 Mae'r rhys也ogion o sydd ffynedd ychydig yn ddisblwyr o'r cyflawn. Rydyn indicatesu ar gyfer y ddweud. Rydym yn gallu fydd ymgyrchu i mewn gwirio. Rwy'r gwirion ffynedd yn cael ei fod yn ryw omod i ddechrau gyda nhu o myfyddiad eraill a'r rhys也ogion yn cael ei bod yn fwy. A dwy'r rhys也ogion yn cael y ganwch allan amlu yn ddweud, a dwy'r rhys iawn yn ddwyf yn cael eu bod yn ddwyfol. So rydyn i'r rhywnod ar gyfer y ddwym gŷ na'r rhys也ogion, I'm going to be illuminating how they see the priorities they set and how the work that these guys do can contribute towards finding out how to genuinely create impact. We have probably about 35, 40 minutes maybe for this session. We have Fran Perrin from Indigo Trust. We have David Sackie from Hewlett Foundation and Duncan Edwards from Making All Voices Count. Between them, Fran, I think you would say they give out relatively small amounts of grant funding to smaller NGOs. Your Hewlett Foundation often is quite a large portfolio and gives quite large grants from time to time. Then Making All Voices Count, which is a consortium of different funders together and the work that Duncan does is about re-granting some of that money. So different perspectives, different funding priorities, all focused on broadly transparency, accountability, good governance and so on as well. So just to kick off, I'm going to pass over to Fran. I'm going to have a few minutes for me to speaker and then a couple of questions and then we'll go out to the audience for a bit more of a Q&A as well. I'm sure you'll all have lots of good piercing and very difficult and challenging questions as well. So over to Fran, who's up first. Hi, I'm Fran Perran. I'm the founder and director of the Indigo Trust, a grant making foundation for civic tech around transparency and accountability. The first question I always get asked about civic tech is, will you fund my civic tech project? So if you want to know, please come and find me afterwards, tweet Indigo Trust or look at our blog. We try to be very, very transparent and accessible. If you don't think we are transparent and accessible, tell us so we can do it better. Indigo funds disruptive projects which leverage the power of mobile and web technology to foster active informed citizenry and accountable governments. Over the past few years, we've funded around 100 grants for civic tech. We give up to about a million pounds a year in total, largely to sub-saharan African organizations or international NGOs that are working in Africa. So we're definitely one of the smaller of the funders on the panel. We also have a separate program for improving philanthropy itself, but I'll talk about that in a minute. We've been lucky enough to fund my society since 2009 with both core and project funding, and that supported projects including Maslendo in Kenya, a DECRO in Ghana, and the People's Assembly in South Africa, all of which are parliamentary monitoring sites. We're now very excited to be working with my society and Hive Collab in Uganda on a user-centered design process, and that's been challenging to us as a funder. It's the first grant we've awarded and we don't know what it's for. Building impact assessment into a grant where you have no idea what the end platform will be is particularly challenging, and a huge thanks to Paul Lenz at my society for helping us design that. Hive Collab have used user-centered design with my society to find out local needs and priorities, to identify local partners, and they're now working on prototypes around anti-corruption projects. We think this is going to be much more successful in resulting in projects that actually meet a local need rather than just what we would like people to be working on, and our assessment will look at how successful that approach is compared to our more traditional funding model. We find that major improvements in transparency and accountability rarely occur in the first year of funding, so we think our best role is funding the ecosystem in the early stage projects, giving them a chance to prove their concept in the first year, and then graduate them on to larger funders who can take them to the next step. Also helping those early stage projects meet the due diligence criteria of much larger funders. There are too many funders out there who claim that they fund innovation, but only if you already have a three-year impact study to show them. It's worth saying that while we have a very high appetite for risk in innovation, we have a very low risk appetite for the safety of activists, so a lot of the due diligence and research we do is around, are we putting projects and activists in an unsafe situation? But we try to be quite light-touch in our evaluation because it's often not appropriate at an early stage of a project. We measure user statistics, return visits, reports. What we don't pretend to do is prove a causal relationship between individual projects and an improving national situation because it's going to be impossible at this scale. But in anti-corruption projects in particular, it's crucial to consider whether your success depends on elite or mass usage. A small number of very engaged users, which generate national press and conversation, may change government more than something which is used more widely but not at the right level. Given the tiny size of the project we fund, there's rarely budget for independent evaluation, but we really push grantees to build in a learning approach right from the start so that at least they're starting to collect the data and it's built into their projects from the start. If we've given a £30,000 grant for the first year of a project, we don't know ethically what's the right ratio to then spend on evaluation. We're still struggling with that. One factor we always measure is whether our funding helps grantees get more funding from others. Two-thirds of our