Placing Global South and Women-Led Organizations at the Heart of Systems Change: Lessons from Co-Impact’s Round 3 Open Call

This blog is Part 1 of a series on our reflections from our Round 3 Open Call. Part 2 discusses lessons from our scoring and review process on what makes a strong systems change initiative.

What would happen if we focused on supporting organizations deeply rooted in the Global South and substantively led by women?

This was the question that was top of mind for our team as we worked on designing the parameters for our third round of grantmaking.  In discussing the many fantastic systems change proposals we’d received during our first and second round of grants, two themes emerged as common among the strongest: they were deeply embedded in their target contexts, and they had carefully considered gender equity and inclusion in their approach. Building on these reflections, we resolved that Round 3 would prioritize sourcing applications from initiatives that are rooted in the Global South, focused on equity, and led by women.

While we certainly aren’t the first to take this approach, it is not yet a common funding practice. Typically, large grants for progress in the Global South go to entities based in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. According to some reports, 2.1% of humanitarian aid goes to local and national actors in the Global South and only 1% of gender equality funding globally goes to women’s organizations. The reasons cited are familiar–the organizations that have the capacity, sophistication, systems, mechanisms, and leadership needed to manage complex projects are thought to be based in the Global North. The subtext is that local organizations are perceived to be less capable of managing large sums of money and delivering results. Women-led organizations are often bypassed for funding due to lack of Global North connections and/or entrenched patriarchal norms. The fact that the majority of the Global North initiatives receiving funding are led and governed by people without the lived experience of the communities who are meant to benefit or any direct accountability to them is not seen as relevant to achieving success.

At Co-Impact, we have been grappling with these questions for some time, listening to our program partners, reading the research, drawing on our experience, and reflecting on both ethics and effectiveness. We have come to see two problems clearly: a) health, education, and economic systems often fail to work because discrimination is built into the design and contributes to poor and inequitable outcomes, and b) systems change often fails because it is overly technocratic in nature when the thorniest problems require a keen understanding of political economy, governance, and institutions.

So, in determining the eligibility criteria for our Round 3 grantmaking, we focused on three critical factors:

• Deep-rootedness in the context in which the initiative seeks to have an enduring impact: Organizations rooted in the Global South bring a deep understanding of local contexts and governance, political savvy, trusted relationships, and a long-term commitment to the contexts in which they work, all of which are critical to achieving – and sustaining – successful systems change. For Round 3, we required all applicant organizations to be anchored in the Global South, with decision-making and implementing power being centered in the country(ies) they are targeting.
• A commitment to shift systems to be more equitable and inclusive: A major driver of underdevelopment is discrimination against and exclusion of women, which is further compounded when these women are also marginalized along the lines of gender, class, race, ethnicity, disability, and/or caste. Systemic change that can improve people’s lives at scale requires a strategic and intersectional approach to transforming dynamics of discrimination. We required all Round 3 applicants to demonstrate a proactive approach to addressing gender inequality and other forms of systemic discrimination in terms of analysis of the problem, programmatic design, and leadership at all levels of the organization.
• A commitment to women in leadership: We know that representation matters and that the systematic exclusion of women in senior leadership and boards is not only wrong, it negatively affects the design of programs. We therefore expressed particular interest in receiving applications from organizations led by women and committed to ensuring every stage of our selection process included at least 50% substantively women-led initiatives. Internally, we set a high bar for what we would consider a “substantively women-led” initiative: The initiative’s leader and at least 50% of the initiative’s senior leadership are women. And we paid attention to the gender representation on boards.

Our leadership and advisory board fully supported these choices and the reasoning behind them, and we were excited by what the choices represented. At the same time, we and some of our friends in philanthropy wondered: Were we painting ourselves in a corner? How would groups respond to the emphasis on global south rootedness, inclusion and women in leadership? Would we find sufficient qualified initiatives that met these criteria?

We also made some important tweaks to our process to promote broader outreach, transparency and inclusion: we translated our Open Call document into four languages, held four Question and Answer webinars with applicants across time zones, disclosed our scoring criteria publicly, extended the Open Call period from one to three months (including a one-month extension in response to COVID), and invested time and resources in reaching out to new networks in Global South regions. While we required all applications to be in the English language, we made it clear that fluency was not required and trained our reviewers not to conflate fluency in English with quality of concept. To make our results-orientation clear, we specified the set of outcomes that we seek to advance in health, education, and economic opportunity, and asked applicants to explain how they would advance one or more of these outcomes. Our hope was that these measures would clearly signal to applicants what we saw as crucial to systems change and how we would assess their ideas.

So, what happened?

When Co-Impact closed its Round 3 Open Call for proposals on 30 April 2020, we found that:

• We had received 601 applications, far more than what we had expected.
• Of these, 570 applications (95%) met our bar for being Global South-rooted and, after an administrative review, 439 (73%) met our full criteria and qualified for further review.
• Of the 439 initiatives that met our criteria for review, 281 (64%) have a female CEO/leader, 250 (57%) have a majority female board, and 249 (57%) met our high bar for designation as “substantively women-led,” with the initiative’s leader and at least 50% of the initiative’s senior leadership being women.
• The applications were from all over the world and represented a broad geographical range, as can be seen in the charts below

These graphs represent the pool of 439 applications that met our full qualifications for review.

These numbers and the specific qualities of each initiative tell a powerful story. For us, a major takeaway is that when a funder consciously signals that Global South-rootedness, gender-inclusive design, and women in leadership matter, organizations respond. And that the huge disparity in where funding goes, cited at the top of this post, almost certainly reflects bias in our own philanthropic defaults and practice rather than a lack of capability and potential.

We continue to dig deeper into the data. To improve our approach further, we invited all Round 3 applicants to give us feedback on the application process. The primary takeaway from the 28% who responded to the survey is that applicants desire more support in designing and proposing systems change initiatives. Many respondents requested examples of successful systems change efforts, better guidance on how to show evidence of impact, and the ability to submit applications in local languages. We are actively reflecting on this feedback, and considering providing earlier stage support to applicants in future rounds. As a specific measure, we will soon hold a webinar on the factors that helped applications to stand out and influenced our decision-making.

For our Round 3 grantmaking process, the next four months involve doing deeper diligence on the 26 initiatives that we have shortlisted, where we hope to better understand their organizations, partnerships, and system change models. We are excited to learn from their thinking and use it to strengthen ours. Many of the applicants who did not make our shortlist are doing powerful work and represent important constituencies, and we hope to share their applications with other philanthropic peers for whom these initiatives may be a better fit. Throughout, we hope to be challenged, deepen our learning and accountability, and grow to be better funders of outcomes-focused systems change that is truly inclusive.

By Kappie Farrington