Adeso aims to spin $5M Scott grant into endowment, web platform

Adeso, a Kenya-based humanitarian aid and development nonprofit, intends to spin a $5 million grant it received from billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott into an endowment to ensure its longevity. It also aims to use its heightened profile as a Scott grantee to push other major donors to provide more funding and resources to local organizations in the global south.

The nonprofit’s executive director, Degan Ali, has said on Twitter that the grant from Scott last year was a “real game changer for our work and the changes we aim to make in #decolonizingaid.” Adeso’s revenue was a little over $3 million in 2020 and $4.6 million in 2019.

Ali has been an advocate for the “decolonizing aid” movement, which seeks to decenter the voices of Western decision-makers and shift more power to nonwhite and local leaders in the global south. With funding from Scott and other donors, Ali is now poised to help other grassroots organizations gain access to the resources they need to sustain the work they are doing on behalf of their communities.

First, Adeso aims to cement its own future by investing the $5 million grant and turning it into an endowment, Ali told Devex.

“We basically said we’re not going to use it for operational costs every day, and we’re going to try to turn this and other funds that we get hopefully in the next few years and grow it into a $30 million to $50 million endowment. That’s our goal in the next 10 years,” Ali said.

Ali said she was surprised to learn that not all Scott grantees had launched such plans. That speaks to how, in addition to more unrestricted grants from donors like Scott, nonprofits could benefit from receiving technical assistance for diversifying funds and access to wealth managers, she said.

Foundations have “people managing their wealth and their endowment that they’re paying every single day. Why are they not giving those resources to their partners?” Ali said. “Why don’t they say, ‘I’m not going to give you a grant of $1 million; I’m going to invest your $1 million, and hopefully it will grow over the next five years to become $10 million or $15 million or $5 million’?’”

Foundations should be thinking about doing those sorts of “transformative” things for their partners to liberate them from being “professional beggars,” she added.

The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit advisory firm that has worked with donors like Scott and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has likewise advocated for philanthropists to endow minority-led and locally led organizations to help ensure their endurance and growth.

Adeso is planning to throw its weight behind the effort to increase major donations to locally led nonprofits with the launch of a new online platform. It will allow organizations from around the world to “hopefully make meaningful connections” to philanthropists and share information about themselves that may help them draw more attention and more funding to their work, Ali said. The website will be called Kuja Link. “Kuja” means “to come” in Swahili, she said.

The website will allow nonprofits to create profiles with information about the thematic areas in which they work, such as those related to refugees, human rights, or women’s issues, Ali said. They will also be able to provide details about where they operate, their existing funders, their board members, and whether they are registered in the countries in which they’re based, among other details, she said.

A major goal of the initiative is to help funders identify more groups working on the ground that aren’t major international NGOs, she added.

Kuja Link has a soft launch set for June, with the expectation of being fully operational by early next year. Funders behind its development include the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Humanity United, and Segal Family Foundation. Other potential funders have not yet been confirmed, said Adeso spokesperson Rebecca Kim.

In addition, Adeso aims to provide more resources to nonprofits through the establishment of a private company that will provide “back-end” services such as managing finances for certain projects and preparing for annual audits, Ali said, as many small nonprofits don’t have enough staffers for those types of tasks.

“The areas that most local organizations don’t have the infrastructure or maybe the capacity to handle is finance, the procurement, maybe some [human resources],” she said.

Ali said that local nonprofits can face difficulty creating robust back-end systems when they don’t have access to unrestricted funding that can be spent beyond specific projects. They usually don’t receive funding for those kinds of overhead costs from their INGO, United Nations, or government partners, she said.

There’s a “huge problem” with small, local nonprofits being told that they’re “risky” while also not being given the money that would help stabilize them, Ali said.

Update, April 27, 2022: This story has been updated to include Adeso’s revenue figures for 2019 and 2020.