LONDON — The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development is introducing new procurement guidelines which mean NGOs will be able to recover the full cost of their DFID-funded programs and no longer face a “starvation cycle.”
The new templates and guidance are designed to ensure NGOs are able to negotiate sufficient funding from DFID to cover all of their costs, including overhead expenses and other costs not exclusively linked to a particular project. DFID describes these as “non-project attributable costs,” or NPAC. The agency will advise country teams to adopt the new templates from October and continue to develop them before a mandatory rollout in spring 2019. The move comes after the funder promised to revise its approach to reimbursing overhead costs in its 2016 Civil Society Partnership Review.
Civil society groups have welcomed the reforms. The hope is that it will put an end to what NGO network Bond has described as a “starvation cycle,” in which organizations struggle to cover the overhead costs associated with delivering aid programs. This can result in underinvestment in essential infrastructure and other support services, such as human resources and safeguarding, as well as innovation. The recent Oxfam scandal served to highlight the potential consequences of this underfunding.