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Sustaining civil society: why legitimacy matters
Recently, I heard a senior USAID grantmaker, addressing an audience of African NGO leaders, stress that he was only interested in funding ‘legitimate NGOs’. He meant something more than ‘formal legitimacy’, ie legitimacy granted by …
Ashoka’s Citizen Base Initiative aims to ‘tip’ civil society thinking
The starting point for Ashoka’s Citizen Base Initiative (CBI) is the vast explosion in the number of citizens’ organizations (COs) and the realization that the overwhelming bulk of funding for them has to come from …
New finanthropists offer a hand up
‘Money ! You just can’t give it away’ screamed the headline in Sunday Business (London, 10 October). It was trailing an interview with Yahoo’s co-founder, Jerry Yang. ‘Learning how to be a contributor to the …
The perfect funding pattern – myth or reality?
Funders face some key dilemmas when supporting small, locally based NGOs and community groups. What kinds of funding patterns best help them to sustain and develop their organizations? What strategies should funders adopt to make …
Encouraging NGO sustainability – some examples from around the world
LOCAL TRUST FUNDS HELP POOR COMMUNITIES IN ECUADOR Although rich in natural resources, Ecuador, a small country in the Andes, is a poor country. Fundación Esquel was established in 1990 in response to the increasing …
Giving without frontiers
Global markets bring individuals from different nation states into ever closer economic, social and political relationships with each other. The creation of a global civil society is an integral part of these burgeoning, if as …
International conference in Beijing hails emergence of Chinese NGOs
The emergence of Chinese NGOs under the umbrella of a powerful state does not fit the popular Western view of ‘civil society’. Yet the very fact that a conference on the Chinese non-profit sector took …
Accreditation – a kitemark for the non-profit sector?
How do you judge whether a non-profit organization is doing a good job? This is an important issue both for NPOs themselves and for donors. Unfortunately, it is also one about which there is little …
Accreditation and power: fighting the kitemarks
If donors were in the business of electrifying a township, it might be prudent to buy accredited electric plugs with kitemarks. However, once they move beyond such concrete projects, the use of accreditation diminishes rapidly …
Company–NGO partnerships in the Asia Pacific
Even before the financial crisis, it was widely recognized both that civil society has a key role to play in the Asia Pacific region and that it has inadequate resources at its disposal. Since the …