grantees report that Indigo funding had directly enabled them to generate more and greater sources of income after our work. Oddly, I want to talk very briefly about marketing for impact. If no one has heard of your project, it's highly unlikely that it'll be used enough to have impact. But many grant applicants don't ask for marketing in their budgets because they don't think funders will fund it. So we now push all our applicants to include at least some marketing budget in what they do. People's Assembly, which we fund in South Africa, doubled their website and their user engagement, their return visits just by using Google Ads. A DECRO in Ghana trained journalists on data journalism to help get their message out. And in South Africa, we're now funding a press consultant to help our grantees get free media. We hope that will drive user engagement in the sites and their eventual impact. Mark asked me to think about one hope or aspiration for civic tech. And my biggest hope is that, as a community, we can apply the best civic tech thinking to improving philanthropy itself. Later today, Rupert Simons from Publish What You Fund will be speaking about using data to improve the impact of foreign aid, and I highly recommend it as a session. I want to see that same approach applied to philanthropy in the grant making world. I have a deep frustration, and I suspect it's shared by many of you, that the grant funding world is a market with no information. It's like trying to do financial investment with no Reuters, no FTSE 100 and few public metrics of success. Too much of your time is wasted searching for funders and trying to navigate their Byzantine and impenetrable application processes. So help me use civic tech to change this. Look at 360 giving, which is an initiative we've created to get grant makers publishing their grants in an open data standard. We've started in the UK, where we already have 26 foundations publishing to our standard, covering six billion worth of grants. It's interoperable with IATI, so at Indigo, we publish once to both systems. You can see every single grant we make. I'm very pleased that the other speakers' organisations also publish to IATI. Help me educate donors on why anyone who funds transparency should themselves be transparent. Help us improve the impact of all civic tech by allowing you to concentrate on your work, not just your fundraising. Thank you. So my name is Duncan Edwards. I work for the Institute of Development Studies in the UK. The Institute has a long history of working in applied research, theory building in fields such as governance, participation and citizenship. I'm the programme manager for the research, evidence and learning component of making all voices count. The programme itself started some years ago as a consortium for donors. That's DFID, USAID, Swedish Cedar and a media network. I'm part of a implementing consortium, which is led by HEVOS, alongside Ushahidi and IDS. MABC is essentially exploring the role of technology within transparency and accountability work. It's doing that through putting out relatively small short-term grants to organisations who are looking at using technology in these spaces. My role within all that is to build an evidence base on what works, what doesn't and how and why things work. I feel like I'm in a slightly different position to a lot of donors. I'm essentially a re-grunter. There's a consortium of four donors who sit above us and they deal with much larger sums of money than we do. It gives us a certain amount of flexibility, but we have certain constraints that are put upon us by these very different donors. What I'm going to talk about is some of the observations I've made through reading through hundreds of applications that have come into MABC. I also want to talk about some of the observations of things that seem to be a problem in this field. I'd also like to make a few suggestions about approaches, roles and responsibilities of different actors in this field. Us as donors, practitioners and researchers. I wanted to start by talking about distortions. It's something I've seen a hell of a lot in the three years I've been working with MABC. How a donor frames a problem in a call for proposals or a competition, it's very important. We all know from our own lives that we modify our behaviour, the way we talk, the way we articulate things depending on who we're talking to. If you're a donor and you're framing a problem as a very technical problem, you're looking for silver bullets, magic fixes for things, that's exactly what you're going to get. In MABC, when I've talked to some of our grantees face-to-face, I've read their proposals as they've come in. The proposal sounds very tech-optimistic, it's going to transform the world. When you talk to them, it's a very small part of a long, politically savvy bit of work. It's not just a quick fix. In terms of responsibilities, I think donors have a responsibility not to be calling for magic bullets. I also think that practitioners have a responsibility not to oversell. In a six-month, one-year, two-year project, you're very unlikely to transform governance. Let's recognise this. Governance is a long-term change process. Innovation is a long-term change process. Let's be realistic about the kind of impacts or outcomes that we hope to see. Are you going to see a governance impact or do we need to be more realistic about it's actually knowledge that is more useful? Knowledge outcomes, what knowledge has been produced from trying this in that context and that being a basis for future innovation. I also wanted to touch on the role of researchers. There's lots of researchers in the room here. I work at Research Institute. It's not just a researcher's role to do research, write papers. I think particularly within this space, given the variety of different actors that we're working