Towards New Partnerships – How to improve Collaboration with Innovators from the Global South?
By Benjamin Kumpf (OECD) and Parnika Jhunjhunwala (OECD)
People directly affected by development challenges are best placed to address these very challenges. To put people at the centre of designing and implementing policy is the right thing to do. Be it in high, middle or low-income countries and fragile states.
This insight and the commitment to participation of affected people in decision-making and design processes is at the heart of the localization agenda in the international development cooperation system. In humanitarian affairs, the Grand Bargain was supposed to ignite a ‘participation revolution’. The Grand Bargain entails 51 commitments, endorsed by eight donor countries and 16 international aid organisations at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016.
Just like other revolutions, this one is still pending. Five years on, there still is insufficient support for local responders. This includes funding, and fairer and more appropriate distribution of leadership and decision-making. In a report “The Grand Bargain at five years: An Independent Review” ODI found that by 2020, only 4.7% of the direct funding went from the donors to local organisations.
There is ample evidence pointing to the need to change how decisions are made over funding and funding priorities. This includes surveys reflecting the perspectives of people in fragile states and studies outlining that the services and support they get is not what they want or need. But why is it that the evidence is not translating to action? For a long time, the predominant challenge in the sector was ‘problem blindness’. In other words, a widespread consensus in the Global North that this is just the way aid flows work. But now, despite recognition of the problem, there is a lack of ‘problem ownership’. Most players agree that advancing localisation is important, but does everyone view it as their problem to address?
The ODI report “Are we there yet? Localisation as the journey towards locally led practice” points out that locally-led development will require not only resources and greater agency for local actors, but also changes in ways of being. Even in efforts to promote localisation, the power dynamics among donors, international, national and local actors exerts its influence, and “it may merely ‘localise the sector’ without embodying the ideals of being locally led.”[1] Localisation entails not just the involvement of local and national actors in project implementation or design, it has to be viewed as redistributing power and addressing underlying power imbalances. Major obstacles to localization are linked to the perceptions of development providers’ dominant views on risk, and local actor’s capabilities. Advancing localization is as much political as structural.
The COVID-19 crisis further demonstrated the need to better support local actors. When most development and humanitarian organizations asked the majority of their international staff to return home in early 2020, it was up to the local actors to fully lead the diverse responses to the pandemic and its direct and indirect effects on people and societies.
A key feature of responses to the COVID-19 crisis across sectors was innovation. Since the beginning of the pandemic, affected persons, civil society organizations, government entities, innovators and activists have been developing thousands of novel solutions to address the consequences of the pandemic. About one-fifth of those innovations have come from low- and middle-income countries across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, according to our analysis of WHO data. Many of these innovations were developed to specifically address the needs of poor, marginalized, or excluded communities, from a digital track and trace system for users of the Kenyan public transport network to innovation collectives producing quality personal protective equipment, mainly face masks, at scale for hospitals in India (WHO Regional Office for Africa, 2020 & Corsini, Dammicco and Moultrie, 2021).[2],[3] Over the past one and a half years we have been able to learn from some of these inspiring innovators. At the same time, we have seen how little traditional approaches to grant-making and decision-making have changed in development and philanthropic organizations.
In May 2021, we published some of our findings in the OECD Policy Paper ‘COVID-19 innovation in low and middle-income countries: lessons for development co-operation’, along with recommendations for development providers. We concluded that development and humanitarian organisations should position innovation efforts by partners in low and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs) as a route to high-impact and relevant programming and as a means for furthering the leave no one behind agenda. The international co-operation vision for LIC and MIC innovation should be a vital part of transforming development from resource transfer models to genuine global co-operation based on mutual learning and partnerships, with funders playing context-appropriate roles including as facilitators, ecosystem conveners and intermediaries in the innovation process.
These recommendations echo voices such as the recent research by Bond on catalysing locally-led development, the RINGO project and many others in the international development sector arguing for a power shift. In July this year, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) endorsed a recommendation and asked all its members to enable local civil society to play a more prominent role in development cooperation and humanitarian assistance. The recommendation asks development providers to “increase the availability and accessibility of direct, flexible, and predictable support including core and/or programme-based support, to enhance their financial independence, sustainability, and local ownership”.
