I often wonder if we were to construct a solutions enterprise to address global inequity and injustice, whether we would construct the nonprofit and civil society sectors as they are today.

Would we bind giving so tightly to tax law built around a capitalist economic framework or architect a road to progress that doesn’t run through charity bureaucracy, galas, annual reports, and all the things nonprofits must do before actually solving problems? We spend so much money to give money. And do we even give it away well? What if in our earnest effort to help, we’ve constructed an overly complex response that gets in its own way?

To gain greater insight into how outsiders can best help communities achieve the progress they envision, World Connect, the organization I lead, collaborated on original research in nine communities in Malawi led by researchers from Duke University and Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and with funding from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. Our paper reinforces that the best ideas for development can lie inside communities. The Malawians we interviewed have participated in generations of outsider-led aid efforts, most of which failed to truly listen to their needs and priorities. The fetishization of expertise and innovation as the best tools to scale relief for underserved populations has crowded out the essential work of collective action and institution development, which always starts locally.

The way the nonprofit and civil society structures are constructed assumes the fund seekers must navigate the world of resources to find those best suited to our mission and our purpose. Much vital energy for progress is lost in the resource chase and this approach doesn’t necessarily source the best ideas. This process is even harder for Global South communities as language, limited Internet bandwidth, experience bias, and other barriers to entry are exacerbated by existential crises like extreme poverty, climate insecurity and/or political instability. And even when we seekers reach the shores of resource opportunity, we are often confronted with harsh realities: thousands of applications for tens of awards, criteria requiring applicants be founders of the institution or first-time applicants or proposing a new innovation, ideally based in the U.S. or ideally not based in the U.S., budgets can’t be too big or too small, awards will only be made in communities where the funder’s staff works, and even if and when there is synergy with a funder, unsolicited proposals are not accepted, etc.

Are we getting the best ideas with philanthropy structured as it is? Do the people with the best ideas, who are best positioned for success, even know about opportunities as they are often posted in spaces only familiar to those who already exist within the funding ecosystem? 

Malawi is the eighth poorest country in the world and yet, its resilient democracy makes it more attractive as an emerging economy for global development investment. Malawi has an impressive architecture of village development committees, community-based organizations, self-help groups, and others that are important power centers with the vision, wisdom, trust and unity to know what needs to get done locally and how. But these local power centers are not invested in for a myriad of reasons: they may not be incorporated, may not have Western governance structures, may not have received prior outside funding, may not have the reporting capacities required by outside donors, and what they want to do may not fit neatly within a donor’s portfolio. By placing biased ‘capacity’ hurdles ahead of assessments of, and support for, local capacity for vision and leadership, philanthropy misses out on great opportunities.

Our paper, entitled: ‘What do communities feel about community-driven development’, assembles new evidence that points to communities as the best locus for development activation. Our field is awash in calls for localization, but still less than one per cent of the $180 billion spent annually in global development and humanitarian aid reaches local communities. To achieve success in localization at scale, I encourage the philanthropic sector to do more heavy lifting to proactively find the ideas instead of expecting the ideas to find the money. Reform is already underway, but our efforts need more accelerant. This work is urgent, development impacts us all.

An investment World Connect made of $684 enabled a women’s nutritional initiative in Malawi to improve herb product packaging, leading to an increase of 250 per cent in sales. A second investment of $8,663 enabled the group to build a milling space, leading to a 2500 per cent increase in sales. This enterprise alone has created twenty jobs, enabled forty families to improve their housing, led to the launch of five additional new businesses on the value chain, and improved food security and school attendance. Funding invested in true community-led development has a high rate of success and spreads success to other communities in the form of ‘good envy’; it’s the way to build a new development power network from the inside. Communities yearn to see their leaders, people they know and trust, grow and learn and thrive with new opportunities.

‘Attempting to become self-developing, communities take on growing responsibilities. As they gain diverse skills and take on additional initiatives, they acquire greater confidence in their own capacities, and a greater share of the development dynamic can be powered internally, leading to more and newer skills and capacities, which can be used in turn to energize new enterprises, thus creating a virtuous cycle.’ – What Do Communities Feel About Community-Driven Development, March 2023

We’ve learned from communities we have invested with how hard they have worked and how development should build on their already significant efforts. Shalini Eddens and Kate Kroeger called for greater risk in philanthropy in a November 2022 Alliance article, but taking risks doesn’t just mean backing unpopular advocacy or investing in disrupted societies. Risk can also mean trusting new loci of change, which will necessitate new ways of meeting new people, meeting them where they are and having long conversations that shed light on their existing capacity as it is defined locally, moving money to their operations quickly, before they lose momentum and hope, in ways that embrace and help grow local capacities, and believing in them for as long as success may take – big progress will certainly take more than 1 or 3 or 5 years. And success means sustainability without us – if we nonprofits do our job well, we should put ourselves out of business.

Until we are routinely funding ideas coming from the centers of communities and ultimately eliminating the bias and barriers that keep so many talented visionaries from vital seed capital for their ideas, we are doomed to repeat the vicious cycle that often creates more purpose in process than in impact. This will take a lot of work, but if we listen to local voices such as those from Malawi featured in our paper, they tell us everything we need to know to do this work well.

Pamela Nathenson is Executive Director at World Connect, Inc.