#Solvable: Access To Clean Energy

Put People First: Development Will Follow

Giving Compass' Take: • Writing for India Development Review, Nimesh Sumati of Caring Friends discusses the importance of prioritizing the human element in development work, rather than worrying about sustainability or scalability over all else. • Discover more about the missions and challenges of those whose passions are immersed in charity, and that will lead to better results overall. Funders would do well to always keep such a lesson in mind. • Here's how to help a social purpose for each Sustainable Development Goal. Most of the time when I used to accompany the founders of nonprofits to meet different funders, especially corporates, nobody was interested in the story and journey of the founders — the struggles they had gone through, the sacrifices they had made, the challenges they faced; all they cared for was sustainability, replicability and scalability. But without understanding the founder’s journey, background and mindset, it’s hard to understand the nonprofit and what it will achieve over time. Once you understand the journey, of say, Dr Sunil and Jenny — a couple in Assam who founded The Ant — and understand what they are up against, your expectations will become more realistic. For instance, in the border areas where they work, there are three very different communities that co-exist, and natural floods and riots are frequent. They therefore cannot scale as a normal mainland organization would. People who do not understand the context will look at their balance sheet and say, “they have been working for 12 years and don’t seem to have done much." Donors don’t always understand the local situation and its complexities and will judge the nonprofit by parameters that are applied in the mainland; they must realize that a worm’s eye view is as important as a bird’s eye view.