm by design, and help attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Once a solution is recognised as a digital public good it is discoverable on the DPG Registry.

This recognition acknowledges their use of vetted Open Source licenses, useful documentation, and adherence to relevant best practices and local data protection laws. What makes this achievement a first for the Venture Fund is that these recognitions were achieved by the companies during the investment round. Typically, companies that go on from the Venture Fund achieve recognition after a year or more of graduation. This new shift is made possible by the growing investment in Technical Assistance at the Venture Fund and the leadership of a robust team of mentors.

This article introduces the Technical Assistance mentoring programmes offered by the UNICEF Venture Fund, the addition of new mentors in the last year, the shift of mentor focus around the DPG Standard, and the results achieved to date from the latest graduating Venture Fund cohort.

Origins of Technical Assistance at the Venture Fund 🔗

The Venture Fund offers different areas of Technical Assistance to start-up companies who apply and are selected to receive early-stage seed investment by UNICEF. Originally starting in 2018, the Technical Assistance programmes only included Business Development and Open Source. Over the years, we have piloted and pivoted mentorship models with input from our portfolio of startups. Today, the Technical Assistance programmes cover a range of topics across an experienced team of mentors, depending on the relevance to the start-up companies:

• Blockchain with Arun Maharajan and Alex Sherbuck (former)
• Business Development with Jamil Wyne and Philippa Martinelli (former)
• Evidence of Impact with Milena Bacalja Perianes and Jennifer Sawyer
• Data Privacy & Security with Lydia Kwong
• Data Science & A.I. with Daniel Alvarez
• Open Source with Justin Wheeler, Abigail Cabunoc Mayes (former), and Vipul Siddharth
• Software Development with Iván Perdomo

The mentors work closely with the experienced team of portfolio managers (Meghan Warner, Kennedy Kitheka, and Madison Marks) to guide and coach Venture Fund companies to achieve their targets and success indicators during the investment round.

Starting in 2021, the Venture Fund broadened the Technical Assistance programmes to include Software Development, Data Science & A.I., Data Privacy & Security, and Evidence of Impact. This was a marked change in growing the support and expertise made available to start-up companies during their investment round. However, as the team of mentors and Technical Assistance offerings expanded, there was a growing need to bring a common rallying point across all programmes. How could the mentors ensure their Technical Assistance programmes complemented one another without duplicating topics or repeating conversations?

Further complementing the core Technical Assistance programme, specialized workshops were held by like-minded institutions outside the Venture Fund’s core team of mentors , along with personalized mentorship sessions. The recent Blockchain Cohort, for example, benefitted from targeted mentorship from AW3L, a blockchain consulting firm that share many of UNICEF’s values around leveraging blockchain for social impact.

“Blockchain has immense potential, but it remains just a tool and its impact is dependent on what we do with it. That’s why it is crucial to have local entrepreneurs on the ground building use-cases that solve real problems unique to their geography. We are therefore extremely happy and proud to support UNICEF and its portfolio companies to tackle real-world problems in emerging markets by utilizing blockchain technology.”

Martijn van de Weerdt, Founder, AW3L

How the DPG Standard unified the mentoring streams 🔗

The DPG Standard became a common rallying point for the UNICEF Technical Assistance programmes. As our mentoring programmes increased and topic areas broadened, we needed coordination and a synchronized stream of Technical Assistance programmes. In the last year, the Venture Fund reviewed its workplan development and strategy to enable more solutions to achieve recognition as a digital public good at or near the graduation point for a Venture Fund portfolio. The most recent graduating cohort, the 2021 Blockchain cohort, represents this improved alignment, with 4 of 5 companies receiving recognition of their products as digital public goods by their graduation this year.

How does recognition of an open solution as a Digital Public Good help Venture Fund startups? It is an acknowledgment by the Digital Public Goods Alliance of a commitment and adherence to best practices and steps taken to protect data privacy and do no harm. Additionally, recognition as a DPG unlocks stronger potential for adoption and deployment of the solution by global stakeholders by providing greater visibility in a public roster of open solutions that adhere to best practices and standards. The recognition of 80% of an off-boarding Venture Fund portfolio speaks to both the intrinsic capabilities of the companies and the value of the Technical Assistance programmes and mentorship provided to them by the Venture Fund.

