3.4: Money matters! Funding for CVA

In this episode we examine the relationship between funding, change, and the expansion of CVA in the humanitarian sector. Guests discuss the role of funding at different stages, from the very beginning through to scale-up.

This episode features insights from:

·  Irfan Khan: Director of Humanitarian and International Partnerships at Muslim Hands

·  Dr. Kathryn Taetzsch: World Vision International's Senior Director, Global Humanitarian and Development Capacity and Capabilities

·  Oliver May: Consultant on risk in the humanitarian and development sector

·  Sindhy Obias: Executive Director of the Assistance and Cooperation for Community Resilience and Development (ACCORD)

Key themes explored in this episode:

·  The tendency to blame donors for a lack of change.

·  The possibility of driving initial changes without substantial funding, but how funding is needed for scale-up.

·  The vulnerability of cash programmes to funding cuts, despite their efficiency.

·  The need to recognize both individual givers as well as institutional donors and take them along in the change process.

·  The challenges faced by local and national organizations in accessing funding for institutional development.

·   The challenges of compliance requirements, which often feel feel excessive rather than a reasonable level of accountability.

Tune into this episode to hear diverse perspectives on the multifaceted relationship between funding, change, and the expansion of CVA in the humanitarian sector.

Transcript

Episode 3.4: Money matters

Guests: Oliver, Anna, Irfan and Sindhy

Karen: Hello and welcome to the third episode of this series of CashCast. I am your host, Karen Peachey. 

In this series we’ve been asking what does it take to make change happen in the humanitarian world when it comes to cash and voucher assistance? We’ve heard from our guests about how it starts with a vision, and involves changing mindsets and as well as policies, processes, and partnerships.

In this episode, we'll explore another key issue – funding and where that fits into the picture of change. 

We'll hear about how 'blaming the donor’ can become an excuse for not making change; we'll hear how changes can be made without major donor support but that scaling up does need investment; and we'll hear how individual givers, as well as institutional donors, need to be brought along with change.  And finally, we'll hear about some of the challenges faced when funds are not available to invest in organizational development and when compliance requirements feel more of a burden than a reasonable level of accountability.

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Oliver: …All of our organizations are established differently. But I think sometimes there is an implied mandate. And I think one of the cultural phenomena I've seen in our sector, which I think holds us back a little bit, is the tendency to blame the donor. And I don't think that that's necessarily a particularly helpful one.

Karen: That's Oliver May who, we’ve heard from a few times in this series already. Oliver has over 20 years of experience working with humanitarian and development organizations. He has worked across many countries, with a particular focus on integrity risks like safeguarding, fraud and counterterrorism. 

Clearly, funding plays a huge role in the development of programmes and innovation in the humanitarian sector – and often we hear discussions to the effect that - if donors don’t green light an idea, we can’t make change. But is this always true?

Oliver fears that pointing the finger at the donor as an inhibitor of change can often be a scapegoat for inertia. He challenges us to shift the perspective and remember that the process of change is multifaceted.

Oliver:in this tenet, you know, it runs that if only the institutional donors would ask us to do things differently, would allow us to do things differently and properly, then we can do things properly. And I think there's a certain level of attraction to that idea. 

... you know, it's like we're in a cheesy cop movie, you know, those desk jockeys down at City Hall, you know, it helps us to sort of generate a sense of collective identity. But we're not in the movie, we're in real life and donors don't act in isolation, they have their own stakeholders to manage and there are, there are limits to what we can influence and control. 

So when we hear, you know, until there's change from the donors, we can't do it, we should be testing that. Sometimes it's true, but I think a lot of the time it's a form of learned helplessness. 

And it reminds me of our tendency as well to kind of blame the global humanitarian system. Yes, you know, it is pretty broken. But so is every human system. And if you're looking for change, at the top of sort of a multi headed human ecosystem, you're looking in the wrong place. So what we can do is start at the bottom, work up or start in the middle and work outwards, what can we change and influence in our own spheres? Who can we collaborate with? How can we push the dial? 

