Unjani Clinics: meeting the need for scale through social franchising

In this contribution to the Organization Zoo series, we discuss an organization with a unique design that allows for scalable and financially sustainable approach social impact. Unjani Clinics is network of nurse-led clinics in South Africa, where nonprofit (head office) oversees operations more than ninety for-profit independent primary healthcare clinics. Combining entities franchise structure represents bundle choices together enable effectively pursue its mission. By combining entrepreneurial incentives nurses, such as ownership rights over their clinics, impact-driven controls, cultivates otherwise untapped resource—i.e., professional nurses’ ambitions—to deliver on This novel combination autonomy formal hierarchical well informal controls safeguard mission address tension between financial value creation, which often prevents enterprises from scaling successfully.