Design your frontline funding strategy

Video transcript

I’m Jinny Baumann. I’m the Senior Program Manager here at the Freedom Fund.

So the Freedom Fund ran a program in southern India from 2015 to 2023, focused on addressing risks to young women in textile mills.

Early on, we wanted to help our grantee partners, who are frontline NGOs working in the communities near the mills, to assess whether they were tackling all the key drivers to harm the young workers.

We supported our partners field staff to collect more than 300 life stories from a random sampling of community members. We then brought them together, about 33 people, half of them NGO workers, half community members, to do analysis in real time.

They sat in pairs and read each story and the whole group visualised the key themes and links between them on a huge systems map. The frontline partners then spent time comparing their planned activities with the themes they’d identified.

They were already working closely with the communities, but this process provided them with a chance to reflect and adjust their work.

We also used these findings to inform other interventions, including a film and an accompanying curriculum which the partners used for community led discussions and actions.

I’m Deborah Aranha and I’m the Freedom Fund’s Senior Program Manager in Brazil.

We are currently setting up a new program in the Brazilian Amazon funding local NGOs working to reduce forced labour in sectors like timber and cattle.

From the outset, the process has involved working closely with a diverse range of local civil society groups and government authorities.

We began consulting them to determine the most important sectors and areas to focus on and understand what was driving the problem.

We work with the local NGOs to conduct site visits where we talked to community members and indigenous leaders. And those steps were really key to help us understand the realities that they face.

We also conducted consultations with people with lived experience to get their input on what’s missing in the current response and what should be the priorities from their perspective.

We chose to work with NGOs, who are representatives of survivors and communities most affected by modern slavery.

We then co-created a Theory of Change that reflects the collective understanding by all stakeholders involved of how the problem needs to be addressed.

After developing the new strategy, we provided the local NGOs with Inception grants that are really key to allow them to test some of their ideas for the long term solutions.

This process, while time consuming, will help us to ensure that we are funding the most effective groups and interventions.

Having a local presence has really helped with all of this as it takes time and deep understanding of the local reality to build credibility with leaders and groups and to design a program that really responds to the local needs.

But for donors who don’t have that option, a local consultant or a partner organisation could take a similar approach.