While past Venture Fund companies have received recognition as digital public goods before, this is the first time that a company achieved the recognition at the time of their graduation from the Venture Fund. Aligning the Technical Assistance programmes around the DPG Standard provided common frameworks and mental models for the diverse team of mentors to support the companies and help them achieve the Standard as an important part of their product development lifecycle.

“As an early-stage startup, we struggled with a clear business model. Especially in the last six months of the investment, support from the mentor network helped in building clear business growth and impact metric plans. Also a year ago, we were very heavy on the tech side but lacked considerable planning on network and visibility growth. We have developed a customer persona and a pricing model, and now have a clearer vision of our Total Available Market, Serviceable Available Market, and Serviceable Obtainable Market (TAM, SAM, and SOM) models.”

Rumee Singh, Co-Founder, Rumsan

Further, farther, together 🔗

What comes next? The Technical Assistance programmes at the UNICEF Venture Fund are gearing up for additional cohorts benefiting from our seed-stage investment: a Data Science & A.I. cohort and an upcoming Blockchain cohort. These early-stage companies undergo a technical assistance programme involving a technical and strategic workshop series and monthly mentorship meetings. Graduates of our seed-stage investment that  have received additional capital through our Growth Funding to take their solution to the next level of impact also benefit from customized mentorship to support their evolution from good prototype developments to solutions that can be implemented and scaled, with sustainable business models and proven pilots.

Additionally, mentors are developing digital toolkits to enable Venture Fund companies and anyone to read up and study best practices for building and sustaining digital public goods. Most of these toolkits will be released digitally online under Open Source licenses. You can find three of these toolkits below:

• Data Science & A.I.
• Drones
• Open Source

Since the first Technical Assistance programmes were launched in 2018, the Venture Fund has seen improved results that correlate with the Technical Assistance programmes. In the most recent Blockchain 2021 cohort, across 500+ hours of mentoring, the cohort collectively reached over 700,000 beneficiaries, raised $4M in follow-on funding, and 4 of 5 graduating companies were recognized as a digital public good before graduation. This also marked a new record of external contributors, with a total of 39 people who contributed to repositories across all portfolio companies. The expert guidance and coaching provided by the team of UNICEF mentors aids the start-ups in achieving new record heights.

“UNICEF’s support helped Xcapit build value, with a premium put on discovery, iteration, survey, and experimentation with the end user. The guidance at the right time is priceless. It prevented us from facing a major problem in the future when our blockchain UNICEF mentor guided us when we were deciding the technology to create our wallet. Changing our mindset to become a fully open source company was also challenging. We had the best guidance we could ask, and we successfully overcame the difficulties and doubts, understanding the benefits of open collaboration.”

Antonella Perrone, COO, Xcapit

Contribute to Technical Assistance knowledge and mentoring 🔗

The UNICEF mentor toolkits are open source and you can also participate. The toolkits are currently accepting contributions for UI/UX and front-end development, as well as content curation and authorship. Get involved with the toolkits by participating via GitHub:

• UNICEF Inventory theme (see “good first issues”)
• UNICEF Open Source Inventory
• UNICEF Data Science & A.I. toolkit

With the Digital Public Goods Alliance, we built upon our learnings and successes from portfolio companies and created the DPG Accelerator Guide as a collection of resources for accelerators to also support local ventures in developing digital public goods, setting them up for scale and impact.

The UNICEF Innovation Fund invests exclusively in Open Source technology – with today’s rapidly evolving innovation landscape, Open Source software, hardware, data, and content not only create value and generate revenue, but also ensure greater collaboration and impact. This reflection is a look back at Open Source activity and participation stemming from the UNICEF Ventures Team from June 2020 to date (July 2021).

By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of the evolving and forward-thinking approach to Open Source taken by the UNICEF Office of Innovation.

