Principles for Effective and Empowering International Philanthropy

A team from West Africa visiting India to learn about the ASER assessment. (Photo by Dana Schmidt)

In July 2020, for the first time, we were able to compare the math abilities of students in and out of school across 13 countries spanning Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Psychometricians developed assessments that were comparable across 11 languages and multiple contexts, surveyors visited over 15,000 households and assessed over 20,000 children from 779 rural communities. Researchers cleaned and analyzed data, designed reports, and organized a launch, all during a pandemic.

As you envision what it took to pull this off, what institutions and individuals do you picture? Perhaps a large international organization like UNESCO, plenty of “global” experts, and millions of dollars to back them?

In fact, the effort was what one observer called “an inspiring example of how south-south cooperation is not just possible, but can rival global North efforts that are often not contextually appropriate...and [involve] expensive [external] ‘experts’.” The International Common Assessment of Numeracy (ICAN) was a product of the People’s Action for Learning Network (PAL Network for short), a coalition of 15 education-focused organizations across 14 countries in the Global South that have focused on community-based assessments of learning outcomes. The effort was led by experts from India, Kenya, and 13 other PAL countries who leveraged expertise from partners of the PAL Network like Pratham and the Australian Council for Educational Research.

The PAL Network is also an example of the best contributions that a globally oriented philanthropy can make. The most typical forms of global giving can actually undermine local accountability and perpetuate the dominant position of Northern NGOs. A recent report found that international giving by foundations is at an all-time high, but the dollars flowed mostly to organizations based in the global north: Only 12 percent of international grant dollars were given directly to organizations based in the countries where their programs were implemented, while grants given directly to “local” organizations tended to be smaller and issued with greater scrutiny.

What type of giving can we promote instead? How can philanthropies not only recognize the value of supporting local organizations but also follow through and provide funding in a way that empowers them? How can they broaden their understanding of what constitutes the most relevant, trusted, and technically robust knowledge and evidence and fund accordingly? At a time when many foundations are being called out for what they are doing wrong, we offer examples of international giving done in ways that support empowered communities.

International Giving to Support Empowered Communities

The seeds that eventually grew into the PAL Network were planted when Pratham, an Indian NGO established in 1995 and a founding member of the Network, undertook a simple exercise to measure how well students could read and do basic math in a few villages in India. Based on that early experience, Pratham discovered that many children who went to school were not able to read and write: While the more visible problem of school-going had largely been solved, an invisible problem of low learning outcomes was hiding in the shadows. Bringing this problem into the light—with tools so easy to administer that the community itself could participate in the assessment—allowed communities to understand the problem at hand and begin tackling it. In 2005 Pratham took the assessment nationwide, mobilizing almost 25,000 citizens from across India to visit households around the country and test more than half a million 5-16-year-old children to see whether or not they could read and calculate. They published the results in an Annual Status of Education Report (ASER, for short) and pushed for the school system to attend to foundational learning.

A few years later, a group of education leaders from East Africa was looking for answers to tackle poor quality schooling in their own countries, and a small travel grant from the Hewlett Foundation allowed them to visit India and learn from the ASER experience. The team came home inspired to launch Uwezo, a version of ASER adapted to their own context.

Fast forward again and eventually, local organizations in 13 countries across three continents were mobilizing ordinary citizens to conduct assessments of learning outcomes and using the results to hold their governments accountable for improving school quality. Individually they shifted priorities of their national governments and school systems to look at learning, not just schooling. Funding from the Hewlett Foundation allowed these groups to share what they were learning. Those exchanges were so fruitful that they formally banded together as the PAL Network to learn from each other and draw on their shared findings of dismal learning outcomes to advocate globally. Collectively they helped shift global priorities, embedding learning as a goal within the Sustainable Development Goals. Most recently, their work culminated in the first internationally comparable math assessment that captures children both in school and out of school through the ICAN (International Common Assessment of Numeracy).

The PAL Network illustrates what a globally oriented (and even locally oriented) philanthropy can look like:

1. Funding for actors with a personal stake in the outcomes of their work;
2. Increasing accountability of public policy makers to their citizens;
3. Starting with what is locally relevant and using that to inform global agendas, not the other way around; and
4. Facilitating ongoing learning and mutual exchange that draws on multiple types of knowledge and expertise.

