The need for localization of development funding for Nigerian CSOs

As the Association for Research on Civil Society in Africa, or AROCSA, convenes the sixth annual conference on civil society and development in Dakar, Senegal on Sept. 7-8 , the leading advocacy session will focus on the experience of 23 Nigerian civil society organizations in the Partnership for Advocacy in Child and Family Health, or PAS, program. According to the Africa Civil Society Sustainability Index, advocacy is the most significant area in which Nigerian CSOs have developed capacity since 2011, as evidenced by the near one point increase in CSO capacity between 2011 to 2020 — the highest increase among the seven indicators of performance monitored by the Sustainability Index.

CSOs in Nigeria have played critical policy advocacy roles, holding the government to account on development commitments and pledges since Nigeria’s return to democratic government in 2000. However, as the experience of PAS CSOs in Senegal will show, CSOs require institutional investment to continue driving and delivering on the change that Nigeria needs and deserves.

“When local organizations get the support that’s needed, they do well because they understand the country better than international organizations,” said Sunday Okoronkwo, executive secretary of Civil Society-Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria, or CS-SUNN, a coalition working to ensure everyone has access to food and is nutrition secure. CS-SUNN benefitted from three years of capacity-building support for policy and legislative advocacy from the PAS program.

“Civil society is the pillar of government — of where government cannot go, what they cannot do, where they’re going wrong, or what’s outside their scope of work,” agreed Ngizan Chahul, coordinator of The Nigerian Association of Women in Agriculture, or NAWA — an NGO in the Partnership for Advancing Women in Economic Empowerment, or PAWED, project that advocates for women’s economic empowerment in the agrarian belt of north-central Nigeria.

“[CSOs] bridge the gap between governments and communities,” Judith Giwa-Amu, education in emergencies coordinator at UNICEF, explained, adding that UNICEF can’t be everywhere but CSOs, being “members of the community,” have the ability to access areas considered hard to reach by international organizations, as well as the institutional memory and experience.

Despite CSOs' catalytic role in development and humanitarian activities in Nigeria, many groups, particularly nascent and unregistered CSOs, still struggle to access adequate funding to implement impactful interventions.

“Give us grants,” NAWA’s Chahul urged, so that CSOs can invest in training and “so that we can carry out the necessary programs.”

Financing Nigerian CSOs for sustainable development

In 2019, the Africa Civil Society Sustainability Index also listed project-based funding and reliance on international funding as “significant barriers” to organizational development of CSOs across the African CSO space. In Nigeria, the index also shows CSO financial viability to be the second weakest area threatening sustainability. With close to one million CSOs in Nigeria, both registered and unregistered, financial viability remains a key challenge in the space as thousands of groups compete with each other to respond to requests for proposals.

International Aid Transparency Initiative’s 2022 curation of donor financing in Nigeria lists multiple envelops from multilateral, bilateral, and family foundations, with bilateral and family foundation funds mostly implemented through awards to local CSOs for alternative service provisioning. Few funding streams were listed for organizational capacity building.

Publish What You Fund’s deeper dive into donor funding for women’s economic empowerment reveals a significant increase in funding to women’s economic collectives between 2015 and 2019 in Nigeria, with most funding going toward foundational capacity project areas such as income generation and improved individual and family health. The survey did not pick up any policy advocacy capacity-building grants for WEE between 2015 and 2019. This finding no doubt justifies the PAWED project, a policy advocacy WEE intervention funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Taken together, these recent surveys point to a complex CSO funding landscape in Nigeria, where the levels of donor funding available may not be the most important issue for CSOs. Rather, the more relevant question may be how donor funds help to position local CSOs for sustainability through localization-focused funding designed to cover operational components.

CS-SUNN’s Okoronkwo explained that donor funding received is usually earmarked for certain projects and doesn’t extend to covering operational costs. This means that there are often no resources to train and invest in staff.

The Publish What You Fund finding that priority WEE funding blends both humanitarian and development programming areas points to a blurring of classifications in official development assistance and questions the differing meanings of localization for CSO in the humanitarian and development domains.

Funding local CSOs through localization strategies

As Nigeria marches into the most contested general elections since the country’s return to democracy in 1999, the economy continues to buckle under the long-term weight of COVID-19 pandemic closures, and as security challenges worsen, the future role of local CSOs must be framed against this backdrop.

Findings of high CSO performance in the area of advocacy from the index, suggest that in moving forward, Nigerian CSOs should have a strategic role to play in ensuring constituency representation in policy formulation platforms of the new administration. Also, CSOs may well play an active role as accountability mechanisms, ensuring that pledges and commitments in election manifestos of the winning parties are kept at national and subnational levels.

CSO service provision is the second most-improved area after advocacy since 2011 according to the CSO Sustainability index, with a 0.6 point increase between 2011 and 2020. This suggests an active role for local CSOs after the 2023 general elections, with CSOs scaling up cost-effective alternative provisioning models and adopting innovative means-tested interventions in partnership with the government.

​​For local CSOs to assume these roles, however, international development funders must rethink the design of funding mechanisms. In moving forward, fit-for-purpose donor funding will have to make adequate provisions for overheads. It will also be implemented through approved budget lines for organizational capacity strengthening, including staff training, and corporate affairs commission compliance support. Funding will also be required for exchange and learning visits, mentoring, and technical capacity building for evidence-based advocacy and efficient project and staff management.

But perhaps most importantly, fit-for-purpose funding should include provisions to strengthen CSOs’ capacity to identify and mobilize sustainable local funding sources and mechanisms. Against this backdrop, international development funders are tasked with applying the same locally led development strategies used when dealing with state actors to local CSOs.

So far, few international development partners in Nigeria are experimenting with this approach. They include the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Gates Foundation, the European Commission’s Agents for Citizen-driven Transformation project, and the Ford Foundation’s BUILD program, providing core and capacity-building support to leading local nonprofits. Thought leaders such as the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and the Brookings Institution point to the advantages of adopting a localization agenda where local CSOs would lead across the development spectrum.

The Gates Foundation is one donor implementing a cascading localization model by engaging an intermediary local CSO, the development Research and Projects Center, or dRPC, which in turn regrants to and provides a range of capacity-building support to a portfolio of over 50 local CSOs and CSO networks working in child and family health and women’s economic empowerment. The dRPC uses its local expertise, having been in operation since 1993, and working exclusively in the local CSOs capacity building space.

Gloria Laraba Shoda, coordinator of the International Council of Women and former national president of the National Council for Women Societies, said dRPC has trained women from NCWS — an umbrella association of Nigeria’s women’s organizations — in a variety of areas including immunization and family planning. NCWS supports the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency through its participation in the National Emergency Routine Immunization Coordination Center platform while also advocating for women’s welfare issues.

“They positively impacted our organization,” said Shoda, adding that Nigeria needs more organizations such as dRPC to empower and build the capacity of the country's CSOs.

CS-SUNN has gone on to provide support for the development of the National Multi-Sectoral Plan of Action for Food and Nutrition, led the development of the domestication of food and nutrition policy in Lagos, Nasarawa, and Kano as well as the state-specific multisectoral plan of action for food and nutrition in those same states, as well as Niger and Kaduna states.

The current political conjuncture may also be an opportunity for action and learning on CSO sustainability through localization. The AROCSA conference on Sept. 7-8 will serve as a catalytic moment and opportunity for the African CSO community of academics and practitioners to contribute to agenda setting on what has so far been a conversation confined to the global north on true localization. Delegates of the AROCSA conference are challenged to tease out the implications of aid localization from the conference’s overarching theme on the role of CSOs in safeguarding and supporting human and environmental health in Africa.