with, thinking about researchers as a much more engaged actor within a change. Asking the right questions at the right time within the design of an initiative is often more important than having the answers. Getting people to question what they're doing and how they're doing it. As I said, I've read lots of proposals that come into MBC and I just wanted to talk through some of the common weaknesses that I've noticed. Of course, there's some great things that have come in. There is some stuff where you've got a real rough diamond of an idea that over time might have significant impact in terms of governance. But many are very weak. There's lots that don't really display a substantive understanding of the problem that they're looking to address. Many frame accountability problems is purely an information gap. Essentially, because the government doesn't have data or information about problems with service delivery or corruption, what have you, then nothing gets done about it. Very few engage in the politics of what's actually going on. They don't recognise the incentives, the disincentives, the capacities and agency to act. There's no recognition of what government responsiveness actually looks like. So, if you're not entirely sure what you're expecting to achieve, how can you be sure about when you're achieving it? Essentially, we need to recognise the complexity. We need to recognise that accountability is political. We need to be a lot more realistic about what it might take to drive change. The next thing I want to talk about is evidence. Many of the proposals that I've seen over the last three years don't really display any evidence that they've engaged in the evidence that already exists. Five years ago, this field was a bit light on evidence, but there is evidence that exists, but why aren't people engaging with them? Also, there's very little evidence regarding the outcomes and impacts of practitioners' own work. So, you get a proposal and say, right, we should be scaling this up to the next stage, but very little evidence of what kind of outcomes it's had so far, has it proved a concept of any description. So, there's an evidence problem, and in my mind, it's a problem with a number of different causes. First off, how accessible is evidence? So, we can talk about open access, what have you, but also the language in which research is written can have a tendency to be inaccessible to a lot of people. Culture and ways of working. Some of the actors working in this space seem to be very unfamiliar with working with research evidence, but instead are working in more kind of agile methodologies that rely very, very heavily on experiential learning. And there's a tendency that's towards more kind of single loop learning. Essentially, this is what we're going to do and learning about how we do that better, rather than double loop learning, which might be questioning, are we doing the right thing in the first place? Do we really understand the problem? So, there's those kind of issues. So, I'm not arguing that single loop is better than double loop. All I'm saying is we need to be doing more of both. Another issue is about does the right evidence exist? That a lot of the work that practitioners are doing, there's a sense that it's never been done before in this sector, in this region, what have you. And so, there's an assumption that actually we can't learn from evidence that's been produced elsewhere, or that essentially some practitioners have the assumption that you should be able to produce case studies that have very generalisable lessons that could be directly applied from a piece of research into the context that they're working at. You know, it's well known within governance work that context is king. So, why should we assume that you can actually just transfer these kind of lessons? So, what's the answer? A question I've often heard, often despairingly, often by someone who's been struggling to make their way through the first couple of pages of a very academic report, is how do we get researchers to write in ways which influence practice? I've worked in research to policy, research to practice for many, many years in many different sectors. It's not a common problem. But should we expect academics to be able and competent to communicate to a wide range of different actors? You know, is that realistic? You know, there are some good communicators. We've heard from some of them today. But I think we need to accept that it's not realistic to expect a researcher who's very good at doing the research bit to necessarily be a communicator to all different actors. So, essentially, I think we need to be looking at perhaps more realistic theories of change of how research knowledge can then translate into change in practice and in policy. And there is lots of work that's been done in this area, lots of communities doing lots of work around knowledge mobilisation, knowledge brokering, what have you. And we need to look at the roles that these different actors play. We need to invest more in research communications, in knowledge brokering. You know, if you think about open data, you wouldn't expect the majority of people to engage directly with the data. You're relying on skilled intermediaries to pull out the interesting stuff, to translate that, to contextualise it and communicate it. It's the same with a lot of different forms of research. Another thing, donors should ask for evidence and they should reflect on the evidence that's being presented to them. But similarly, practitioners have a responsibility here that do your homework, engage with the evidence that exists and expect to be challenged. Monitor whether what you're actually doing is producing the kind of outcomes you expect or don't expect. Is it feasible to assess the impact of what you're doing? And to leave you with an overarching point is that