To provide concrete pointers on how research findings and recommendations can be put in practice, good practice is needed that shows what works to better support innovators in the Global South. So we invited some organizations that represent these voices and implement emerging good practice to share insights at the event ‘Towards New Partnerships - Pathways to Improve Collaboration with Innovators in the Global South’. This virtual seminar took place in October 2021 and set out to highlight good practices that can be adapted by bilateral development providers and other donors. It was co-organized by the OECD Innovation for Development Facility, the South-South Network for Public Service Innovation and the International Development Innovation Alliance.
Our team at the OECD works with bilateral development providers on advancing innovation for development efforts and investments.
The SSN4PSI was launched in 2017 with an aim to strengthen local partnerships and exchanges among Southern countries by identifying innovations and scaling-up novel solutions to public service challenges. One of its core objectives is to institutionalize South-South and Triangular Cooperation in public service innovations through knowledge-sharing, peer-to-peer learning, and technology transfer rooted in the principle of “Matchmaking”. Asad-Uz-Zaman presented three successful innovation in the public sector in Bangladesh: myGov, a one-stop service aggregation platform integrating several public services, saving citizen’s time, cost and number of visits; inspiring Bangsamoro Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) of Philippines to replicate it in its own context. NISE (National Intelligence for skills, Education, Employment, and Entrepreneurship), a matchmaking platform among the unemployed youth, skills providers, and job providers in Bangladesh. The platform ensures real-time data sharing between the supply and demand sides, thus acting as a comprehensive recruiting facilitator for employers and industries by publishing job circulars, establishing linkage with training service providers and hiring. Somalia and Jordan are already piloting the NISE platform in their country context. Lastly, the ekShop initiative, which creates a platform where marginal producers can sell their products directly to customers and take advantage of online shopping by integrating all the top e-commerce and logistics companies into a single channel, which is being replicated to encourage self-reliance for Syrian refugees in Turkey.
The International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA) is a collaboration platform bringing together the innovation leads from some of the world’s largest development agencies. Since its formation in 2015, IDIA member agencies have been working together with a range of country actors to develop tools, frameworks and principles promoting ‘localized’ innovation practices both within their own institutions and to support others across the global innovation community. This includes case studies of how to translate these innovation principles into practice.
The virtual seminar featured brief case studies of South-South innovations, and reflections from Asad-Uz-Zaman (Policy Specialist, Aspire to Innovate (a2i)); Denia Nkala (UNOSSC Regional Coordinator for Asia-Pacific, South-South Network for Public Service Innovation), Jocelyn Mackie, Co-CEO Grand Challenges Canada, Susan Snider, Director of Strategy and Innovation, Equality Fund, Ese Emerhi, Global Network Weaver, Global Fund for Community Foundations, and Walter Kerr, co-founder and advisory board member of Unlock Aid.
Walter Kerr, underscored the need to support innovators from the global south mentioning that “too much public money is locked into yesterday’s systems.” This system is characterized by structural barriers in areas such as procurement, funding cycles and risk frameworks, and by inequity; both in resources and power. This in turn largely prevents innovators in low and middle-income countries from accessing finances and scaling solutions. This observation echoes findings from a 2019 OECD report on innovation that summarized insights from across bilateral development providers. It found that “the lack of genuine and sustained engagement with the global South is a widespread problem, and should be addressed directly and collectively to ensure that innovation efforts are more relevant, appropriate and build on the best ideas from around the world.”
“Too much public money is locked into yesterday’s systems.”
Walter further outlined that the dependency of parts of the current aid system on only a handful contractors/agencies to disburse funding stands out as one of the main problems preventing equitable funding flows.
Besides creating better incentives for professionals working on grant-making in development agencies, Walter emphasised the need for simplification of procurement rules, easing the process of applying and complying with the funder’s requirements. Lengthy legal processes can constitute deterrents for potential applicants, especially innovators and smaller and newer organizations with constrained resources and less experience with overly complicated rules and procedures. Development providers should instead move a step towards new partners, by making key processes more flexible and collaborative, thus meeting the innovators where they are.
