CASE 3

I AM A DONOR

Know their context

Learning about a different context, and how this should be incorporated into your own strategy, shouldn’t be an extractive exercise. Donors tend not to be embedded within the communities they hope to benefit, limiting the ability to understand appropriate and effective responses. When partners are embedded in these communities, they should obviously help drive the understanding of how to innovate for those communities. As with a company, a shared vision is always a more effective vision. The local innovating organisations themselves are the ones best placed to effectively describe their own needs.

Be the change you want to see

Seeing the recent ambitions of many funders to promote collaborative projects has been promising, though it obviously also comes with scale benefits for funders. Yet requiring collaboration should also be encouraged alongside not just shared funds, but also an emphasis on designing and incorporating both donor-organisation and organisation-organisation processes that can act as mechanisms for collaboration.

This has an additional aspect: technology itself should also be creatively incorporated to minimise administrative burdens and enhance communication between stakeholders in a project. This must obviously be implemented within a context which appreciates digital inequalities.

Don’t be afraid of experiments

Donor funds often present clear barriers to civic tech innovation, for example:

“…innovation remains under-resourced, and models that are providing clear results are not properly supported;
pathways to scale remain limited because of the total funding available; and
the risk appetite of donors remains too conservative to properly support and scale innovation”

Help build capacity

Investment needs to be made into an organisation, rather than a project if you wish to contribute to a strategic vision. Fostering organisational development means supporting these costs, ideally through unallocated funds. However, it also means helping to address skills gaps within organisations that prevent them from effectively delivering, and also may prevent effectively practising for sustainability – similarly to how Incubators and Accelerators also provide support for improving a startup’s business and organisational development.

Donors with access to various human resources can help provide these forms of support while civic technology organisations scale up.

This capacity can also be developed through the provision of your own skills by actively sharing and participating in existing communities of practice on African civic tech funding, like CTINs.

D: Unpacking the Risk of Path Deviation

You can look at path deviation as an area of risk which combines reputational and impact risk. Pretty much all funding partnerships present the risk of deviating an organisation from its own strategic path,as it focuses on the outputs for a project that may not strictly align with your own strategy. As noted, "Business goals and impact goals should be kept as aligned as possible, and when they conflict this should be made explicit".

E: Tech is Sexy…For Now

Across funder types, many are still very excited about the potential for technology - both for investment and impact. However, this opportunity may not be a permanent window. As technology becomes mainstream and embedded within individual institutions, the required skills are becoming more normalised. This means leveraging the opportunity while you still can, but also for the future by beginning to define what is specific about the technology skills you offer.

F: Budget for the Future

Sustainability needs to be in your budget line items. Particularly given the challenges to the types of funds available and limitations to the use of those funds, you should specifically allocate line items that can foster your sustainability. For-profit entities do this through the accumulation of profit, and non-profits should do this through the accumulation of surpluses that gets allocated against future expenditure.These line items should be included across funding and financing proposals and offer security against volatility in the funding and finance environment. It also better enables you to sustain organisationaldevelopment, like employing as opposed to contracting capacity and talent.

G: Pay it Forward: Manifesting Equality in Grant Funding

As some of the excellent work on the non-profit industrial complex highlights, civil society organisations require collaboration between organisations that break down silos, and this need not be money-based. There are many ways collaboration between organisations can allow for cross-subsidisation of activities,making them more cost-efficient, and less donor reliant. Collaborations between civil society organisations through sub-granting can also be a way for more professionalised civic technology organisations to support grassroots organisations that could benefit from technology projects. Makingsure you include express line items for collaboration in grant proposals can assist with this. And organisations can simply offer each other non-remunerated services that leverage each organisation'sstrength for more impact.