Civil society

CIVIL SOCIETY: How to resource it right?
Even the most elegant strategy is useless if it can’t be fully and effectively implemented. That’s why both donors and grantees need to understand and agree on just what it will take to achieve the outcomes they seek. And then ensure that the necessary resources are committed to the effort.
But experience has shown that no one wants to pay for overhead, as a result, many organizations are trapped in a “starvation cycle”. The cycle begins with donors (public as well as private) who have unrealistically low assumptions about what it actually costs to run an organization. Organizations depend on external funding, they feel obliged to conform to those unrealistic expectations insofar as humanly possible. For that matter, they cut overhead to the bone and underreport administrative expenditures. Unfortunately, this only serves to reinforce the unrealistically low assumptions that kicked off the cycle in the first place.
Donors expect grantees to do more and more with less and less, and the organization is starved for the resources necessary to deliver results.

Birungi K. Desiderius
077 2 426 607
Executive Director
Better World Uganda
P. O. Box 406, Hoima-Uganda