Giving Compass' Take:

• Larger nonprofit organizations can expand their models for more innovation to be able to respond in big shifts happening in development. 

• How can donors support nonprofit resilience and growth in the development sector? 

• Here are five tips for supporting the social sector R&D. 

One usually thinks of development work—especially with civil society organisations—as a basket of small and large projects that seek to find solutions to observed, entrenched problems. So, a village without a functional school gets additional teachers and funds to build classrooms, a house without electricity gets solar lamps, a woman without access to credit gets a loan, and so on.

Development workers who are engaged in these projects bring their hearts and minds to their missions—and I am speaking here of people and organisations that mean well. But a question that has always confronted this sector is: Can nonprofit interventions withstand the big shifts in development?

They can be as diverse as technological advancements, climate change, or economic policy. One area I will not cover here is political shifts. Obviously, economic policy is affected by political priorities, and political mobilisation, in turn, can often be sparked by unanticipated stimuli.

The big shifts in development could be triggered by a variety of factors—they could be caused by the government, when it announces an economic policy that effectively alters the terms of trade for agriculture, or explicitly seeks to convert rural hinterlands into manufacturing bases, or pursues a policy of last-mile electrification.

Development interventions have been shown to be most useful when they fill last-mile gaps in government programmes, or successfully innovate on product development or implementation design. Three prominent strands of work emerge from here:

  • Humanitarian responses
  • Economic development
  • Rights-based work

By fostering space for experimentation, learning, and innovation, nonprofits will succeed in building models that a scale and optics-hungry government, and the efficiency-seeking private sector, can adopt in future, and that respond to the demands of the big shifts in development.

Read the full article about resilience in the development sector by Tanaya Jagtiani at India Development Review.