Introduction
As I’ve come to learn, in Effective Altruism, we aim to answer the question: “How can we do the most good with finite resources?”
However, working in grants administration and data governance in the Global South, I find that we’re riddled with a paradox across non-profit work: The mechanisms used to fund social good seem to work against our ability to maximize it.
Competition for funding forces NGOs with identical missions into bidding wars, which leads to survival anxiety, encouraging organizations to prioritize payrolls over community outcomes.
I kind of think of this as the "Hunger Games" of philanthropy, and I’m offering a blueprint for donors to rework this paradigm.
The Ground Truth
I think this in one of many elephants in the room of international development.
As I write this, two (or more) charities with precisely the same mission, like strengthening social cash transfer programs, or distributing nutritional supplements to pregnant women, are responding to a call for EOIs, writing proposals competing for the same donor money.
But if our purpose for doing good were pure, should we be competing? And should it matter which organization wins a major grant? If the ultimate goal is the vulnerable child, it shouldn't matter whose branding is on the health facility that offers the child the services, right?
When NGOs fight for survival, we can’t stop the world from having a cynical impression about us: NGOs are more interested in protecting their own institutional structures (and salaries), rather than the communities they were founded to serve.
Synergy vs. Competition
Granted, we do see collaboration, but it is often artificial. Two organizations form a consortium to combine strengths. They are called implementing partners. But they don’t partner purely for strategic synergy. More often than not, they collaborate simply to form a bigger weapon to defeat a competing consortium in a bidding war.
I think true synergy looks different. A real-world example from Zambia’s national health response comes to mind.
Different organizations in the malaria program actively teamed up in the malaria elimination agenda over the past decade or so. PATH MACEPA spearheaded novel community malaria surveillance mechanisms in three of Zambia’s 10 provinces. Instead of hiding that methodology as proprietary secret sauce for winning future tenders, they used their own resources to build capacity within the US President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) PAMO project to replicate identical methods in four other provinces, and did the same with the Churches Health Association of Zambia (CHAZ) for remaining regions. Since then, staff from CHAZ have routinely co-facilitated workshops in PAMO-supported regions, and MACEPA have supported CHAZ field teams. And when World Vision and Malaria Partners Zambia showed up as new players in the malaria space, forming the Partnership for a Malaria-Free Zambia (PMFZ) Project, PATH helped them design their project. And the PMFZ project happily built capacity in Amref when they were starting community malaria surveillance work, while PMI helped the PMFZ partnership acquire an additional $30M to replicate their work beyond Zambia in what is now called the Rotary Healthy Communities Challenge Project.
I think that’s what synergy ought to look like: Capacity strengthening led by the pioneering experts, creating unified quality across regions.
The Illusion of Shared Spaces
Some that I’ve discussed with ask: "What about government-convened Technical Working Groups? We share learnings and best practices there. Doesn’t that count as collaboration?"
Yes, I guess it does. Except in several settings, TWGs are often composed of competitors guarding their secret sauce. Partners are forced to share data and some learnings simply to meet the government’s statutory reporting demands and buy their goodwill, without which they wouldn’t be allowed to operate. Without those strict requirements, many organizations would work in complete silos, reporting only to their respective donors. This leads to an unfortunate industry trend: organizations copying methodologies from “competitors”, repackaging them with fancy names, and marketing them to donors as proprietary innovations to get funding.
Realigning Incentives for "Doing Good Better"
Why does this happen? Market-based development stipulates that competition drives quality.
It’s called survival of the fittest, and the corporate world agrees with this. But I think in international development, this assumption does more harm than good.
As shown in the malaria surveillance example above, quality can be replicated and may actually improve fastest when the best-performing organization trains everyone else to use the same proven model. This is contrasted with the best-performing organization fighting for funds to spread into regions where an organization with a similar mandate already operates.
That’s not to say organizations should not innovate new methods and models, but whenever they do so, they should be open to having their novel ideas “peer-reviewed” and replicated by other organizations without any fuss about ownership. As long as NGOs think “if we don’t win this tender, we’ll have to lay off staff” they will keep worrying about survival more than they focus on delivering high-quality interventions.
Imagine Donors Changing the Rules
What if major foundations sat implementing partners down and said:
"We are granting you $20 million to tackle malnutrition in four provinces. There will be no bidding wars up in here. Here’s what we’ll do to solve this problem together. Team up and map out who has the strongest local presence in each region. Split the money in proportion to operating costs, projected beneficiary count, etc., establish one open-source data pipeline, and strengthen capacity amongst yourselves, led by the top expert in this room so that each partner delivers the highest quality service in their jurisdiction. Even if you’re the best at implementing this intervention, if you don’t have presence in a certain province, we’re not giving you money to go there just for the duration of this project; we’re giving you money to train whoever is there so they can help sustain the impact there, while you continue operating where you already have presence."
My Proposed Framework for Doing Good Better
Doing good better requires donors to deliberately enforce a new model:
Many Chefs Baking a Bigger Pie
Imagine the millions of dollars saved in administrative overhead if all players learned the most cost-effective methods for delivering life-saving interventions. Imagine the speed of execution if teams spent more energy cross-training staff, rather than spending months writing 100-page competitive proposals to safeguard next fiscal year’s salaries.
If our goal is to do the most good possible for the people who need it most, it is time we stopped thinking of success in charity work as a zero-sum game and started baking a bigger, shared pie together.
My ask is this: Can foundations foster genuine synergy among grantees so that all the existing charities can do good better? Perhaps it would be a good idea if foundations promoted a culture where the “not-so-cost-effective” charities are trained to be cost-effective, not so that they can compete for funding, but so that they can do cost-effective interventions in the regions that the already cost-effective charities will never operate in.
From a "cost-effectiveness" framework (and the objective of maximizing impact), competition among charities is not detrimental itself. But I agree this competitive drive for funds should be balanced with synergetic approaches.
Reading similar posts, the main issue seems if they are caring indeed for doing most good. If that was the main goal, an "adequate" funded charity would be willing to give up some funding if they believe smaller ones have a higher capacity to allocate more effectively those funds.
Probably, the problem of competition arises when a "survival mindset" is at play, which would rise questions about why funding is scarce. A bad assessment of cause prioritization? Overcrowded sector by similar charities? Or harmful incentives influencing selfish requests for funding?
I would not blame competition alone, but rather conduct an in-depth analysis of all these issues. Probably, would be a nice idea of a non-profit to enhance the collaboration and the cross-working among charities in similar areas.