How can we generate change within our own organizations? And there's actually a huge amount of guidance and resources out there in terms of how to do that. In the information age, the internet is absolutely full of really great feedback and is a wonderfully connective tool to find other people that are also pushing change. I don't think we should necessarily wait for a mandate. 

Karen: This reminds me of a conversation we had with Anna Kondakychan an earlier episode, where she spoke about how she saw some of the early progress on cash start. 

Anna: It started with you know, really a small coalition of the willing sitting together looking at ways that markets could be mapped, looking at ways that from the existing supply chain management procedures could be looked at to support cash as a modality. And then from those kind of early trials, many errors. More trials, then you begin to build a case in that organization. And then maybe some years later, the policy commitment came and the investment followed.” 

Karen:So in the case Anna is talking about, while there were costs associated with the early work, the need for bigger money came later – following the idea, following the change, not leading it.

Yet just as funding was an enabler of the growth of cash, Anna tells how the funding environment for that organization changed and caused things to slide back. Here’s Anna again, continuing her story:

Anna: At some point, like midway through this, and what by all, by, you know, many objective measures was a successful journey …  Um, there was a, um, ... an outside change to, um, how that particular organization was expected to operate.

The people were still there, the people with passion were there. Now there was some organizational tools in place also to operationalize programming with cash. But the investment dropped drastically, right? So you have that rollback, rollback phase.

...You had two ingredients of the success. The third one was no longer there and then...things started to slide back. It's not at the same... scale as it is I believe it would have been had it not been for that setback and the drop in investment.

Karen: So in this example, the move to cash programming started and investment followed but then the operating context changed and things started to slide back. Much as that was the experience for one organisation a few years ago, it's also something that risks happening more broadly now – as the sector faces a massive reduction in funding and tough decisions are being made about programmes. 

As cash programmes can be scaled back faster than in-kind assistance (given pipelines of stocks already exist), cash assistance can be particularly vulnerable when the funding environment changes – even though the evidence shows they are more efficient than in-kind assistance.  This, once again, shows the importance of continuing to make the case for using cash rather than assuming everyone is on board.

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Another guest we’ve been talking to through this series is Irfan Khan, the director of Humanitarian and International Partnerships at Muslim Hands, a faith-based international NGO. 

Muslim Hands is currently working to scale up the use of cash assistance in its work. 

As an organization, they receive a lot of funding from individual donors and they're working with them as they make changes in how the organization works.

Irfan shared with us how they are incorporating traditional Muslim practices and beliefs as means of getting their individual givers on board with cash programming.

Irfan: We started looking into what and how we can make the best use of the type of funds that we are receiving in Muslim hands. ...Within individual donors, the type of funding that they were, donations that they give out to us, there are two main different types. One is Zakat, another is Sadaka, which is a normal charity, and Zakat is an obligatory donation that being as a Muslim you have to give out. 

So now we are looking into how to make the best use of the Zakat donations that we are getting because if the spirit of Zakat is all about to empower people who are less fortunate, then we as a custodian or we as a people like who are holding on to collecting Zakat from our donor group, we have got that space and we have got that responsibility to bring up the right programming or introduce right programming where people who are Stuck in a cycle of poverty they can they can make the best use of those funds or those donations.

...It is getting a very positive response, especially the pilot project that we are currently implementing in Mali. We are allowing our donor group to identify the type of business or type of support they want to provide.

So for example, there's a dedicated website that has been set for it, where we put the cases of individuals like who have got requirements to open up small businesses and they're looking for certain amount of funding. And then the donor group got access to that website and they just identify or they just pick which they believe is the right investment that they can make in the shape of supporting beneficiaries, either it could be a woman group that they want to support or a man group.

So we allow them to be part of the whole process so they see the journey like where these, you know, target groups are at the moment before starting the small scale businesses and then where they are once the business has started and how the progress is getting made. 

So we are engaging them quite a lot and this engagement is allowing them to generate more interest from other...donor groups of ours and with time we are quite positive that it's going to grow more. 

