Giving Compass' Take:

• Sapna Surendran shares his experience with a donor who asked too much and an organization that attempted to accommodated what they could not at the expense of impact. 

• Have you been encouraging grantees to engage in unproductive activities? How can you better serve organizations and therefore the communities they serve? 

• Read about healthy grantee relationships. 

Towards the end of 2018, I volunteered to take up an additional project with my organisation. I had worked on projects relating to tuberculosis for four years and was eager to learn about managing other disease portfolios, as well as keen to increase my technical expertise on non-communicable diseases.

The project involved remote management of field operations—an area I wanted to return to after many years of technical advisory work. A big incentive was also the opportunity to work with a funder who counted as one of the leading global health donors. The role was primarily a front-facing one with the donor, and at a strategic level. I assumed I would be able to balance the project with my existing work responsibilities.

Our initial discussions with the donor went well. Trouble started brewing when they wanted us to operationalise a digital tool they had developed. Based on my field teams’ initial ground work, and the local intelligence we had received, we understood that our target audience—doctors—were not keen on using an app or digital platform to streamline their health records, and for subsequent follow-up.

We communicated our apprehensions to the funders about going down this route, but they were not amenable to our suggestions. They had invested millions of dollars in software development and designing the user interface. This, coupled with mixed uptake of the application in other settings, made them keen to try it in our setting as well. So, we went ahead.

From that point onwards, all discussions were just a series of arguments between me and our point of contact within the donor office. And because we had a very timeline-driven donor, we were faulted every time deliverables and project outputs did not meet their expectations.

Read the full article about donor-grantee relationships by Sapna Surendran at India Development Review.