Bogotá gave us confidence in our new ways of working
18 Dec 2024
Patrick Steiner-Hirth is a Senior Project Manager at the Robert Bosch Stiftung, working in the Peace team, which is one of the foundation’s areas of focus in the Global Issues support strand. The foundation was a core funder of the Bogotá #ShiftThePower Global Summit in December 2023.
As one of the few representatives of a funding organization in Bogotá, Patrick experienced “the pleasure of discomfort” of being outnumbered by colleagues from civil society organizations – but felt gratitude for the frank, revealing conversations he had. He came away confident that the foundation’s new ways of working were on the right track – and determined to advocate for further efforts to decolonize and #ShiftThePower.
“For the last few years, we have been offering more flexible funding, more long-term funding, more institutional or core funding. And most of our funding is now open ended, with a commitment on our side over several years, with flexibility built in. Now we try to start a new funding partnership like an exchange. We have an MOU for developing a ‘learning relationship’ and then maybe programmes and projects drop out of that. We are not really pitched many projects and programmes anymore. Usually, once we invite a partner to send a proposal everything has been discussed and agreed already, which means very little paperwork.
Our experience at the Summit fed into the discussions we are having in the foundation about our decolonizing efforts, for example: how are we are reforming our funding mechanisms? How are we developing partnerships? What is our place in the system? How do we deal with our privilege and the power imbalances in our relationships? We brought a lot from Bogotá of value to the whole foundation.”
Read the full interview with Patrick here
More reading on donor-CSO relationships
Speak with a collective voice – and claim our power
Rotimi Olawale of Youth Hub Africa in Nigeria sees collective CSO platforms and collective feedback as a key way to change donor practices. “If one organization gives feedback to a donor it is not going to be effective, and that one CSO will be worried about saying anything negative to its donors – they won’t want to risk losing their funding. But if there’s a group of civil societies that speak with one voice, there is less risk and the message is something donors are more likely to listen to.”
Finding better ways to engage with donors
Jonathan Kifunda of Thubutu Africa Initiatives in Tanzania wants to see donors becoming genuinely engaged with communities and see the impact of some of their practices. “We need to take donors into communities and show them the reality on the ground, and the magnitude of some of the failures that come from the systems they have built. We can also show them the successes that new ways of funding are bringing. Once they realize the issues and go ‘aha!’ we can invite them to be part of the solution – and this is when they could be willing to team with us and begin to #ShiftThePower.”
How to get from rhetoric to reality in decolonizing development
Amitabh Behar is a leading civil society voice and Director of Oxfam International. After nine-years, he stepped off the GFCF board in 2024. Amitabh sees the structure of international development and its way of working as “a replica and reflection of how power is concentrated within a few groups in the global order, and cannot be divorced from the broader political economy.” He identifies four dimensions of decolonization that global development needs to address to usher in real change:
- Decolonize design and structures
- Decolonize money
- Decolonize knowledge and competence
- Decolonize the “theory of change”
You can read Amitabh’s post-summit opinion piece here or an interview with Amitabh here.