This article looks at a few aspects of Open Source engagement at the Innovation Fund:

1. Support models
   1. Legal & policy
   2. Building and leveraging from the community
2. Case study: Cloudline and upstream engagement

New to Open Source at UNICEF? 🔗

If you are hearing about the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme for the first time, check out this introduction post to get important context behind why UNICEF invests in Open Source mentorship and support for Innovation Fund portfolio teams:

/blog/2021/07/unicef-open-source-mentorship/

Innovation Fund support models 🔗

Start-ups receive both funding and customized mentorship during their 12-month investment period with the UNICEF Innovation Fund. Since the Innovation Fund launched in 2016, the Innovation Fund team noted the impact of hands-on guidance to help start-ups understand how to work open and lead open. Start-ups receiving Open Source support were better equipped to develop sustainable business models that made Open Source intellectual property work with them instead of against them.

By the end of the 12-month investment cycle, graduating companies achieve the following milestones in place with their projects:

• Solid understanding of Open Source licenses and different business models depending on a permissive or copyleft strategy.
• Laying foundations for growing or participating in friendly, inclusive communities.
• Documentation site to showcase their Open Source work, and how to get involved.
• Continuous Integration pipeline to test new changes in the code-base before they are added, and avoid common human errors.

Across these milestones, three themes of support have emerged as as most essential in the past year: legal & policy, building and leveraging from the community, and building in the open.

Legal & policy 🔗

The UNICEF Innovation Fund is unique in Venture Capital on its open-first investment strategy. Start-ups receiving UNICEF funding are obligated to either create their own Open Source works or contribute to existing Open Source works. This leads start-up teams to ask more questions: how does this work in a legal sense? How do you establish a sustainable business model with Open Source dependencies and the different types of license models that exist (e.g. permissive and copyleft)? These are the questions that start-ups receive tailored guidance on from the Open Source Mentorship programme.

How did the Open Source Mentorship programme support both start-ups and UNICEF Country Offices receiving funding from the UNICEF Innovation Fund? The programme improved business and legal resources and referrals for managing Open Source intellectual property. This was primarily done by creating a self-serve knowledgebase of legal, governance, and tech policy: the UNICEF Open Source Inventory. The Inventory was created in close consultation with start-ups receiving UNICEF funding, leading industry experts in areas such as Open Hardware and open design, and other existing Open Source communities of practice.

Building and leveraging from the community 🔗

Over the past year, we also saw more upstream collaboration. UNICEF Innovation Fund start-ups collaborated on existing projects like the PX4 Drone auto-pilot software instead of reinventing the wheel themselves. This enabled the work done with UNICEF funding to go further and impact the wider ecosystem, instead of an individual project with highly-specific use cases.

Furthermore, as the Innovation Fund portfolio continues to grow, new inductees in the Open Source Mentorship programme are able to build on top of work done by previous portfolio companies. This accelerates the rate of development for the new inductees and gives them a model of success to look towards during their engagement with UNICEF.

For example, two companies from the 2019 Drones cohort created documentation websites that were used as models for the 2020 Generation Unlimited cohort. qAIRa from Perú and Rentadrone from Chile created documentation websites using the popular toolchain Docusaurus, created by Facebook’s Open Source Program Office. The work of qAIRa and Rentadrone was leveraged as models by VRapeutic and I-STEM in the 2020 Generation Unlimited cohort. Using graduated companies as models accelerated both technical and content development for the new teams when they had relatable models to use in building their own Open Source documentation websites.

Innovation Fund case study: Cloudline and upstream engagement 🔗

Cloudline Africa (South Africa) operates small-scale autonomous airships that have longer endurance and range than current commercial drones; their solution will help deliver medical supplies to hard-to-reach communities and reduce operational costs in the last-mile.

Four highlights from Cloudline’s period with the Innovation Fund are below:

• The team launched the airship with a payload capacity of 10 kgs with a 50 km range.  
• Full endurance capability (40km/h) along with automated waypoint flying. 
• Contributed flight control software to the PX4 upstream community by introducing a new mode of aircraft to the community in the form of airships.  
• Cloudline received the Fast Company South Africa Most Innovative Company Award 

“Our greatest triumph of the year was the flight of our pre-production airship. Capable of a 10kg useful payload and a 50km range, this aircraft is ideally suited to medical logistics and other high-value scheduled deliveries.” — Spencer Horne, Co-Founder

Going upstream 🔗

Contributions made to another popular upstream community was another major highlight of the Open Source Mentorship programme. Furthermore, the contributions were not casual “drive-through” contributions; they were consistent and focused broadly around the ecosystem instead of a single repository of source code.

