For as long as we can remember, grant making and funding grassroot organisations came with its own type of power, control and erasure of community autonomy. Global donors and International Partners often parashooting their way into communities instituting their own rules and implementing their own agenda without a local context. Consequently enacting hierarchies in leadership. Philanthropy came with a cost.
Here comes Participatory Grant making. A process within global philanthropy that centres communities in the decision-making process. One that empowers them to decide where and how their resources are distributed. One that is fed by lived experience, indigenous knowledge and local context.
In West Africa, Love Alliance work in conjunction with Initiative Sankofa d’Afrique de l’ouest (ISDAO); an activist led fund supporting movements advocating for sexual rights and freedoms in the region. Their process of participatory grant making is implemented through local activists who collectively constitute a grant panel. These panel members represent LGBTIQ+ communities, Sex Workers and people who use drugs. Grounded by experience, collected data, transparency and equity, they oversee proposals through grant cycles and help decide how resources are allocated to the community-led organisations.
ISDAO works across Nigeria and Burkina Faso, countries in the region with diverse cultures, systems and languages. Yet both are experiencing how participatory grant making is shifting the power in leadership, community autonomy, resilience building and empowering movements.
A case for Nigeria
Scaling up
Nigerian organisations have often operated in silos. Whether it is competing for resources or duplicating services due to donor demands. The PGM approach sees the bigger picture of intersectional needs and services. Sex workers, LGBTIQ+ people and people who use drugs often face similar levels of stigma, healthcare discriminations and cultural marginalisations. As a result they share similar needs. Understanding these issues as an intersectional human rights concern creates critical mass to scale up advocacy, pursue policy reform and build infrastructure – just some of the building blocks that sustain these levels of community programming.
For organisations like TAHRA, working with peer educators and sharing resources with organisations doing similar work across cities has expanded their reach and transformed their programming. Their Love Alliance funding has seen them expand their services to empower younger people with their mental health via their fashion hub as well as advance their capacity to those experiencing gender-based violence.
Collaboration
Through collaborations, many grantee organisations have been able to magnify their reach and impact. Love Alliance have propelled the formation of consortiums within and across geographical regions.
Take for instance, The Alliance for Health and Rights Advocacy (TAHRA) Initiative. Through a consortium, it expanded its work beyond Adamawa state to Bauchi and Gombe. There has been knowledge exchange and information transfer.
Collaborations also occur across resourcing, services and governmental institutions.
Law enforcement are often the perpetrators of unlawful arrests. for organisations like Securing for the Creative Goldmine in Youths Initiative (SCGYI), establishing a partnership with the Ministry of Justice led to the release of unlawfully detained young people who use drugs. This has been part of their work emphasising welfare and harm reduction over criminalisation.
They have also partnered with the Nigerian Union of Journalism to help educate reporters on ethical and responsible reporting. As we know media shapes culture and shifts perception. Changing the language humanises communities and sensitises wider society to their plight, creating a culturally centred approach to supporting those who use drugs.
For Solace Hub they have collaborated with the Joint National Association of Person’s Living with Disabilities (JONAPID). This has helped them identify and jointly develop policy material to support queer people living with disabilities. They have been able to train sign language facilitators so the communities they serve can access services.
In the case of Greater Women Initiative for Health and Rights, who through their consortiums have collected data used to advocate for community needs and holding decision makers to account. As a collective, they have also designed a toolkit for safety implemented across regions.
Leadership
In the past, donor organisations have led through hierarchies. These hierarchal power structures led to tokenism within communities as many leaders wanted to align with donor priorities. For Onyema George of the Nigeria Key Populations Health and Rights Network (KPHRN) he say’s “community leaders were rendered cosmetic figureheads with no actual decision-making power. Added to that, many organisations have remained under -resourced and invisible.”
However being a part of the participatory grant making process has given leadership a voice and shaped his confidence.
Daniel Vena and Josephine Aseme, whose work advocates for the rights of sex workers attest to a growth in leadership confidence because their community’s voice is included in the proposal design from its inception. This has enabled them hold multi-level discussions at national roundtables. With the hands-off approach where the funders/implementing partners aren’t micromanaging, leaders are building their capacity and optimising to deliver value to their communities instead of ticking funding boxes. As leadership growth thrives, the table expands.
