Locusts and Pandemics

The East African region has been slammed in the past year by seemingly Straight-Out-Of-The-Bible plagues of locusts, floods, and now, the Global Covid19 Pandemic. It’s also been a tough year for civil society that for years, has suffered from both chronic and inappropriate funding. The sector suffers from the prioritization of project based financing over core support, the latter being the lifeblood of civil society. Funding also tends to be truncated and with fixed short term project cycles that don’t lend themselves to effective social change, or movement building which requires longer and more flexible time frames.

And while almost all NGOs are struggling to survive in a time of shrinking funding because of Covid19, local NGOs have been the clear losers in the funding for Covid response. A startling statistic from the Center for Global Development showed that only 0.07% of the US$2.5 billion allocated for Covid19 response has ended up in the hands of local non-governmental organizations.

The Covid pandemic has reinforced the need for the philanthropy sector to go back to basics. Some key concepts gaining prominence in this time include trust based grantmaking; the call to support civil society and other associational life in the form they see best; a shift from project based to core and operational support; adopting of nimble and responsive support that allows for adjustments in the external context. It has indeed been sobering for the sector to realize that for some, even a pandemic was insufficient to shift pre-agreed on log frames, and theories of change!  Other promising trends include a move to longer and collaborative partnerships as opposed to the more contractual project based financing.

Deficits:

In addition to Covid19, the Black Lives Matter Movement has caused a seismic shift in many sectors. The East African philanthropy sector is not exempt.  If we pan out, and look at the entire so-called “Development Sector”, some of the criticisms levelled against the sector are that the sector can be guilty of perpetuating post-colonial practices, or as Firoze Manji says of continuing the “Missionary position”.  This critique, mainly levelled against Western, or Western facing INGOs, is that through their work, they center (mainly) Western societies as the ideal that African societies should “develop into”. As a consequence, the work and efforts of the sector end up being an effort at panel beating African NGOs and societies from what  “isn’t” (in Africa) to what “is” (in Western Societies).  Equally sobering is the critique that INGOs also operate and reinforce specific power structures through their work, where on one side, you’ll typically have Western (or Western facing) donors/ INGOs with all the knowledge. And on the other side, you’ll have local NGOs (“grantees”) often positioned as supplicants waiting to be capacity built, funded and generally whipped into shape.  It’s this centering of development on the “white gaze”, a phrase coined by the late Toni Morrison (may she rest in perfect power), and also echoed by others like Dr Robtel Naijali, and Dr Mordecai Ogada, that we are called upon to change, if the sector is to serve the communities it was ostensibly created to serve.

Some of the work that we are urgently called upon to do includes de-racialising development, and this moment presents us an opportune time to examine our practices. The sector needs to urgently reform its practices including a shift in power, attitudes and grant making practices.

In Parting: The Parable of the Sower

Growing up, I remember my incredulity when I was told that growing crops in straight lines was something that was “brought by the white man”.  When rather skeptically I asked what we were doing before, I was told “we were planting haphazardly”.  Many years later, I came across the work of Howard Jones who had studied African polyculture, and the ‘discovery’ was that far from being haphazard, this was actually well thought out agronomy practice. And this served as a lesson, as growing up, the visually pleasing straight lines were examples of aspirational farming, and with the more complicated polyculture being something that we needed to develop from. How much soil health, and agricultural productivity have we lost as ‘modern agriculture’ tried to ‘modernize’ African agricultural practices I wonder?

And that’s a good way to end this #ShortTake.  How much are we losing as a sector as we try and ‘develop’ society on our terms, and not communities? How much NGO vibrancy is lost when we try and mold NGOs into a certain image? We truly need to find out what our True North should be, else no amount of recalibration of compasses will fix what ails the sector.