In one room, a booming Degan Ali from Adeso was sharing practical steps to follow for community organizations as the “Western rule-based international system collapsed” – and along with it, Official Development Assistance (ODA). Her entrepreneurial case studies from countries like Somalia solve tangible problems for communities in a way that no longer requires external funding. 

Along a few corridors, Palestinian human rights expert Omar Da’na spoke to an intimate circle about preserving evidence and pursuing prosecutions on behalf of fallen journalists in Gaza. Sessions that studied digital ceasefires, remade engagement frameworks for peace, and invited participants to map their resiliencies completed a reflective week at PeaceConnect, an assembly organized by Peace Direct. More than 300 Global South peace and justice activists and allies travelled to Nairobi, Kenya, to attend.

Focused on facilitating collaborative action, the gathering eschewed the usual complaints about talk shops and embraced an agenda that met the moment with courage and pragmatism. A thread of sessions that reimagined the resourcing of civil society ran through the week. We heard about partners like Plan International buying into “reverse calls for proposals” and how local endowments were being built from modest land investments. Here are a few stories from the conference that stood out.

1. Community philanthropy & matching funds

Despite shifting aid dynamics dominating lots of conversations, many community organizations pushed back against the ‘post-ODA’ narrative of crisis, saying they’d long been dealing with a scarcity of institutional funding. Local resource mobilization and creative philanthropy efforts were key parts of the sustainability strategies that some were implementing. Former Executive Director of the Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF) and philanthropy advisor, Janet Mawiyoo, shared how they work with community organizations to raise part of their resources for projects. “We call it a matching funds model, where communities raise 50% of the total amount of resources they’re looking for,” she explained. 

The resources accepted as a kind of surety ranged from volunteers’ time to livestock. The proviso is that the resources are raised domestically. “For example, we have the Maasai community, who rear goats, cattle, and livestock. So we will sit and discuss what their livestock is equal to in regard to the issues on the table? What can they trade with us? What is the monetary value of that in-kind contribution, and how can we approach a funder or a support partner to match that value?” she explains. “If we have 1,000 goats valued at one million Kenyan shillings, is the funder able to match that investment for one million shillings in funding? The value of those goats translates into the resources that we need for the community projects.” These alternative resourcing avenues brought stability to KCDF’s project pipeline through a key focus on sustainability, meaning the team hasn’t had to worry about “what comes after aid”.

2. Reversing calls for proposals

Arising out of a restructuring effort led by the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI), Reverse Calls for Proposals offer a dramatically different approach to grant funding. They are just one prototype spearheaded by WACSI’s RINGO project which examines the purpose, power and positioning of INGOs. The basic idea was to flip the usual process of responding to donor calls and interests with a process that centered on community priorities instead. This involved shifting from a donor-recipient relationship to a co-investment arrangement, something the Zambian Governance Foundation (ZGF) managed successfully to implement. 

Working with the Nyakasanga Development Community Foundation (NYAKU), ZGF supported community members from the Kasese district to formulate a potential plan to tackle climate change in the region, including the need for sustainable agriculture mechanisms, livestock disease control, and elevating youth voices. SOS Children’s Villages and Plan International both signified their interest as a funding partner, to the shock of many community members. “NYAKU then had to do their own reverse due diligence on the funders. Isn’t that beautiful? They got to ask the INGOs all those questions about safeguarding and sustainability that are normally posed to local communities,”  ZGF CEO Engwase Mwale said. A tripartite funding agreement was put in place between Plan International, ZGF and NYAKU after the successful completion of the reverse due diligence process and the program officially had liftoff. 

The appetite has admittedly not been great amongst other international donors, but Mwale said the community in Kasese was still accruing benefits from the exercise. “We’ve learnt that we need to ensure that communities recognize they have a voice to determine their own development priorities. We also saw first-hand the active and empowered feeling on the part of communities when they can take center-stage.” They also proved to Plan International that sometimes it’s perfectly fine to dispense with an eight-page due diligence spreadsheet!