To create further momentum and a push for development providers to change practice, Walter proposed “aggressive advocacy” by diverse actors in the international development cooperation sector. If a critical mass demands greater transparency on how and on whom development agencies are spending money, the future of how local innovators are supported might be reshaped. And there are reasons to be pragmatically optimistic. For instance, the recent address “New Vision for Global Development” by USAID’s Administrator Samantha Power included a call for more inclusive and locally led development. There was a specific mention of USAID’s partner base, and making the agency’s work more responsive to local voices.
Lastly, a seemingly simple but effective action for the agencies would be to hire more contracting officers who invest greater time into identifying and connecting with new partners. Ideally contracting officers would also be hired from local communities, to better identify locals in their communities, thus reaching a more inclusive innovator base. This echoes findings from private sector companies that draw heavily on innovations from external partners through open innovation processes, such as NASA, and on findings from across the development sector summarized in ‘Lean Impact’ by the former USAID Chief Innovation Officer Ann Mei Chang. To effectively spot innovators and promising solutions, and to help them test, learn and scale, organizations need to invest in staff capacities. Without sufficient time and expertise of grant-making officers and staff in other positions, development organizations are unlikely to effectively identify and support innovators, and to improve their own processes. Concrete steps to advance the latter can include anonymous surveys of grantees to ask for feedback on past application processes, along with establishing extra space in grant applications to invite ideas for how processes to better understand problems and test solutions could be run on the ground. This could support differently structured awards that support adaptive management of grants by deferring detailed planning of later phases until learnings from earlier activities can be incorporated.
“We learned that participatory funding is a spectrum, not a binary”
The speakers unanimously emphasised on the need to go beyond reforming processes, rules and regulations. Ese Emerhi pointed to the importance of a mind-set shift in the sector. This includes deep reflections on personal and inter-personal levels. Conversations about our values, our position in the systems we work in, the power dynamics in these systems and our human relationships - are issues easily overlooked in a context of technical terminology and removed/external decision-making. Changing power dynamics and established hierarchies does not only imply battling the structural and organisational ones, but also requires introspection to identify and address our own schemas of power and privilege.
Several substantive actions to shift power being practiced by the funders in their own organisations are shared below.
· Explore diverse forms of participatory grant-making: Sue Snider, Ese Emerhi & Jocelyn Mackie: “We learned that participatory funding is a spectrum, not a binary.” Sue Snider shared that the Equality Fund realized from its inception that there isn’t a one-size fits all solution to participatory grant-making, and that the organization would need to move incrementally, test new approaches and continue to learn in real-time. One of the most critical manifestations of the Equality Funds values and a key vehicle to test and learn participatory methods was the creation of the Global Advisory Panel (GAP). This Panel is comprised of ten exceptional feminist leaders and helps ensure that feminist accountability is at the heart of the Equality Fund’s approach—staying true to inclusive grantmaking, community-informed strategies, and the Principles for Feminist Funding. One approach that the Equality Fund has recently implemented encourages women’s and feminist funds to either “step up” or “step back” for funding opportunities. This funding stream, called Activate, was a portfolio of grant funds designated by the Equality Fund and it and was the potential grantee partners who decided on the priorities for the funding and subsequently, who would step up and receive funding, and who would step back and pass. This funding process was an opportunity for sister funds to think beyond themselves as an individual fund and about the ecosystem as a whole. The decision to step up or step back created a show of solidarity, in which many funds (especially the bigger/more resourced funds) put others first. This non-competitive and ecosystem focused approach creates a sense of trust, care, and support among community innovators and also tangibly transfers decision-making power from the funders to grantee partners. Ese Emerhi shared of an offbeat but notable practice of asking donors to apply to grantees, being carried out in the Latin American SERES Foundation. Their approach reverses the power-dynamics allowing innovators to assess the donor’s intent behind funding their projects. Jocelyn Mackie shared how Grand Challenges Canada put its commitment to shifting power into practice by ensuring that people affected by development or humanitarian challenges are represented in review and decision panels. The participation of persons with lived experience allows a more nuanced review of proposals and inclusive support of the fundees.
