This is a fantastic list and I strongly resonate as the leader of a rapidly growing organisation with some of the challenges as fixes that you have shared. 

One half-baked thought that I have is that often the skills that make individuals great at entrepreneurship are orthogonal to the skills that may make someone good at building the operational backbone of an organisation. For examples - entrepreneurs need to be comfortable with rapid and often ad hoc decision making, failing fast, comfort with risk and uncertainties, and generally a cowboy / cowgirl mindset. However, in order to build long-term, sustainable operational structures for growing organisations one needs systematic thinking, SOPs and organised policies, risk aversion or at least a risk mitigation mindset, certaintiy and more of a 'city-planner' mindset. 

Therefore, one thing that I have observed is that it can often be helpful for organisations to explicitly recognise when they are shifting from R&D / pilot mode to growth / scaling mode and to invest early in operational capacity. 

Fair points, all well made and is so often the case, I think we are actually in vast agreement. 

Sorry for not being clear on my analogy to overheads. The discussion of 'overheads' often feels to me like a proxy for a larger, ethical discussion on whether intrinsic motiviation for charity work should be priced into the finances of an organisation. I agree whole-heartedly with you and disdain the 'overheads' framing for evaluating the financial health and financial models of organisations. Similarly, I don't think intrinsic motivation should be priced into team member pay, and I understand you feel the same way. 

Upon reflection on this discussion, I am trying to think through reasons why we observe different labor dynamics in the NGO-space in parts of Africa as opposed to what I have observed in South Asia and the West. Perhaps the labour markets in these various African markets have been distorted by international funding with significantly greater purchasing power parity. In India, we observe that most NGOs are significantly funded by local sources of funding meaning that the funding dynamics are somewhat calibrated to existing, domestic market forces. Would be interested on your experiences and why you believe you see these multiples of salaries in your local context? 

@NickLaing As always, love to hear your opinions. 

I would like to share one agreement and one disagreement and would love to hear your thoughts

Agreement: Fund solutions not projects - I strongly agree with this framing and I fear that the project-centric approach to fundraising has caused NGOs to also have a project-focused mindset to trying to reach its objectives. The Wicked Problems of global health and development required long-term, systemic and integrated solutions across a range of private, public and civil society actors that are unlikely to drive long-term meaningful change through singular projects. While I believe that we can make real impact through marginal, cost-effective, long-hanging interventions (perhaps fortification of food staples :P), a solution mindset helps align thinking and incentives. 

Disagreement: Lower salaries - I find similarities in your argument to the more common "funding overheads" argument which is where my initial disagreement stems from. In reading beyond the headline, I would actually agree that if NGOs are paying multiples more than comparable private or public sector roles then this can have a fundamental distorting effect on the labor market and may be attracting talent for extrinsic, short-term motivations which could be very problematic. 

However, at least from my experience in the Indian NGO space, I have not seen the scenario that you lay out with NGO workers getting paid so much more. I wonder if this is something systemic to the Ugandan context or other more narrow context. 

Personally, I am in favor of seeking to align NGO salaries with overall labor market salaries - whether that means increasing or decreasing the benchmarks. I don't think that the pricing in of intrinsic motivation or altruism is an effective salary-structure approach, especially once organisations pass beyond the "R&D" mode and start meaningfully growing and seeking general talent from the labour market. 

Thanks for the very reasonable question. In short, our current budget for the next financial year (through to June 2026) is currently earmarked to existing programmatic obligations. Additional marginal funding would allow us to bring in support to start building out this solution and we would leverage existing team members for the on-ground validation exercises. 

Thank you for the question — we recently presented our validation results at the Nutrition Society of India Conference, and you can view the full slide deck here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ReSC7R1HmV9_i61nu12YX5rOV56S6hGY_B3etFP5p3E/edit?usp=sharing. Our computer vision model, trained on 837 iron spot test images, currently achieves ~84% accuracy on test data and substantially reduces the subjectivity seen in manual qualitative testing. While it doesn’t replace quantitative lab methods like ICP-MS, it provides a low-cost, reliable, mill-level QA tool to flag potential under- or over-fortification more consistently.