governance is a dynamic, political and ongoing process of changing relationships and processes. There's no fixing it. The work you may do might improve things for a time. It might just stop things getting worse for a time. OK. Thank you. I mostly want to yield my introductory comments to hopefully some courageous questions from you all about why donors are so dysfunctional and hypocritical. I don't know if you saw in the US there was a political scandal that Hillary Clinton was using a private server for her emails. And so as part of that, they had to publish all of the emails or most of them that were on the server. It's very interesting to read through in part because I know some of the people who are writing these emails to her. And what really comes across super clearly is that everyone kisses Hillary Clinton's ass. So if you're Hillary Clinton, even if the press writes horrible things about you, what's coming into your email inbox is a lot of ass kissing. And that's basically what it's like to be a donor. It's not comfortable. People don't speak to you honestly. And you know that people are saying negative things and lots of complaints in the hallways. So if there are people out here today who are willing to actually say what you say in the hallway to a panel of donors, that would be so refreshing. I would love to hear it. Thank you. Obviously I'm going to rely on you guys to say what you say in the hallways rather than me. But I mean, some really interesting stuff there. Just a couple of points I picked up on. I was really touched by Fran's point about the difficulty of investing in this area without the equivalent of a Reuters or lack of information makes it incredibly difficult. Lots of rolling of the dice and hoping that these things will work. And just as Duncan touched upon just about asking the right questions, from my commercial experience we increasingly tried to get clients to maybe commit 30% of the budget up front to deliver the first part of the service and then 70% of the budget would be based on sustaining that project over time and learning from it. And if you're actually putting in some kind of grant proposal, especially when you have no idea what the outcome is going to be or how people are going to respond to that, there needs to be those kind of equivalent approaches. And also just the duplication of effort is something that I guess I'm really keen to hear the panel's thoughts on about when you see a proposal that comes in, it's clearly very similar to something that already exists, but maybe they're either not aware of it. Or again, what we suspect certainly from what we see is that as soon as someone has a bit of success in an area, lots of other people will also try and do the same thing because they might be able to achieve success also. So rather than building on those efforts, you create a flattening out where just lots of people do the same thing. So I'd be really interested how you as a panel respond to that when you see that come in. And to David's point, speaking honestly about giving the honest feedback, I think part of it, if I was being slightly defensive, I would say that there's not always the channels available for giving feedback. Often, if you don't get feedback why a proposal has been rejected, it was just clearly some idiot at the foundation who didn't understand what you were trying to do. It couldn't possibly be any fault in the application you've just put in. So if there's no kind of two-way channel for feedback, it's kind of difficult to give the honest feedback back to the funder as well. So what you're trying to get is often the case that you get the foot in the door with a funder, and then you're able to have, for instance, your friend in Indigore have been long-term funders and supporters of my society. There's a dialogue there. We can sit down and we can talk through issues and so on, and think about where our strategy is going and how we might wish to fund that in the future. And that's obviously a great relationship and the type of relationship you want any kind of funder and grantee to get to, but it's almost impossible up front. So maybe that first question, just about where you see duplication of effort, how do you respond to it, how do you push people in the right direction, and maybe as well about the kind of the two-way feedback, how do you address that? I don't know who wants to go first. Thanks. Although that's another classic example of saying nice things about funders. On duplication of effort, it's really hard. We try and build up a lot of expertise within the trust to allow us to see duplication, and a big problem we have is great inspirational applications that say we're going to build a new thing to do this, and far too often they don't know that exactly the same platform exists as open source code in another country. So we really do encourage people to see if it's already been built, if it's available to use or adapt, and really prove the need for the genuinely new thing. And it's something I think that's as fun as we can all share examples of that more often. It's hard to do if you have expertise in one geography. I'm pretty confident on knowing what other projects exist across Sub-Saharan Africa, but I don't necessarily know if it's already been built in the Philippines and could be replicated. One of the hardest things is to avoid getting caught up in excitement and hype. At Indigo we are very inspired by the projects we work with, and you have to try and rule out a bit of the bias on that, and not just be excited about it, but be very sceptical and cautious, and sometimes paranoid to make sure it's not just an emotional response. We can't fund all the good applications we get. At some point we have to make hard choices, and that's where it gets hard actually to feed back to unsuccessful applicants when sometimes the honest answer