3. Growing local endowments

The evidence of local organizations raising sizeable endowments was varied but strong. KCDF has set up a perpetual trust that manages its growing endowment, along with assets that include a five-storey rental office block. Rita Thapa, founder of Nepalese women’s fund Tewa, has also reduced their dependence on external funding through the consistent mobilization of resources through innovative local, social philanthropy. It’s a journey that started with modest donations from family and friends and now includes the towering, income-generating Tewa Centre in Kathmandu – a conference and office facility for the city’s network of NGOs. “Like so many of you here, we realised that we were feeding off a dead sloth (chasing grants),” Thapa says. “So we had no choice but to quit, which seemed like a scary, difficult thing to do. But once you jump onto this new, uncharted path, it unfolds before you and you will see what it is you need to do,” she adds. Small, consistent investments in an endowment were Tewa’s path to sustainability over at least 2 decades.

Ali tells a similar story, although she does admit to wishing she’d started on the path towards “liberating ourselves from donor funds” sooner. “If I could talk to myself 25 years ago, I would advise my younger self to put whatever money we had – even $5,000 or $10,000 – towards buying land in Nairobi. Developers would now be coming to us to build apartment buildings because we would have had all this land. For those of you in your 20s and 30s leading organizations, please learn from our mistakes – invest in your long-term sustainability. Develop reserves and endowments for yourself,” she shared. 

Adeso is pioneering a paid-for service delivery program in Somalia through a private water company it has created. “We drill boreholes and have connected a whole distribution network to people’s homes. We even have a reverse osmosis plant with a meter in every house. We’ve managed to reduce water prices by 86% in those communities, giving them bottle-quality water in their taps – the only drinkable tap water in the entire country.” Ali says the for-profit company has earned over $200,000 in the past two years. “People are willing to pay for the service. So this is the kind of entrepreneurial, real, tangible problem-solving we can do. And guess what? We don’t need any more grant funding for that location as it’s fully self-sufficient,” she concluded. 

4. New pathways for regional solidarity 

Conversations around remaining relevant and connected to participant communities took up a fair amount of time, too. There was widespread agreement that in the next five to 10 years, ODA would likely comprise minimal, purely humanitarian or life-saving aid – and probably only in extraordinary emergencies. As some speakers suggested, the efforts put towards influencing bilateral and multilateral donors need to be redirected towards influencing organizations like the African Union (AU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). “We need to be thinking about how to influence our national governments because they are going to have more and more autonomy for the limited ODA that comes down the pipe,” Ali said. 

This redirection seemed to tie in neatly with the anger piled on institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank for being undemocratic. “Every single institution the West has created has been inherently undemocratic. They come to our countries and spend millions of dollars on democracy programs, but every single institution they have created has been undemocratic. Is there one country, one vote in the Security Council? No, there isn’t – there’s veto power. Is it a system of one country, one vote at the World Bank and IMF? No, it’s not. So these multilateral institutions that so many are trying to cling to have been created for the benefit of the colonizers and not for us. When we look at what’s happening in the world today, yes, it’s scary and chaotic, but this Western, rule-based system is collapsing,” Ali said. Organizations would need to stay relevant by providing tangible services to the communities they serve – and seeking solidarity in regional blocs with aligned interests. “What we should be doing as civil society is figuring out how we influence those new emerging institutions like BRICS and others so that we don’t replicate the same model that the Global North has pushed on us,” she added.

Da’na agreed with Ali, specifically in the context of Gaza and protecting the legacy of slain journalists. He’s advocating for support towards a high-profile “Journalists Are Not Targets” campaign, leaning on regional bodies like the AU, the European Union and the Arab League. It would involve coalition actors forensically documenting attacks on journalists and securing digital archives of footage and metadata before more evidence was lost. Combined with judicial efforts at the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, Da’na said this global accountability work offered promising avenues for activists. “We need to make the protection of journalists a global norm that violators cannot ignore,” he added.

Images: © Peace Direct/Brian Ongoro

Sheena Adams