The Funding Letter I'd Write If I Were Brave
This is the letter I have not sent.
Yet.
Every nutrition partnerships person in East Africa has a version of this letter in their head. We rarely write it down because the day-to-day work of fundraising depends on a polite version of the same conversation. The polite version pays the bills.
The unpolite version, occasionally, is what would actually move the work.
I'm publishing this as the letter I would send to a fictional but specific large donor — let's call them The Foundation — if I had the freedom to send it. The names are invented. The patterns are not.
Table of Contents
Dear Programme Officer,
Thank you for the call last week and for the request for a fuller proposal on our maternal nutrition work. I appreciate your time and your continued engagement with our team.
Before we send the formal proposal — which will land in your inbox by the deadline, in the format your portal requires, with the logframe rows your reviewers expect — I'd like to write you a different letter. Not instead of the proposal. Alongside it. The proposal is the version of our work that will survive your compliance team's review. This letter is the version that might actually help your programming decisions.
You asked me what's working. So let me try to tell you, properly.
1. The most useful thing we are doing right now is the part of our programme you do not directly fund.
Specifically: the cross-county learning network we run between county nutrition coordinators. It has no logframe. It produces no quarterly indicator. It costs us about KSh 4 million a year of staff time. And it is, by some distance, the highest-leverage thing we do — because it is the channel by which programme-level learning actually moves between counties, faster than your annual report cycle, faster than the ministry's strategic plan revisions, faster than any one organisation's M&E framework.
You fund the deliverables. The learning network is the part that makes the deliverables work. We have asked, in three previous proposals, to ring-fence a small budget for it. Each time it was struck out as "not aligned with the results framework."
I'm asking again. Differently.
2. The thing we said we would do that is not working is our SMS-based behaviour change campaign.
It is not working in the way the proposal said it would. The opt-in rates are a quarter of what we projected. The messages are being read by husbands rather than mothers in roughly half of the households we sampled. The behavioural shift indicator has not moved.
We will report this honestly in the next quarterly. We will not soften it. The reason I am writing it here, in this informal letter, is because I want you to know that we know — before the report lands. The decision to be honest about it has cost us, in previous funding cycles, with funders who treat honest underperformance as evidence of poor implementation rather than evidence of honest reporting.
We are pivoting the campaign. The pivot is described in the proposal. The pivot is real and we believe in it. But the original design didn't work, and pretending it did would be a worse use of your money than acknowledging it.
3. Your two-year funding cycle is making our work less effective.
I know this is not your policy choice. I know it sits with The Foundation's board. But I want to put it in writing.
A two-year cycle for nutrition work in this country produces three predictable distortions:
- Programmes get designed for what can be demonstrated in 18 months, not what shifts outcomes in 5 years
- Staff turnover spikes around year 2 as people leave for longer-cycle funders
- Long-term partnerships with counties get rebuilt every 24 months from scratch, with implementation lost in transition
A five-year cycle, even at half the annual budget, would produce more impact than the current model. We have said this in five board meetings with you. I am saying it once more, in writing, in a letter you do not have to forward.
4. Your insistence on attribution is hurting field-level collaboration.
You require that we report indicator change attributable specifically to your programme. That requirement, built into your reporting templates, is making it harder for our staff to share data and lessons with other organisations working in the same counties on overlapping interventions.
The unintended consequence: we have a less collaborative field than we would otherwise have, partly because every funder is asking each grantee to claim the same county-level indicator improvement separately. Several of us know this is happening. None of us has been able to push back successfully on the reporting requirement.
I understand your need to demonstrate impact to your board. I am asking you, in the next funding cycle, to consider a "contribution" rather than "attribution" framework — one where we can credibly claim our share of a system-level shift without having to bracket out other organisations' contribution. The fact that this is uncomfortable to administer is not a reason not to do it. The current model is producing fragmentation as a side effect of accountability.
5. The thing your programming is most missing is funding for the field's biggest gap — adolescent girl nutrition.
Across The Foundation's portfolio in this country, you have committed roughly 80% of your nutrition spend to under-fives and pregnant women. You have committed approximately nothing to adolescent girls, despite — as we have discussed — this being the most under-served and highest-leverage window in the maternal nutrition continuum.
I will not bury this in the proposal. I will say it here, plainly: if you have an extra five million dollars to allocate over the next funding cycle, the highest return on it is adolescent girl nutrition in the highest-stunting counties, not expansion of existing under-five interventions.
You will not write that into your strategy this year. You may write it in five years, when other funders have demonstrated the model. By then we will have lost a cohort.
I'm flagging it now so that, in five years, the field record shows that we — and others — were pointing at this gap before the funding caught up.
6. The relationship between our organisations is good. Don't let it become only transactional.
I have worked with you and your team for several funding cycles. The team is strong. The relationships are real. I value them.
But I notice that the substantive conversations about strategy have been getting shorter and the conversations about reporting compliance have been getting longer. This is a normal pattern as funder-grantee relationships mature. It is also corrosive over time. The five-year-funder-grantee relationship that loses its strategic conversation becomes a procurement contract, which is not what either side wanted.
Can we do an annual strategic conversation, off-template, with no attached funding decision, where we just talk about the field and what we are seeing? Not a "site visit." A conversation. The fact that this is unusual is part of the problem this letter is naming.
7. Thank you.
I know this letter is unusual. I am sending it because I think the polite version of our quarterly conversations has stopped doing the work I want them to do. The honest version may not change anything. It may also, occasionally, change something — and that is worth the discomfort.
The proposal lands by Friday. We look forward to the review.
With genuine respect, and the appreciation of someone who knows that grant funding makes our work possible while also, sometimes, making it harder than it needs to be,
Cyril
What This Letter Is For
I am publishing this version of the letter — fictional, but with elements drawn from real conversations — because I think the partnerships sector talks about funder relationships in a private code that does not let the field learn from the patterns.
The patterns are real. Two-year cycles are limiting. Attribution requirements are fragmenting. Strategic conversations atrophy into compliance ones. Honest underperformance is sometimes punished. The most under-served populations are the ones where no funder has yet built the constituency, so the funding follows the existing constituency rather than the public health need.
These are not pathologies of one funder or one grantee. They are systemic patterns that everyone working in this field knows about and few write about, because writing about them feels like biting the hand that feeds.
The hand that feeds also occasionally signs the cheque that delays the work it claims to support. We can name that.
For the related thinking about how I came to this work, see why I left clinical work for partnerships and the donor question I keep getting.
One Last Note
If you are a funder reading this: please do not read it as an attack. Read it as a contribution to the better version of the funding relationship that we — funders and grantees together — could build.
If you are a fellow partnerships person reading this: write your version. Don't send it. Or do. Neither of us is brave enough to send it most of the time, and that is part of why the system is the way it is.
The polite letter pays the bills.
The honest letter pays the dividend.
I am still figuring out, in any given week, when to send which.
This is the honest one. I have not signed it.
Yet.
