Brett Gleitsmann Program Officer, Safe Water Initiative
In grantmaking, as in any other part of our lives, we know that “it takes a village” and that we are better off when we work together collectively to achieve a common goal. And yet, collective action, even for the greater good, is anything but easy.
There are a few reasons for this. Technical partners, like international NGOs, come in with their own agendas and approaches. Governments often aren’t empowered or lack the resources to play the coordinating role that is so critical to harmonized implementation. Donors have their own agendas and don’t always have the time, technical expertise, or bandwidth to develop complementary grants with multiple partners.
So, how can we move collective action from pipe dream to real possibility?
Community members from Kabarole District, Uganda display a community watershed map during a site visit with the Ministry of Water and Environment, a Conrad N. Hilton Foundation grantee partner.
The Safe Water initiative team at the Hilton Foundation works to support governments with their mandate to deliver safe water services, while also finding ways to involve grantee partners in opportunities for collaboration and collective action. It hasn’t always been easy. We have at times struggled to adequately elevate the government to play this critical coordination role, even though it’s not a strategic use of resources for us to play this role ourselves.
Recently, we have found some success in the water resources management space in Uganda and Ghana. We have identified dynamic and talented national- and local-level government partners that are truly dedicated to fulfilling their agencies’ mandates. By signaling our intention to provide direct grant funding to the key government partner and our flexibility, we have created (in Uganda) and are creating (in Ghana) an interlinked portfolio of water resources management grants to government, and international NGO and local NGO partners, that center around a common workplan – with the government playing the central, coordinating role.
We are still in the early stages, but the excitement from government and NGO partners to work together is palpable. Ensuring long-term water security requires significant coordinated investment and proactive management to protect a country’s water resources that people rely on for their drinking water, as well as for agriculture, industry and other paths of economic growth. Prioritizing water security is more important than ever, given the challenges posed by the impacts of climate change and the pressures of population and economic growth.
Here are some elements we identified as key to the success of this effort:
Co-creation –The government’s overarching water resources management guidance documents were already central to each partner’s individual implementation plans. And yet, each partner had been working independently for years with other funding to implement small parts of the plans, and they were all frustrated by the lack of a coordinated effort. Everyone strongly agreed that it would be worth the upfront time and effort to co-create a set of interlinked grants to help optimize impact, and the government took the lead in this co-creation.
Government leadership – In both countries, we’re working with dynamic, technically savvy, dedicated leaders within the water ministries that have been able to get upper management buy-in and ownership of these grants. From the outset, water ministry leaders have been strategically maneuvering to expedite the required bureaucratic processes, while also actively coordinating the co-creation of the grants with the external partners – even without Foundation involvement.
The ministries seem excited to capitalize on this opportunity to demonstrate their ability to successfully raise funds and have increased impact through this type of partnership approach. In Uganda, for example, the ministry organized a grant launch event with the three partners and all relevant stakeholders. The Commissioner for Water Resources Planning and Regulation at the Ministry of Water and Environment, Dr. Callist Tindimugaya, attended the event – sending a strong signal to other Water Managment Zones to think along similar lines.
Time and flexibility– It took more than a year to weave together and co-create the three grant applications for Uganda. In Ghana, we anticipate it might even take even longer. Plenty of plans were changed along the way. At the outset, we didn’t even know all three partners in each country, and it was only as we went through the co-creation process that we started to make connections and bring more partners into the fold. Grant start dates and payment dates were moved multiple times as the co-creation of applications took longer than expected. These delays and challenges require a lot of flexibility from each partner to navigate. For the Safe Water initiative at the Foundation, having other grants in the initiative pipeline to fill in for these gaps was paramount.
Open-minded – We did not have predetermined ideas about how this grant package would look and didn’t try to force any particular configuration from the outset. Instead, we tried to let the government and the NGO technical experts design the program and figure out how they could best complement each other. Of course, we had a few conditions linked to the initiative’s specified geographies and our focus on drinking water; other than that, we tried to follow their lead and play the role of convener.
Mutually beneficial – In addition to the anticipated, shared on-the-ground impacts that the partners could agree upon, the partners also recognized and acknowledged that they needed each other to make this happen. Beyond funding, the government needed the NGO’s technical support to generate evidence on the impacts of water resources management. For their part, NGOs are looking for impact on a larger scale which close collaboration with government can facilitate. This co-creation and co-implementation process has only strengthened those relationships.
We are inspired by this initial success and plan to continue to invest our grantmaking resources in a way that empowers our most dynamic local government partners to play a central coordination role during the grant creation process. With a little patience and flexibility, our hope is that collective action will become a reality.