Karen: So for Muslim Hands’ they're working to build a connection and show the journey of the donation.  In doing so, they're taking the individual donors along with them as they change their approach to working with communities.

As the use of cash is scaled up, it inevitably means making changes to systems and processes and ensuring you have the right people in place with the necessary skills to do what's needed. 

All this requires investment in the organization itself. That money can be hard to find – especially for local and national organizations.

Now, even at a time when international organizations are supposed to be moving more funding to local actors, the change is very slow and the compliance and accountability requirements problematic.

Sindhy Obias, the Executive Director of the Assistance and Cooperation for Community Resilience and Development or ACCORD for short, an NGO in the Philippines, explains the challenges they face on this score.

Sindhy: It's been a difficult ride for local organizations and I always express this whenever there is an opportunity that local organizations are sometimes or most even most of the times are at a disadvantage position in terms of budgeting, in terms of resources because we are expected for example to implement all these activities. We are also expected to look into the sustainability of the organization, we also are expected to meet the standards set by our donors, for example, and our partners. 

But the problem is, or the question rather, is whether we have that resources to meet all these standards set, you know? Do we have that resources to build our capacities? Or even to retain our staff who have been developed, who are important, key, fundamental to the organization. That's some of the challenges that we face and it puts the organization's life into risk without such kind of resources, without such kind of support. 

And we always encounter such.... because year after year after the project ends, the question is, so now how do we, how are we supposed to thrive because we no longer have these resources? That's the same problem with other local organizations. And that's the advocacy that we have been pushing for local organizations to have ... funds to support institutional capacity building. 

Those are the struggles that we have had as an organization. Institutional funding, sustaining organizations, keeping our staff, supporting the capacity building of our staff, and meeting the administrative requirements of the donors, of our partners and supporting other concerns that we see beyond the projects, beyond the activities and goals of the project. We see other concerns in the communities with our partners. But how do we package that? How do we address that with these very little capacities that we have? 

Karen: Despite these huge challenges, Sindhy asserts there is some room for optimism. 

Sindhy: I'm a bit optimistic about this because I can see that from my perspective, there are already some developments that are happening. And I say that it's a long journey and it's not an easy journey because ...these messages have been repeated over and over again and we want to ... see results. And we also want to see results not just for our organization but also for other local organizations, especially organizations that are smaller than ours. So yeah, there's a lot to be done, you know, in a diplomatic way of saying it. There's a lot of things to be done. There are still a lots of gaps to be addressed. And yeah, I think that there's a lot of already, there's a lot of conversations already going on around that. And I say, it's high time that these concerns should be addressed, should be resolved. 

Karen: As we draw to the end of this episode, one thing is for certain, the use of cash assistance has grown over the last decade and now accounts for 21% of all international humanitarian response – approximately $10.10 billion in 2022. Donors have played a key role in the growth of cash and, just like all the other entities in the humanitarian system, they can be enablers or inhibitors of change.  

From the discussions with Irfan, Sindhy, Anna and Oliver, it's clear, as we seek to increase the use of cash, we need to manage a plethora of issues to do with funding. 

While some issues are cash specific, others are not. For Sindhy, some of the issues she faces with increasing the use of cash are the same as those she faces with growing the use of other forms of assistance i.e. the limited investments that have been made in the institution building of local and national organizations.

Whoever the donors are, be they individuals or organisations, they inevitably want to know how the money they've given is being used to best effect. 

The story of why cash assistance makes sense, and why its the preferred form of assistance in most contexts of crisis contexts, needs to continue to be told. 

I hope we will meet again in the next episode of this series where we will dig into questions about how risk is an inevitable part of the discussion as we seek to increase the use of cash in humanitarian action. 

Once again our guests have some great perspectives and interesting views. 

Let’s continue the conversation, we want to hear from you, feel free to share your thoughts or questions with us through our different channels indicated in the description of this episode.

So that's it for now, until next time – goodbye!