Getting the Civil Society Discussion Forum Going..

All -

Katja and I spoke yesterday about how we could get the Practitioners Forum on Civil Society working and I agreed to post some initial thoughts. A little bit of background on myself - I am Head of Civil Society Department for the Department for International Development (DFID). I was the Team Leader for the UK’s ‘Building our Common Future’ White Paper on international development in 2009 and prior to that worked for DFID in Tanzania, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and on peace-building and conflict resolution in various parts of Africa. I joined DFID in 2000 after 20 years of working for non-governmental organisations in the UK, Mozambique, India and Malawi. I studied at the Institute for Development Studies, Sussex 1984-86.

When some of us met in London in May, I and my colleagues in DFID shared some ideas that we were developing in our dialogue and work with civil society. We spoke about the changes DFID had implemented in its work with civil society following the general election in the UK in 2010 and the start of the Coalition Government. We mentioned that we were:

• Changing the balance of DFID support to small, medium and larger CSOs
• Introducing more competition and a stronger focus on tangible results, outcomes, outputs and Value for Money
• Introducing a 40% ceiling (ie. not providing grants that would constitute more than 40% of an organisation's income) on central support to CSOs
• Introduced a more rigourous internal process (development of business cases) to justify all of DFID's investments including with/through CSOs 
• Encouraging matched and performance based funding
• Emphasised the need to use more evidence and independent evaluations in all our work with CSOs
• Introduced pre contract due diligence work and the need for CSOs to commit to IATI and increased transparency
• Increased emphasis on generating learning, sharing and better practice.

Over the past few months, we have moved ahead with these measures and also shared insights with a range of contacts in other bilateral and multilateral organisations.  I would be really interested to know if other organisations are changing their ways of working and how these have been perceived by CSOs.

 I am also sending a link to Michael Edwards' recent article on philanthropy (really interesting reading).

Hope you will all start to contribute to this Forum. Let's get it working for us all.

Best wishes,

Roy  

Related links 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/oct/1…