During the mentorship programme, Cloudline added 61 commits across four repositories. The summary of their contributions were adding a new vehicle type to the PX4 auto-pilot software: airships. The team first opened a discussion on the PX4 community forum. After getting feedback from a developer, they proceeded to add the Cloudline airship into the upstream software. This was followed by documentation additions with controller diagrams and simulation instructions. Through their contributions, a wider network of developers can simulate and interact with airships similar to the one created by Cloudline.

But the contributions did not stop at code. Cloudline developer Anton Erasmus delivered a deep dive presentation at the PX4 2020 virtual contributor summit. He explained to other developers about how to leverage the multicopter control system, as used in the Cloudline airships and other popular drone devices. This outreach step is important in growing awareness in the existing community for new introductions to the common software, and how both Cloudline and the PX4 community could help each other in achieving their similar yet different goals.

What is next for the Innovation Fund? 🔗

What does the next year ahead look like for UNICEF’s Open Source Mentorship programme? Stay tuned for the final post in this series, which will explore on-going work to standardize the mentorship curriculum, detail how Innovation Fund companies are being coached in becoming Digital Public Goods, and the research and development for an Open Source Program Office at the UNICEF Office of Innovation in 2022.

Special thanks for content and data collected in this post: Sanna Bedi, Zenani Orengo

2020 saw the launch of a formalized Open Source Mentorship programme for the UNICEF Innovation Fund, built up on two years of work from RIT LibreCorps expertise and consulting.

The Open Source Mentorship programme includes five modules about Open Source intellectual property and communities delivered across twelve months. UNICEF grantees are matched with an experienced Open Source Mentor to guide them through the modules. The mentorship takes an interactive, guided approach to understanding the unique context that each team and product exist within. The assigned Open Source Mentor provides specialized advice and training:

• Tailored feedback based on business models
• Existing local user communities
• Best practices for collaborating together with others on similar challenges.

The geographic diversity in the UNICEF Open Source Mentorship programme is unusual for technology incubators or accelerator programs. All funded projects come from UNICEF programme countries. The UNICEF Innovation Fund provides equity-free funding for Open Source solutions from local innovators and entrepreneurs solving local problems. To date, the Innovation Fund has invested in teams from over 57 countries. Argentina, India, Iran, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, and Rwanda represent the most recent incoming cohort in July 2021.

But why does this kind of work matter to UNICEF or the United Nations?

UN Roadmap for Digital Cooperation 🔗

In June 2020, the United Nations Secretary-General released the UN Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, a call for action and a vision with several key considerations:

• An Inclusive Digital Economy and Society
• Human and Institutional Capacity
• Human Rights and Human Agency
• Trust, Security and Stability
• Global Digital Cooperation

The report explores the impact technology has in each key area:

“Digital technology does not exist in a vacuum – it has enormous potential for positive change, but can also reinforce and magnify existing fault lines and worsen economic and other inequalities. In 2019, close to 87 per cent of individuals in developed countries used the Internet, compared with only 19 per cent in the least developed countries.”

UN Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, June 2020

Open Source Mentorship enables digital cooperation. 🔗

Therefore, the conception and development of Open Source Mentorship is inspired by the Roadmap, in four key aspects:

1. Digital Public Goods: To encourage knowledge transfer and collaboration on practical, everyday advice on building technology projects in line with the Digital Public Good Standard.
2. Digital Capacity-Building: Empowering others with the skills and information they need to be bringers of Open Source change and innovation in a disruptive and competitive Venture Capital ecosystem.
3. Digital Trust and Security: Providing a holistic view of Open Source intellectual property that is influenced by, but not bound by, quarterly earnings reports and share prices. Understanding the commitments of Open Source licenses and technology, and how trust is earned and lost in Open Source products and communities.
4. Global Digital Cooperation: Designing and structuring communities to be healthy and collaborative in nature, united in resolving common challenges and problems.