Through the works of peer support and peer leaders, leadership isn’t only decentralised, it is inclusive as it considers subgroups even within community structures. Most of all it is reflective of the people, their context and diversities.
Sustainability
Through community-focused needs and advocacy, once overlooked issues have become visible. This creates a chain reaction and a sustainable model for advocacy and movement building. As more change happens on the ground, more organisations are springing up catering to an expansion of needs. This spreads the work and the impact.
Much of the Love Alliance grant projects have integrated capacity training in finance, communication and administration. This has built expertise and strengthened human capital. Advocacy is an ongoing process. Better structures and programmes mean continuity. It means those that do the work are empowered enough to keep it going. When thinking about sustainability Daniel Vena of GWIHR says, “Nobody wants their seed to die off”.
A case for Burkina Faso
Self-autonomy of the Community
Creating an awareness campaign is one thing but going further with advocacy is another. The Love Alliance funding has taken projects beyond advocacy for the prevention of HIV to increasing their self-autonomy.
For organisations like Association Bienfait’s de la nature (ABN), they developed programmes for
financial management, resource mobilisation and leadership training. This is an example of one the ways self-autonomy has been demonstrated in the community. At WOMA media, where their web radio project was created to amplify the voices of women across communities, working interns were remunerated.
Women were trained in public speaking to enhance their participation in leadership and campaigning for their reproductive and sexual health rights. To have a place on the resource table, it starts with a confident voice.
Visibility
For some in Burkina Faso, their advocacy is still emerging and showing signs for a groundbreaking future. The visibility from their projects have increased trust within the communities and propelled them into national conversations.
Song Taaba is an organisation working on risk reduction and reintegration with people who use drugs. Their school awareness activations scored them a place on a platform instituted by the country’s health ministry earning them a space at the decision-making table at a national level. Colibri SUD has received national acknowledgement increasing the power to be part of setting the agenda for their communities on a community and country level. Most importantly participating in policy reform means organisations are no longer working in isolation.
Structure
The work of sustained advocacy is determined by the foundations built to hold things in place. From formalising associations and securing community centres to building team capacity and operational funding, building advocacy structure has been lightening rod for funding implementation. It has facilitated safety for activists and communities to strategize with intention and think future forward. This has been crucial for developing the competencies for much of the community leaderships and programming advancement. Evidently, services have become more available, strengthening advocacy efforts resulting in the establishment of a detox and treatment centre offering both in and outpatient care by Colibri SUD. “Our activities have become continuous as a result” says Dr Cherileila Thiombiano.
Structure isn’t just physical. It is technical, intellectual, political and emotional. It is what propels the engine for movements to thrive and consequently communities can excel.
Network
Integrating networks is essential for pulling together resources, strategy, knowledge, insights and even infrastructure. The Love Alliance/ISDAO grants have helped facilitate networks with older organisations, teaching younger ones to build competence, manage resources and manage projects efficiently.
Think of it as intergenerational mentorship but on an organisational level. Much like the case for Nigeria collaborating through consortiums, Burkina Faso is also networking across groups, institutions and even regions. WOMA media for instance through their 2022 grant expanded their work to Togo and Cote d’Ivoire sharing data and learning insights from their counterparts working on similar objectives.
Flexibility
Whether it is preparing for an emergency like dealing with cases of violence, needing to provide safe spaces for community members or funding issues that were not prioritised in the past, the flexibility of the fund has created a level field for problems as successfully expanded impact. Song Taaba’s Kasum Ouandraogo says, “We tried to advocate for a legal review to reduce the penalty for drug users. We have never had funding for that before.”
Conclusion
As the humanitarian world navigates a funding freeze, participatory grant making is seeming like an emerging rainbow through a current storm. By shifting the power to communities, developing a localised funding framework, strengthening infrastructure through collaboration, building human capacity and courageously tacking newer issues for long term impact, it is demonstrating that grassroots communities possess the resilience to solve their own problems.
With a guiding ethos of intersectionality and transparency, it is setting a precedence for young organisations to lead their communities from a place of empowerment and not subservience. What we see is a philanthropic future in the region that is human again.