The experience of five decades of development has increasingly shown that civil society can be a major contributor to sustainable development.  A significant proportion of the more imaginative and socially relevant initiatives arise from the efforts of institutions and individuals working at the micro-level.

As more and more countries adopt liberal, market based economic policies, programmes aimed at the central issue of sustainable development, the creation of sustainable livelihoods in the numbers needed, can only be carried out by the civil society.  The private sector is not interested, and the government does not have the capability.

Virtually all inter-governmental forums voice a strong demand for grass roots development action.  Yet, very little real funding assistance has been made available for promoting such activity.  Ironically, despite (or perhaps because of?) the massive policy-level impact made by the independent sector at the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, there has been  a distinct fall in the financial support this sector has received from official sources during the period since then. 

Unfortunately, the classical obstacle standing in the way of achieving this goal is the inability of international and even national funding agencies to appraise, process and monitor large numbers of small projects. For this reason, it is now becoming imperative that new mechanisms be found that can promote and fund  relatively small scale innovative projects. 

If international financing agencies are to play a stronger role in promoting a new development which is participative, equitable and sustainable, they must find ways to introduce new criteria for the selection and approval of projects, particularly small, relatively high-risk but potentially high-payoff ones.  We need to develop new mechanisms and attitudes that can overcome the many hurdles that today prevent agencies from funding activities that can lead to a genuinely sustainable development.

First, the the overhead costs associated with current procedures for project approval and management have to be brought down so they no longer serve as excuses for the inability of agencies to fund small projects.  This requires the development of mechanisms such as networks, intermediary project management institutions, and self-evaluation methods to permit the support of such small projects while maintaining the required level of control and accountability. 

Second, increased funding must go to basic institutional and capacity building support.  With very few exceptions in the non-governmental arena, funding agencies are currently geared to approving “project - based” activities which do not always provide produce the kind of innovative and process based  activities needed in many situations. 

Third, new and innovative initiatives must also be funded.  Given that existing development approaches have clearly been inadequate and new solutions to development needs must be found, and that existing institutions, which are already locked into approaches for which substitutes must be found, it is logical that some of the solutions we seek will lie with new institutions.   Present funding practices almost invariably presuppose that an implementing organization is already in business and has the required infrastructure and track record.  In other words, the international development assistance community is set up only to give to those who already have, in most cases government agencies. 

Fourth, the time scales and gestation periods for the processing of  projects must be greatly reduced.  These may be appropriate for large multimillion dollar projects, but are far too cumbersome and slow for the needs of small projects. The procedures and project formulation must either be simplified or, again, assigned to intermediary bodies.

Fifth, it is exceedingly important to allow for multiple efforts, even if they are seemingly similar in objective or strategy.  The only hope for finding viable alternatives for specific development problems is to generate and test a variety of approaches undertaken with a variety of levels of competence.  It is only from such diversity that the most viable ones can be selected for replication on a wider scale. The traditional fear of “unnecessary duplication” is highly inimical to the generation of creative alternatives.

Sixth, we have to recognize the critical importance of critical funding.  Project funds for grass roots type development action are almost invariably sub critical.  Individually, each project needs sufficient resources to be able to carry through its tasks, and collectively they need to be able to communicate with, exchange and rely on information from others in the network.  If appropriate  technologies like woodstoves or solar pumps have failed, it is largely because of this factor.

Seventh, we must concentrate on building sustainable capacity.  The need for introducing higher levels of professionalism into the work of non-governmental and “voluntary” organisations implies that their work must become increasingly self-financing.  This in turn will require them to carry out their activities not only in a business-like way, but on the basis of activities which arte commercially viable.  Inspite of their professed interest in supporting such activities, international funding agencies are not actually geared to doing so.

For the reasons enumerated above, governmental and other public organizations have inherent limitations in striking new paths, either technologically or institutionally.  Thus, funding support directly to creative initiatives by non-governmental organizations must be developed.   q

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