Power dynamics-global north givers and global south receivers
Tasneem Balasinorwala and Diya Deb
Project funding decisions are primarily influenced by international commitments, national level commitments, donor country policies or development cooperation policies followed by stakeholder discussion deliberation and finally local needs.
‘We stopped applying for funding calls from Germany’ was more or less the tone of the conversations that we were hearing when we spoke to organizations working in India.
PowerSouth was conceptualized on the basis that more needs to be done to connect local and grassroots organizations (with a gender and marginalized community lens) in India (our point of reference from the global south) to resources and funds from Germany (our point of reference from the global north).
We wanted to validate our preliminary set of ‘biases’ and the need to build better or do things differently. So we put together a survey – two surveys – to target resource providers and resource receivers.
The small sample that responded to the surveys were mostly individuals working in international NGOs,, donor organizations, philanthropists and former employees from national NGOs as well as on ground implementers, in the global south. The nature of work of the interviewees ranged from working in private sector to NGOs, INGOs, UN, and Federal ministry for environment, working on the issues of climate biodiversity, water and sanitation, development cooperation, forests, and ecological restoration. The individual responses received do not represent the views of the organizations they work in. The majority of respondents have worked over 15-20 years.
Here is a brief overview of some of the key outcomes.
Lifespan of impact
70 % of the respondents responded that the impact of their work had the potential to last over 10 years.
Who decides
According to the respondents, the project funding decisions are primarily influenced by international commitments, national level commitments, donor country policies or development cooperation policies followed by stakeholder discussion deliberation and local needs. Please note that very few talked about consensus driven approaches between the resource providers and receivers.
Half of the respondents said representations from the global south were involved in decision making but from the responses to the survey, we noticed that adequate gender representation and representation from the communities seems low.
Projects are largely coordinated, administered and managed by national NGOs/ agencies and consultancies.
Contrary to what we assumed – majority of the respondents felt that it was crucial for the intermediaries (national/ international NGOs/Agencies) to exist to reduce the transaction costs and support.
Substantial numbers talked about it not being crucial well. It was a 60/40 ratio. Responses and reality checks include the inability to to work directly with small local organizations; organizations with smaller funding needs not fitting the scale of operations of several millions; local organizations lacking the knowledge and capacity to apply and administer international funds; the lack of trust being a challenge but also acknowledging that corruption and accountability problems with intermediaries are not completely mitigated as well. One more reason cited was that while it is important to bring in the learnings of global frameworks there is a need to reduce transaction cost at the level of INGOs and intermediaries where a lot of funds get allocated for their salaries and administration costs.
To whom flows the funds:
Between 50-60 percent of the respondents agree that a part of the funds disbursed goes to grassroots and local organizations. The caveat though is that there seems to be a lack of awareness or assumption around what percentage actively gets disbursed to the implementing partners.
For resource providers we have the following chart that presents an equal division of percentiles.
Which begs the question – is this not important to keep track of? Is it Think Globally and Act Locally or is it Earn Globally and Act locally? Of course that may sound a a bit too harsh but is there an ounce of truth in it? And is national considered as local? Or is local considered as truly local? Questions that need to be further dwelled into.
Needs of resource providers
In response to the kind of additional support needed to fund local/grassroots organization directly some of the responses included having a reliable source to validate the work that is done by local organizations and presence of mechanisms to ensure transparency; need to be able to access and understand what the clear criteria of selection is. One respondent stated that if more diversity and local work is wanted then there should be a better way to network and connect with the smaller yet important initiatives; information and identification of partners; visibility and bigger outreach to donors, and knowledge partners who can communicate the need to potential donors.
Needs of resource receivers
Implementers on their experience in accessing international or bigger national funds directly suggested the need to shed a spotlight on the following – when there is a call for funding the topics are more often precise and this precision needs to come out clearly during the application process; donors are risk averse and that they don’t often take chances with newcomers. To quote one respondent ‘Funds are available but we need the right introduction to access them’ just shows how power networks can shape funding flows – which is not a new thing but it also not always a good thing.
Takeaways
On the positive impact, lessons and key takeaways while giving or receiving funds, there was much that was shared but to maintain brevity, we will highlight some realities that shape funding decisions.
- From the practical point of view although small concrete projects make a difference for both the implementers and also for donors in Germany, the more funds you have available within a timeline of a year, the bigger the projects get and the more difficult it gets to support local work directly.
- Majority of funds goes to the intermediaries and consultants to harvest funds.
- Multiannual budgets work better than yearly budgets, especially if monitoring is involved. With that a longer term success of implementation can be achieved. Also keeping a budget for unforeseen events should be mandatory in many budgets.
- A good donor or partner interface for organizations that are applying for the first time is a useful mechanism
- The biggest takeaway contrary to our expectation is that ‘money is not the biggest bottleneck’. It is the willingness to invest time and integrate best-in-class conservation techniques by consulting with the locals.
- Sustainability and genuine stakeholder ownership matters very little to corporate funders coming newly into the space
We want to share that as we researched further, we saw that many of the smaller NGOs in Germany that work in India at the grassroots levels were transparent on the administration fees they charge, the volunteer work they do that ensures the main funding reaches where it belong – the locals and the grassroots (please note that most of this information is in German – so information access is also a small hindrance).
Some even opened up or aligned themselves with the unfair monopoly of big government agencies in Germany and bigger NGOs. If we really want to think globally and act locally then just we need make sure that the processes and systems designed are led by local organizations for economic, environment and social sustainability.
Tasneem Balasinorwala has been working in the civil society sector at the local, national, and global level. She has also been a founder of Pune Tree Watch as a citizen action group. She has worked on a range of projects around biodiversity, cities, climate and water and sanitation, gender and anti-corruption and she has been consistently working in communications and advocacy, networking and community engagement. Tasneem is co-founder of PowerSouth.
Diya Deb is a non profit strategist with years of leadership and grassroots experience in both national and international organisations. She is passionate about campaigning, and amplifying the voice of the marginalized and is currently working out of Berlin. She is an ardent reader, loves photography and traveling. Diya is co-founder of PowerSouth.