1. Fund Actors With a Personal Stake in the Outcomes of Their Work

“If there has been one key lesson of international development experience to date, it is that public policies work best when they are designed and implemented by local actors … Although international donors now recognize that local ownership is critical to successful development interventions, they often fail to invest in the local institutions that can do the ongoing research and analysis needed by policy makers and activists to effect program improvements over time.”

This was the argument program staff at the Hewlett Foundation used to make the case for providing large and unrestricted support to think tanks based in and run by citizens from the countries they seek to influence. The Think Tank Initiative provided a decade of unrestricted support to over 40 think tanks in 20 countries, and as a result of the large, long term, stable support that they received, the vast majority of supported think tanks were able to more strategically and intentionally strengthen their research quality to achieve policy influence.

Actors who have a strong understanding of the context for which they are developing solutions, and a personal stake in the success of their solutions, are more likely to know what needs to be done, and more likely to be held accountable if they get it wrong.

In the case of the PAL Network, each of the members is its own autonomous organization, based in and led by leaders from the countries in which they conduct their assessments. Even though members of the network have all agreed on principles for their reading and math assessments which hold steady across all countries, each organization has been able to make adaptations to the assessment process that are needed to accelerate impact in that context. For example, ASER Pakistan expanded its assessment into urban districts, breaking from ASER India’s rural model in order to provide policy makers with an understanding of the entirety of the learning landscape in a rapidly urbanizing setting. In East Africa, Uwezo took up a similar spirit of adaptation and adoption of ASER by adding several reading comprehension questions to assess children’s reading, given that many of the children in these settings were reading in a non-native language.

Funding actors with a stake in their solutions also means providing a meaningful level of support to these actors so that they can get the work done. International grantmakers give grants to “local” organizations that are smaller than grants given to international organizations or organizations led by expatriates. When the Segal Family Foundation analyzed revenue growth for over 200 partners in Sub-Saharan Africa, they found that those led by expatriates grew twice as fast as the organizations led by Africans. Indeed, the very language we use about “local” organizations reveals our bias about what is possible in terms of the scale and scope of their ambitions: Donors often make excuses about the absorptive capacity of “local” organizations without batting an eye at making big bets on brand new organizations led by white people.

However, the scope and scale of the problems “local” organizations are tackling are large, and funding needs to be commensurate. In the case of PAL Network members, six-figure checks as seed funding to get new assessments off the ground were critical, giving organizations the support they needed to be bold and ambitious. For example, in East Africa, PAL Network member Uwezo’s very first learning assessment was nationwide in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania—not a small-scale affair in a few sub-regions. The national and regional footprint of the Uwezo assessments made them a credible barometer of learning in each of these countries and provided a platform for influencing national policies.

A challenge global funders face is obtaining enough contextual information to understand how external support will affect the policy, advocacy, and research ecosystems. Funders have the ability to “pick winners,” which can be destabilizing to the local NGO sector, particularly in contexts in which resources are scarce. Knowledgeable in-country staff and/or consultants can assess the political dynamics and help mitigate some of the risks of funders’ choices. Funders can also fund multiple organizations working on the same issues to encourage the development of the best ideas and can fund organizations from across the field. Funders should look for evidence of the impact that organizations are having and publicly acknowledge the potential negative impact on the local NGO community, local politics, etc.

2. Increase Accountability of Public Policy Makers to Their Citizens

International giving should strengthen, not undermine, accountability within other countries. But as Ruth Levine has argued, “because a United States foundation advancing a policy agenda is not itself accountable to the citizens of other countries, it may inadvertently undermine the relationship between citizens and their own government.”

The learning assessments conducted by PAL Network members are homegrown and implemented by well-trained citizen volunteers. Each of the PAL Network members mobilizes citizens within its own country to carry out learning assessments in order to understand and highlight the realities of education systems on the ground. The families and communities affected by the shortcomings in education delivery are engaged in the process of conducting the assessment and in the process of advocating for change.

Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) is another network that epitomizes this principle. WIEGO brings together organizations of informal workers, innovative and committed researchers, and development practitioners “to improve the status of the working poor, especially women in the informal economy." At the crux of WIEGO’s work is providing and energizing spaces where groups of informal workers can unite together to make demands of their government. Women exercise agency in multiple ways by coming together into organized groups, electing representatives to speak on their behalf to municipal and even higher-level authorities, and making their voices heard. In Ghana, WIEGO has worked with waste pickers who were being ignored and left behind by the government despite their critical contributions to Accra’s solid waste management. WIEGO supported waste pickers to grow strong, democratic organizations through which they could prioritize and articulate their demands. Eventually, waste picker leaders developed such a strong voice and confidence that they started to shape the national discourse on waste-related policy.

Offering core support to organizations is a crucial component of strengthening local accountability. It is impossible for an organization like WIEGO to spell out to a donor what the exact needs of waste pickers will be and how they will solve them. Issues are fluid, as are opportunities to influence policy. WIEGO has been able to observe and learn directly from waste pickers and vendors and take advantage of narrow windows of opportunity with the government thanks to unrestricted support from the Hewlett Foundation. Having a flexible, adaptive programming approach was especially critical after the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. WIEGO adapted new strategies quickly, shifting to support workers’ demands that government stimulus funds for small business relief include street vendors and market traders. In response to workers’ advocacy, the government extended its application process to expand access to the funds.

Similarly, one of the problems the Think Tank Initiative aimed to solve through unrestricted support was the fact that most think tanks in low-income countries received support for one-off projects, which were often defined (if not designed) by the donor agency funding the project. As a result, think tanks were stuck doing research responsive to donor needs, rather than establishing their own research priorities and helping their governments to create and refine policies that responded to citizen demands. For example, when a building that housed five garment factories in Bangladesh collapsed and killed 1,130 people in 2013, the Centre for Policy Dialogue did not have to mobilize funds to respond. They had the flexible support they needed to organize quickly to monitor whether or not the government followed through on its commitments to support victims and take other measures after the disaster.

3. Start With What Is Locally Relevant to Inform Global Agendas

The international development field is littered with attempts to “influence the global agenda,” in conversations between “global” actors and other “global” actors. Such conversations need to be rooted in the real needs of real people, and local NGOs, particularly those that are connected to cross-national, cross-regional, and global conversations through formal networks, can be an invaluable source of inspiration and information about what actions international actors can take to meaningfully affect lives and livelihoods.

The PAL Network began with an issue that was locally relevant—the fact that many children were going to school without ever learning to read or do math—and worked to tackle that issue in its own country. When they connected with other organizations who were tackling similar issues in their own countries and came together as the PAL Network in order to learn from one another, they realized that the issues that were locally relevant to each of them also had global resonance. Jointly they were able to bridge from local efforts to global influence. For instance, they worked to ensure that the Sustainable Development Goals included education goals that centered around children’s learning—an improvement upon the previous Millennium Development Goals which looked only at whether children enrolled in and completed school. Their advocacy was tied to lived realities of citizens in their countries, which means the change they were pushing for was meaningful.

Funders can play an important role in facilitating these efforts outside of the grant dollars that they provide. For example, in the case of the PAL Network, program officers from the Hewlett Foundation actively worked to bring voices of member organizations to the table in “global” spaces where funders were well connected but efforts like these would otherwise have been excluded.

A bottom-up approach to policy change is also a hallmark of WIEGO’s work. Based on over a decade of work with informal workers, WIEGO recognized the importance of labor standards for women working in the informal sector. For example, in 2016, WIEGO supported some of Accra’s most vulnerable workers, women kayayei (headporters), to successfully campaign for an end to a daily working toll, establishing that informal wage workers should not assume all of the associated costs and risks of their work. WIEGO has also supported informal workers in securing expanded access to social protection and improved infrastructure and services in markets. Using principles from these commitments—namely that the path to formalization should be supportive and not punitive—WIEGO has advocated for the International Labor Organization to adopt ILO Recommendation 204, the first-ever international labor standard specifically for the informal economy, and a roadmap for policies that facilitate a transition from the informal to the formal economy in the ILO’s 186 member states.