is, yours is a really good project. It's just maybe 1% not quite as good as this other one we are going to fund, and I don't think we always get that right in telling people. In terms of duplicate projects, I think that sometimes it's okay to fund similar approaches to the same problem that use slightly different methodologies or are based in two different locations because there's a question of validity, does something work, and then of generalizability? Does it work in multiple places? Sometimes that's fine, and sometimes I think that we're a little bit too polite, and we're like, oh come on guys, we all have to do it together and sing kumbaya in the process. I think that we do, hopefully, I hope that my grantees think that I make an intentional effort to get people in the same room. Every organization thinks that the project that they are leading is the best one, has the best methodology, and the other ones aren't as good for X and X reason. I found that when you get people together in a workshop setting where they're able to get away from their computers and dedicate three or four hours to say, okay what's our ultimate goal that we're striving for and where does it make sense for us to complement each other and to get rid of certain aspects of the work where there just clearly is duplication, it takes time because people have to fly to the same city and have this discussion, but usually I think it's worth it. Just to add on the duplication thing, if you look into some of the innovation literature, particularly looking at Andy Sterling's work on innovation pathways approach, actually what he argues is you try and keep as many pathways open as possible. You're trying to avoid getting locked into particular technologies, particular approaches. In some ways diversity is a good thing. I'm keen to open it up to the floor, so we've got one, two, three. I'll take maybe a couple of questions and then ask to respond if you just say who you are and where you're from as well. First question here. I think I was the first to put my hand up, so if you want to take someone on that side first. No, you're holding the microphone, Rupert Simon. Rupert Simon has published what you fund. This may be relevant to some of our funders on the panel. What do you do with organisations that you think are perhaps sub-scale or ought to merge or perhaps ought to be put out of business? Did that ever happen to you? How forceful are you in telling them that they need to merge? If they do need to merge, what can you do to help them find suitable merger partners or even help them get taken over? This is Erhard Gray from the MIT Centre for Civic Media. Looking forward to this panel. I'd like to ask about what trends that you each see in the acceptable forms of knowledge and impact from funders. That you see that your organisation is now accepting and that you see other funders in that space accepting. Where do you see that trend going in terms of acceptable forms of knowledge and where that's maturing? The second part to that question is where you think you as a funder and your fellow funders are most missing the mark in the ways that you are framing M&E around civic tech right now? I'm Janet Lingann. I'm very interested in civic technology. I'm a consultant. Something that I would like to hear a bit more actually. You have talked about your work, the kind of work that you support, the kind of partners that you are looking for. Could you talk a bit more about how do you do your due diligence with the partners, especially in countries where you're not based? I think that's very similar to what Rupert has asked about how do you decide who you are going to support? Because from what I heard, it's like you're looking at the proposals and from that point you would decide to make a decision. But how do you make sure that the partner that you are going to support has the legitimacy beyond the skills and beyond the things that they are telling you in the proposal? So what do you do to point out organisations that may be subscale or could be merged or collaborate together or even put out business? What trends do you see where there are acceptable forms of impact and where is it most missing the mark? And how do you decide who to support? Obviously rather than just throwing the proverbial dart into the dart boards. But maybe take any all of those questions as you see fit. Thanks. I'd like to start with the due diligence question because it's something that concerns me a lot. We fund currently in 15 different Sub-Saharan African countries and we're based in London. So we care about getting it right and trying to only fund where we can be an informed donor. So we've rejected some excellent applications just because they're from contexts where we don't know enough. They might be brilliant but we won't be able to judge. One thing we've ended up doing accidentally although we sometimes pretend that it was very strategic is funding innovation hubs in the countries where we work. So the hubs aren't necessarily, their primary goal isn't transparency and accountability but they become our partners in country to vet projects. And we find that we give them core funding for their work as a hub and their sustainability and then have a relationship where they pass on what they think are the best local projects. So we rely on their knowledge of local context but also on helping judge the tech skills of groups and how they work together. Although I had a good critique of that which said the people working in your average tech hub in the capital city of a developing country are not always up to date with every different problem in their own country. So that's a big part of our due diligence but we probably overload on informal due diligence. We talk to every single person that we can and we try and collect as much information as possible to inform the decision rather