· Broaden the boundaries of flexible funding: Sue Snider & Ese Emerhi: One of the multiple ways the Equality Fund is shifting power into practice is a flexible funding model, where their core focus is on supporting the vision and needs of innovators, taking direction from organizations led by people they represent and acting on the principle of “nothing about us, without us.” This method of funding is an essential aspect of transferring power because it recognises the change-makers as leaders, and passes on agency to their hands – to choose and to respond to challenges specific to their communities. A similar practice is put in place by the Kiisi Trust Foundation (where Ese Emerhi previously worked as project director), especially in its early days. They did not engage with communities as donors searching for potential ‘beneficiaries’ but let the community members decide what areas they wanted to work upon. Alongside flattening power structures, this approach also solves the issue of ‘finding a problem for the solution’ that is prevalent in current philanthropy practice. Finally, Jocelyn noted that an effective use of the Grand Challenges model is to fund innovators with lived experience of, or who are most proximate to, the particular challenge. These are the innovators we all need to support, to enable them to test and transition to scale their solutions.
· Rewrite the notions of risk: Jocelyn Mackie & Sue Snider: Speakers agreed that too often discourses on risk in the sector remain on a superficial level and contradict real practices of agencies. On the one hand, there are countless calls to ‘take greater risks’, on the other hand, development professionals in donor organizations do not seem to have greater incentives or guidance to take meaningful risks. Development and innovation requires risk appetite,[4] and as highlighted in the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (2011)[5], risk should be managed, not avoided. But we need to be clear what kind of risk we are talking about. Evidently, risks on safeguarding, just as reputational or fiduciary risks need to be managed radically differently compared to programmatic risk. Jocelyn Mackie outlined the need to be nuanced when talking about risk taking in development and humanitarian contexts. Grand Challenges Canada has developed a specific risk category and defined and separated ‘innovation risk’ from the others, namely execution, fiduciary, financial, security, and reputational risks. Such specification allows the organization to support its programme officers and partners to better manage risks in the appropriate buckets. A thought-provoking way to view innovation risk was highlighted by Susan Snider: “the risk is not in ‘what if we fund’ the new organisations, it is in what if we don’t fund them?” Such a “flipped approach to risk” along with potential risk categories such as ‘risk of stagnation’ or ‘risk of incrementalism’ is what could be adopted by development agencies to strategically advance innovation for development efforts.
· Invest in scouting: Sue Snider: In another way of concretely supporting innovators from the Global South, the Equality Fund intentionally supports ‘emergent’ organisations, those in very early stages or who do not have the financial track record to be funded by more traditional or larger partners. Using references, networks and innovators on ground, the fund has experimented with a scouting strategy which identifies these emergent groups and approaches them with a conversation about funding needs. Strategies to channel funding to such emergent players include capacity building for new organizations, and channelling funds to fellow organizations in close proximity that can act as intermediaries for the time required to build institutional capacity. This strategy is complementary to the flexible funding approach, and subsequently its power shifting intent.
“The risk is not in ‘what if we fund’ the new organisations, it is in what if we don’t fund them?”
All speakers concluded that in addition to such concrete actions at the organisational level, changes in our mind-sets and behaviours are required to move towards equitable power sharing. Ese Emerhi, called for an end to transactional partnerships between donors and grantees. For effectively shifting power to local innovators, Ese emphatically stated, “actors in the Global North need to see actors in the Global South as true co-investors; not beneficiaries, not recipients, not as dependents. We need to stop seeing local communities as problems to be solved”. This shift in perspective would be a crucial antecedent to achieve any visible shift in power. The phrase championed by Black Lives Matter movement “fund us like you want us to win” does not only call upon funders to reckon with racial injustice in the philanthropy community but can be viewed as a clarion call to all international development agencies to adopt this vision of a more equitable, inclusive and power-balanced funding practice.
[1] Baguios, A. (forthcoming) ‘Localisation re-imagined: from localising the sector to supporting local solutions’. Blog/webpage. ALNAP
[2] WHO Regional Office for Africa (2020), “African innovators join the fight against COVID-19”, http://www.afro.who.int/news/african-innovators-join-fight-against-covid-19
[3] Corsini, L., V. Dammicco and J. Moultrie (2021), “Frugal innovation in a crisis: The digital fabrication maker response to COVID‐19”, R&D Management, Vol. 51/2, pp. 195-210, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/radm.12446
[4] OECD. 2021. Development Co-operation Fundamentals. Risk Management.
[5] OECD (2011), Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation: Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, Busan, Republic of Korea, 29 November - 1 December 2011. https://doi.org/10.1787/54de7baa-en.