The recommendation contains many of the demands made by the “WIEGO Network Platform,” a policy roadmap created together with informal workers’ organizations from Latin America, Africa, and Asia: rights, protections, and incentives for informal workers to formalize and recognizes the importance of a friendly legal and policy environment; the preservation and expansion of formal jobs and guards against the informalization of formal jobs; recognition or public space as a workplace; expanding social protections to informal workers, including social insurance coverage and occupational health and safety; and acknowledgment that membership-based organizations of informal workers should be represented in tripartite negotiations or consultations on issues affecting them.

The work of organizations like the PAL Network and WIEGO helps to realize the promise and mandate of global institutions to draw from expert communities in the places the institutions' work is supposed to be relevant to. It also demonstrates the importance of the agenda being set locally, and the support being marshaled globally.

4. Facilitate Ongoing Learning and Mutual Exchange That Draws on Multiple Types of Knowledge and Expertise

Funders often assume that organizations based in low-income countries need external expertise in order to do their work. But while there is nothing wrong with harnessing external support for learning, the danger in focusing excessively on “capacity building” is that funders may fail to acknowledge and draw upon the many strengths these organizations bring to bear: an intimate understanding of local needs, the types of solutions that could succeed, the political economy at work, and so much more. And when funders use evaluations for accountability or bureaucratic purposes, they may be serving their own needs rather than providing a learning opportunity for organizations to iterate and improve.

Funders who see that every organization has both something to learn and something to teach (including to the funder!), open up space for rich and meaningful mutual exchange. The Think Tank initiative learned this lesson midstream. Originally, the initiative offered capacity-building sessions to grantees in the network. They found that think tank leaders were not gaining nearly as much from these sessions as they were from conversations with their program officers and peers at other think tanks. So they pivoted from providing capacity building to facilitating peer exchange, which think tank leaders found to be more helpful. Peer exchanges among think tanks helped facilitate the spread of successful ideas like informing electoral debate in Latin America.

Support within WIEGO spreads laterally through different city teams exchanging around thematic areas, quarterly meetings within countries where all the sectors come together, and calls between colleagues when they need support. There is only a small WIEGO team in-country, but they are able to take advantage of the wider global network for targeted technical support, in specific areas, and when the local teams request it. This puts everyone within WIEGO on equal footing. Similarly, members of the PAL Network learn from one another; as one member remarked, “the PAL Network is as much about love as it is about learning. It evokes emotion in a way that PISA [a large international assessment out of the OECD] does not.”

In addition to mutual exchange, funding external evaluations and research is another tool to facilitate ongoing learning within organizations when the research is informed by the input of the organization being evaluated. Members of the PAL Network benefited from research by a team from the University of Cambridge, funded by grant dollars. The research looked at how to use the learning assessments generated by network members to drive actions that would actually improve those results. They found opportunities to link citizen-led assessments to citizen-led action, which prompted the PAL Network to support its members in learning more about programs like Teaching at the Right Level.

An outsider point of view can be helpful, but the key for funders is to understand that every organization has something to learn and something to teach and that knowledge comes from multiple sources (lived experience and empirical analysis both have their place). This opens up avenues for rich learning, adaptation, and improvement on all sides.

An End to Business as Usual

It is all too easy for global philanthropists to fall into the trap of assuming western expertise is required to make things rigorous, that good ideas flow only from the “North” to the “South” and that strict project-based parameters are required for accountability. In reality, often the best expertise is embedded in context. Ghana’s informal workers experience the failures of current policies and systems and have come up with innovative solutions in areas as diverse as solid waste management and labor rights. Through WIEGO, grassroots proposals have fed into global policy arenas, shaping norms and standards from the bottom up. In the case of the PAL Network, it is precisely because their learning assessments were developed in situ that they hold properties that make them better—they are simple and understandable, which makes them actionable. Knowledge does not have to be complex to be meaningful.

Despite these characteristics, which set the PAL Network, WIEGO, and local think tanks apart from other efforts, money has not flowed easily to their work. Will COVID and calls for racial justice provide a significant enough disruption to "business as usual" that funders can begin to explore new approaches?

This article has benefited from substantial input from Ruth Levine, CEO at IDInsight; Suman Bhattacharjea, director of research at ASER Centre; and Sarah Lucas, program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Read more stories by Dana Schmidt, Dorcas Ansah, Enrique Mendizabal, Rajarshi Singh & Sara Ruto.