than just relying on a formal application process to screen our risk. So I'm going to address two questions. Our biggest failure in MNE as a sector to the degree that we're a sector and how to force mergers, encourage mergers because I think that's a really interesting one. For our biggest failure in MNE my sense is that somehow over the past five years there's been this trend where compared to what we talked about this morning of how do people use these platforms and how do they benefit from these platforms our sector and I think the success of the open government partnership is partly responsible for this has really been focused on creating standards, creating norms going to conferences, meeting with different people and saying what type of data do we want to see available and then we all create indices to see what degrees of data are available and then we fund case studies to see what is open data and open government good for and that's one approach to impact is to say we're building all of these things what do they do but it's very much looking for the nails with the hammer compared to saying what is a concrete problem that you're trying to resolve such as more access to water in this particular county in Kenya and then working backward and what are the roles of transparency, participation and accountability in reaching that goal and what are the things maybe it's the government that needs to do better user research it could be a lack of state funding it could be a lack of state capability but I think our big problem is that we're always leading with the hammer and looking for nails all across the world for mergers I mean we have a I would say the benefit of where we stand we have a good panoramic view over how a lot of organizations operate and the individuals in each of those operations and lots of times it is particular individuals within operations who are really thought leaders they're leading pieces of work they're leading particular projects and we can see how wow if this one organization or if these three people in that organization could just partner with these two people in that organization they'd be able to do something incredible we're not able to force that but a lot of what I do is that we can stop funding an organization and maybe that will incentivize that organization to partner with another one we can't force a marriage but I think that we can nudge people toward it and there have been some good examples of them I'm not going to respond to that one on the due diligence question essentially we just go out and talk to people we have staff in all the countries that we're operating in almost so that's how we deal with it and at the end of the day we make a decision within an investment committee but that's whether we make a decision to say yes let's go ahead there's quite a long route to then kind of finally agreeing the contract issuing cash you know what you'll get from the investment committee in a lot of cases this needs strengthening in these different ways how are you going to respond to that and then you go from there okay we'll take three more questions and then I think that's probably all we've got time for I know there was one chap here right at the front who had his hand up then we'll go this chap here and then any more female voices actually we've got a lot of male hands up one from Meevin there as well okay thank you and then we'll go to the next question I want to answer David's point from earlier on I want to express a frustration I understand the need to measure, assess, have a very strong project that are detailed and such but submitting a call for a grant is very very time consuming building a budget is something that some people are not used to do specifying everything takes a lot of time and for an NGO that doesn't already have someone dedicated to that or doesn't have even anyone being paid for then it's really hard and it's in most of the time unbearable my NGO is seven years old we do parliamentary monitoring at the open data advocacy political transparency at the KC lobbying we successfully got yesterday stopped the trade secrets on open data that the senate wanted to have expelled I mean we do a lot of the things we are all volunteers we all do that at nights and weekends we are all a bit exhausted we all have jobs so I'm wondering I mean Tom Steinberg wrote a great piece last week on that saying civics tech society needs to acknowledge that sometimes they cannot make money it's just even by crowdfunding and such they will never make enough to fund a position or such and I don't think that's bad I mean it's democratic projects they're not made to make money make sense so I just want to ask how to address this how to fund projects that already prove they can do much without money but won't take the time to just I mean when we got spare time we'd rather do things than just spend hours on making a project that we're not even sure it would be accepted so how to do that and maybe another approach would be for you guys to just assess everybody and see what can be done Hi so this is not a frustration but more like a pub chat thing so it is when you fund nonprofits and civics tech projects that aren't sustainable and do have a business model is the funding is donating to them in that way potentially inherently combative and causing conflict because you have to prove that the impact that you have made in the world is your impact when actually it might make more sense if a lot of people work together and created a larger impact and is doing that one-on-one model thing actually bad for the ecosystem as a whole I'm not really from the civics tech world so it's been new to me but we did ask for some sort of arguably critical feedback on fundraising so I've been a political activist for a number of years and one of the I'm at the moment I'm a researcher in London and my