Think big, start small, act fast! The dual approach of long-term institution building and catalytic funding

When it comes to tackling complex systemic problems such as global pandemics and public health, how can donors and programmes find the best way to make an impact that’s both sustainable and responsive to ever-changing needs?

Last year, FCDO’s Vaccine Data CoLab joined with COVAX’s GIS Working Group to convene a Chatham House-style discussion of different donor approaches to provide or support host governments access to the data they need, particularly GIS supported microdata, to inform decision-making to respond to COVID-19. Participants included representatives from World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, FCDO, USAID, and CDC, with roles ranging from senior governance specialists; programme officers; geospatial analysts, advisors, centre leads; advisors for monitoring, evaluating, and learning; epidemiologists, research scientists; economists; and innovation leads.

After a global pandemic and thinking ahead to plan for future emergencies, we asked ourselves “are we working this way because it is the right way or because we’ve always done it this way? Or is this a moment to take a new approach?”

A dual approach to funding impact

Catalytic funding’s quick and iterative approach acts as the “canary in the coal mine” — by responding to changing conditions, surfacing new opportunities, and quickly testing interventions and approaches, it helps de-risk bigger investments and shape longer-term plans so they grow with the needs on the ground. Meanwhile, longer-term programmes act as the engine to scale ambitious work and provide stability and vision for institution building. Together they combine to create a responsive and scalable approach to tackling complex systemic problems.

1. Rapid responses are necessary to adapt to ever-changing contexts and provide a proof of concept to new approaches

Rapid responses are often necessary to bridge disruptions caused by local and global crises, such as the supply chain gaps faced during COVID-19 in many African countries or the lack of trusted data for vaccine allocation.

One approach outlined in the Convening was the use of catalytic funding to provide a data-driven, rapid response to urgent needs. These small donor funds have tight timelines, small budgets, and highly focused scopes. New innovators — many from non-traditional actors such as the local private sector — are often best positioned to identify immediate methods of addressing specific challenges in a country or population. These small activities are useful to provide “proof of concept” solutions and can iterate quickly to find flaws and improvements in project design.

These small donor funds are usually insufficient on their own to address large institutional change, broadly sustainable solutions, or scale to other areas or topics. They are often unable to address systemic issues which require policy or process changes; instead they focus on creating pace and momentum for an immediate response. Governments or other large entities may also identify a similar gap and develop a workflow to address it, but recipients of small donor funds struggle to integrate their learnings and findings within the larger community. Without collaboration with a traditional partner, they may be unable to hand over their pilot to sustain and scale.

2. Longer-term funding creates the space for institution building and capacity strengthening

Larger, traditional funding approaches often support institution-building and capacity strengthening; policy and process revision to address systemic issues are often part of the programme design. These programmes usually have significantly larger funding amounts as well as longer-term timelines to build capacity and sustainability, as well as implement formal monitoring and evaluation activities that allow adaptive learning from both successes and failures.

However, these large funding approaches usually have procurement and project reporting requirements that can be labour and time intensive, especially for small actors and create high barriers to entry for new innovators and local actors. They are traditionally difficult to pivot in a time of crisis. Though changes can be made to improve the response times available through traditional funding methods (requests for proposals and open calls), these methodologies are not sufficient to meet the needs of a crisis, when grassroots and smaller entities identify gaps and mobilise rapidly on the ground.

What the group recommended

#1: Institutional donors must partner and collaborate with catalytic funders that source and supply smaller funds, and integrate those findings into larger institution building.

Small donor fund project and grant managers should include a process of linking in and relationship building with larger institutions and programmes in their field to integrate learning and findings, as well as possibly build sustainability planning.

Large programmes can look at how they can either portion a small budget for rapid response programming and/or partner with a similar initiative to address emerging issues rapidly, in ways that also support the overall strategy of the institution building, sustainability, and shared learning.

#2: In a rapid response environment, small fund donor activities should prioritise support for organisations and individuals with existing relationships with government and/or other larger institutions which are best poised to integrate outcomes into institution-building.

In times of crisis, funds should be prioritised to those with individuals and organisations with work already underway, where crucial relationships have already been established to avoid delays and gatekeeping. Small donor funds can often help existing programmes pivot project elements to address the emerging crisis in highly responsive ways.

#3: In the absence of sustained and assured funding, donors must work with organisations to build capacity to sustain their work beyond external funding.

Data-driven solutions remain an experimental and growing field, and much of the innovative and rapid response occurs in civil society and the private sector. Governments rarely provide sustained funding to existing civic technology projects or private sector technologies with a public good benefit, and as a result, too many key services wither.

Larger institutions such as governments can take the best of these approaches in different ways, such as hire the innovators or integrate programme design into their own work. Donors should undertake the responsibility to connect recipients to new technical partners and additional off-ramps for continued support.

#4: Require interoperability, prioritise specificity, and collaborative design at the outset.

Any funded intervention needs to design for sharing findings and integrating learning. To build for success, donors and traditional partners should outline the requirements for interoperability, break down strategies into specific and targeted components, and work with innovators to share needs and gaps at the outset of any intervention or partnership.

#5: Rapid Deployment of Catalytic Funding

Learning from COVIDaction suggests that fund managers should aim to select programmes and packages of work for funding within a rapid time frame that fits the emergency response (think days and hours instead of weeks and months). This will support the rapid mobilisation and deployment required in a crisis situation that innovators can provide.

#6: Donors should align procurement processes and restructure incentives to reward learning and collaboration and achieve better integration into large institutions.

Participants collectively identified the challenges they face with donor procurement processes that can act as barriers and dis-incentivise participation in donor funding calls. Processes can be cumbersome and vary significantly by donor, including timelines, parameters for monitoring and evaluation, reporting requirements and intellectual property clauses. The structure of competing for funding also discourages some of the key recommendations for ways forward, including interoperability and sharing lessons learned.

#7: Strengthen adaptability of large institutions to enable donors and governments to be more responsive to grassroots organisations.

Grassroots organisations move quickly, and while many donors responded to the pandemic by removing restrictions on their funds to give more flexibility for grantees to target monies, donors cannot often match the pace of the needs on the ground. Governments also typically move very slowly and while funds have been available from COVAX donors, many governments have not been able to absorb the support. While both donor organisations and recipient governments often have “innovation” teams that may be able to move quickly, these are rarely connected to budget and decision-making, or larger operational workings.

Vaccine Data CoLab are using behaviour change approaches, health data systems, and hyperlocal ways of working to address vaccine uptake and access. We are taking these learnings forward into our work with our first two lead countries in Africa and one grant in South East Asia, co-designing with partner governments and local institutions to ASSESS the current vaccine data landscape, ACTION findings by funding a portfolio of grants to test new solutions, and LEARNING TOGETHER by convening local partners regularly to share and discuss findings.

Our partners for this work are:

• Infectious Disease Institute, Makerere University (IDI) in Uganda
• Dev Afrique in Nigeria
• Behavioural Insights Team, Aisyiyah, and Tulodo in Indonesia