Re-imagining the future of the INGO

This May, the FCDO hosted a Global Partnership Conference on the future of international development.

It included conversations about shifting power and localisation, a segment on AI, and various others on technology.

But there was little discussion in the public forums – at least those I attended – about what it will take for INGOs to change and what sort of future we, as leaders, need to be preparing our organisations for.

Of course we don’t know exactly what the future will hold, and so any thinking about what the future role of our organisations will be needs some creative thinking and imagination. A session that Impact Works recently ran with Bond CEOs presented four versions of the future for leaders to engage with. The session made me reflect on the transformation work that I started leading at ADD in 2021 and that I have been co-leading with Fredrick Ouko since 2022.

A future where funding flows to disability justice movements

For us the starting point was clear; we wanted to transform ADD into an organisation that enables funding to flow to disability justice movements. We wanted this future because we had both seen many examples where this wasn’t happening enough. Situations where INGOs and funders were the key decision makers and where activists and their organisations lost out, frustrated by plans they were merely consulted on and funded to do things they would not have prioritised. And because we could see more generally how important it was to deliberately move to solidarity-based models which are creating much more of the just and equitable world we want to see here and now.

An important starting point in the process of identifying what that change would mean for ADD was getting clear on exactly what change we were pursuing and why.

As we say in our strategy, we wanted to ‘journey away from the traditional model of international development and towards an inclusive solidarity that heals injustice’. We have named our strategy mtiririko, which means ‘flow’ in Swahili, because we want to see resources flow to disability justice movements as result of the work that we all do. By focusing our strategic framework on the concept of flow we remind ourselves that this work is not about ADD itself. Instead, it is about using our position and networks to increase the flow of resources and opportunities to those who have the vision, agency and right to lead change: disability justice activists and organisations.

Activists and partners had told us that more flexible resources were what was needed. The mandate felt clear that we could use our positionality to try and increase their flow, and that was what we wanted to try and achieve.

There were also things we were not going to do. For example, we were not trying to localise our country offices which might then compete with disability justice organisations. Nor were we trying to grow. Instead, we needed to become smaller and enable more resources to flow.

These key strategic decisions had to be made to re-imagine our organisation. What we ruled out was, I think, as important as what we focused on. We also recognised that we could not do everything at once. The change would be incremental and happen over time.

Staying true to our essence and learning from innovators

In imagining a new kind of ADD we were greatly helped by two things. First, the organisation’s founding ethos matched the place we were going. This meant we were genuinely going ‘back to our roots’, which was the first thing that enabled staff to feel that the change we wanted to make was in integrity with the organisation ADD was created to be.

That integrity was important. It’s one thing I would encourage other leaders to consider when thinking about the organisation that will need to exist in the future. What future for your organisation will fit with who and what the organisation was created for?

It’s all too easy to think every INGO must re-imagine itself in the same way, but INGOs do not all begin with the same model. We are many and different – that’s part of our strength. Applying a futures’ lens to the organisation you lead is also about considering how you can combine the ‘essence’ of the organisation with a vision for the future and doing things differently.

The second thing that helped us, once we had asked activists what they wanted from a future ADD and worked with our trustees and staff to identify a way forward, was looking at other models of participatory grant-making and movement support for examples of the kinds of things we could do differently. Not to replicate them wholesale – we needed to find the right approach for ADD. But there were innovators and organisations that were already exploring ideas that felt resonant to our origin story which helped us to begin to develop new practices.

The need for more flexible funding

One of our challenges – and a common one for INGOs – was the extent to which we relied on restricted project funding. Nevertheless, we had committed to move away from this and towards becoming a participatory grant-maker. That shift required more flexible funding for ADD so that we could begin to fund our grantee partners more flexibly as well.

Now that we have made that transition, being able to point to examples of where that practice is happening has helped inform the pilots we developed for our grant-making in 2023 and 2024. We are also now better able to facilitate activist decision-making. In some cases, decisions are now made by an elected panel of activists. In others, a group of organisations with something in common come together to decide how to spend an allocated amount of resources.[HP1.1]

It is the combination of these two models that has enabled us to honour ADD’s legacy as a solidarity partner in the disability justice space. We are continuing to reach nascent and grassroots organisations through our participatory grant-making, and continuing to help build movement ecosystems through our funding. All of this is done with the goal of contributing, through our funding, to thriving and diverse disability justice movements.

Moving into the future

Facing the future then, for us as an organisation, has been about combining a clear vision for the kind of organisation we want to be – reaching back into the past for the essence of the organisation – while also learning from newer models which inspire and push us towards a different future. We have found ADD’s contribution to that future through our new grant-making mechanisms, which are now enabling significantly more funding to flow to grantee partners.

It’s taken us five years to get here, mainly because we had to balance the available resources, our commitments to end programmes well and the speed at which we could move towards doing things differently. But we have made huge progress by both reimagining the future and returning to our founding ethos.

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