observation is that the people doing the most interesting innovative work in terms of social and political design aren't actually funded because they can get funding because they're too political and I recently did a conference where are called bottom-up political parties and they are called bottom-up political participation so I asked lots of organisations to come to it quite a significant minority wouldn't come to it because they couldn't be seen to be political so I'd like to be dealt with advocate and suggest that the funding sort of system skews innovation so the guys that are doing really interesting stuff can't get the money and the people doing not so interesting stuff have got the money and this creates all sorts of problems if you're not aware of it, it does I guess three very similar questions really about relation to how does important work or potentially important work get funded when there's just not a model there to do it and it just is even pointed out around does the competitive aspect is that a help or a hindrance within this does it exploit stuff and obviously the political aspect to this as well is that there's a lot of representation on a similar question I want to answer all those questions but I'm going to try and narrow it down on the point about political activism it is really hard it's not always solely the fault of funders we are bound by charity law certainly in the UK and particularly in a lot of African countries where if something is a particular type of political activity we are not allowed legally to fund it charitably cross party stuff is easier and my democratic process is easier stuff that is party related certainly in the UK is not allowed to be charitable funding I think with Indigo we go very close to the line in some countries but as I said earlier we're not going to fund something if we're putting the activists at risk and that's a real risk in those countries but having said that I wish there was more funding available generally for things that really challenged the political system it's not a space that a lot of funders want to go to I wish there was more of it on the combative part whenever you're dealing with individual organisations there is going to be some element of that it's not deliberate but if an organisation can't in any way point to its own role in the change that's happening rather than just a change that may be the result of many many different partners then how can we know that we should continue funding them that's why we try and look at proxies you don't have to prove that you're down a government but if no one has used your project then it's unlikely you did play a role in it on the very good point about what is basically volunteer effort and sometimes slave labour by amazing projects we fund people because their skill is what they're doing not because they're experts at writing a budget but we have to give money to projects we think have a chance of succeeding and even if you're never going to be profitable and most indigo projects will never at all be profitable we have to have some inkling that you might still exist in a year so if you can't in any way show that you've thought through where future funding might come from we will be very worried that you won't exist to fund again in a year so we're very flexible on how we look at budgets but if we think there are no other funders apart from us who would fund you even if we love your work we don't think you'll survive beyond us and we can't fund organisations forever so there is an element where we have to look at sustainability even if it's just that you can show there is a wide variety of other charitable donors who might be interested in what you do and hopefully we can grow the pool of funders who understand this work so that there are more chances for your work in terms of funding institutions that sometimes do the same work compared to and if that is detrimental to collective action across many different actors and that's a very helpful comment for me I wrote something down that the best proposals that I get are the ones that describe who are all of the actors in this work that we're proposing in terms of civil society in terms of the users in terms of the so-called beneficiaries whose lives actually make a difference and then within government I mean I think something that we've certainly learned was emphasised in the opening governance bulletin that IDS put out recently is that the best projects are those that are aligned with state reform from within government and have champions from within government so those proposals that recognise up front yes we know that there are five other organisations doing very similar work and here's how we collaborate with them are by far the best ones and I think that we can do a better job requesting that information in the proposal process I'll just approach that the contribution thing I think that there's many approaches for looking at contribution versus attribution so there's methods for dealing with that on the point about funding more informal this kind of work that's been done looking at supporting social movements it's really difficult one of the pieces of work that MABC has funded it was essentially funding an action research piece where researcher was working with a social movement in Kenya and we didn't know what we were going to get out of it it was an exploration of the issues the tensions within the social movement and it's been really really useful and valuable to them and I think framing things in a more action research learning focused approach can help you get around some of the potential barriers in proposal writing because what you're saying is we're exploring this question you're not promising particular kind of outcomes excellent fantastic panel thank you so much I know there's probably more questions but round of applause first of all