Below is an excerpt of an article originally published in Development Today. Read the full article here.
Some say we should simply fund local organisations directly. They are right about the goal, only half right about how to get there. Direct funding fails not because the ambition is wrong, but because it asks staff in donor capitals to judge hundreds of organisations they have never met, without the relationships, knowledge or authority to do so properly. That is no reflection on the people who tried. It is a verdict on the tool they were given. Remove the intermediary, and the work of screening and carrying risk does not vanish. It lands on the desk least equipped to hold it.
Some of this weight we pile on ourselves. The rules were written for billion-dollar agencies, and then they were applied to village organisations. BRAC is 50 years old and a leading responder to the Rohingya crisis. Yet even for us, registering for a single UN fund can take the better part of two months. Now, picture a small community group facing those levels of red tape. The pressure is rising as funders move to larger envelopes that cut their own admin costs but raise the bar for who can apply. While those concerns are real, they do not justify a single set of rules for every grant.
We do not need an intermediary for this part. We need rules that fit the size of the grant. Change those, and a small grant does its job: giving an organisation the track record it needs before it can handle larger funds directly.
But the rest of the risk is real, and someone has to hold it - to screen applicants, take the exposure, and answer when things go wrong. The only question is who. Give that job to a body sitting above the money, and you have rebuilt the intermediary under a new name. Give it to those closest to the ground, and you build something new: capacity that grows, and less money lost to overhead.
Read the full article in the Development Today. Or read more about BRAC's Pooled Fund for Localisation here.
