How deeply should philanthropists understand local social issues before they try to solve them? We know that philanthropy initiatives can have long-lasting impacts on the way communities live and operate, but often funding priorities focus on what the donor or founder wants to achieve, rather than what the community needs. Without enough knowledge of local practices and social structure, programs can hit obstacles, fail, or even create new challenges for the people they were trying to empower.
Corporations and individual donors feel their money is safer if given to a big-name international aid agency, while private philanthropic organizations and government development funds often prefer to replicate programs used by global non-profits than invest in grassroots models that could actually be more effective and less costly.
As donors go for the easier option, they also perpetuate the power imbalance that has long overshadowed the sector, where the person or group with the money is making decisions for — but without the input of — local communities they may know little or nothing about. How do we shift the sector away from its top-down thinking and toward localized philanthropy? And what does the most effective relationship between funder (whether local or international) and local civil society look like?
It will take time to tackle such an entrenched issue, but existing research shows there are some ways in which philanthropic practices and donations can be localized, including empowering communities to develop and maintain the projects that are designed to support them, bringing local voices into the decision-making process from the start, and establishing trust with local civil societies. The panel will discuss the importance of localizing development in the Arab region, and the relationship between the funder and the local civil society.