Across Latin America, a familiar pattern plays out again and again: philanthropic donors excited by civic technology give small, time-bound grants to develop prototypes, and then watch those prototypes quietly disappear when the grant ends, demonstrating the importance of changing funding methods to sustain civic technology.

As someone that has been working at the intersection of social change and technology in the region for the last 25 years, I have seen dozens of brilliant tools—from chatbots fighting corruption to platforms exposing political advertising—rise and fall with the funding cycle. The problem is not a lack of imagination. It is a lack of investment in sustaining civic technology and turning that imagination into policy influence.

As we tumble headfirst into another tech ‘goldrush’ with AI, the urgency and importance of the sustainability of civic tech endeavours cannot be overstated—and philanthropy has a key role here.

Over the past three years, I have been involved in POLIS, a public policy advocacy programme created by Civic Compass to train civil society organisations in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. POLIS was born out of frustration: too many one-off tech projects floundered because their creators did not know how to engage policymakers or sustain their work. In 2023–2024, we worked with more than 60 organisations across the three countries, providing workshops, personalised coaching and policy mapping exercises. The lessons from this experience of sustaining civic technology, and from our wider research, point to the real bottlenecks that philanthropic funders must address if they want digital civic tools to matter.

One-Off Grants Breed Fragile Prototypes, Failing to Sustain Civic Technology

Civil‑society organisations in our region are adept at building alliances with peers and familiar allies, but they rarely map opponents or power structures. A recent evaluation of POLIS participants found that fewer than one in four organisations systematically identify stakeholders who might hinder their advocacy. Nearly half struggle to articulate a clear theory of change or explain how a successful public‑policy campaign would translate into measurable outcomes. Sixty‑three per cent cannot identify quantifiable indicators to monitor progress. Instead, they measure success by activities rather than outcomes.

Read the full article about sustaining civic technology by Gastón Wright at Alliance Magazine.