The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) are corpses. They have been devoured and buried alive while they were still throbbing. They are the first missing persons of a very quickly orchestrated system of mass destruction. Nobody knows where they are or what has happened.
In the mid-2000s, international NGOs (INGOs) were some of the most trusted institutions in the global development landscape. 20 years later, this trust has eroded …
When I started working with community foundations in Australia, I assumed these organisations were ‘born’ from the communities they serve. However, I soon realised this …
For too long, the interaction between funders and grantees has been reduced to little more than a transactional exchange. Money flows one way, deliverables flow …
The author is an Embassy Staff with a European country based in the Global South, and wishes to remain anonymous. Did you know that less …
Musimbi Epillose The concept of #ShiftThePower is rapidly taking over the old development approaches. For a long time, grassroots organizations were placed behind the scenes …
At Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace (PSJP) our goal has been to centre the normative values of justice, solidarity and agency in the field …
At this time, when governments of developing nations are increasingly skeptical of foreign funding, barriers imposed by the donor countries put grassroots CSOs at enormous risk. As powerful elites in the Global South continue to discredit CSOs in the name of ‘foreign agents’, tied aid contributes to this narrative, muddying the waters for activists.
When the sector talks about donor fatigue or donors saying they don’t see where the money is going. Well, only less than 10% of your money comes directly to us. They should ask Northern CSOs about the other 90% – they shouldn’t ask us.
Have you heard of imaginal cells? This is what Amaha Selassie asked us as we sat in the jungle-themed hotel lobby. It was the night after the #ShiftThePower Summit in Bogotá, and 5 of us had come together seemingly by accident, talking for hours about the worlds of possibility and complexity that the Summit had unlocked. None of us knew about these cells, so Amaha explained
