Donors Charter

Twelve questions that funders of technology-for-development projects could ask before a grant is considered.

The Donors Charter was proposed by Ken Banks in 2014 as a practical way for donors to reinforce best practice and to focus on better-planned projects. It was first set out in A New Donor Code of Conduct, published in Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Why a Donors Charter?

Technology-for-development (ICT4D) has a habit of repeating itself. Pilots are launched, ideas are duplicated, lessons go unshared, and very few projects ever reach scale. In Innovation: The Missing Middle, a paper by Dan McClure and Ian Gray, most of the people interviewed struggled to name a single ICT4D project that had gone to scale. The only two mentioned were FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi, and there were questions even about those.

Best practice does exist, but it is voluntary and easy to ignore, and academic findings rarely make their way to the people doing the work. Yet most projects cannot get started without funding, which puts donors in an ideal position to filter out those that are poorly thought through or inadequately planned.

The Charter imagines major philanthropic foundations asking every applicant the same set of questions before a grant is considered. Its aim is to reduce replication, failed pilots, secrecy and the lack of collaboration that hold the sector back.

Twelve questions

Applicants would answer these before or during the proposal submission process. A gap in the answers would not rule a project out automatically, but form part of a conversation about why the project is necessary, and why it should be funded.

Preliminary questions

  1. Do you understand the problem, have you seen it first-hand, and why are you the right person or team to solve it?
  2. Have you searched for existing solutions to the problem?
  3. Could an existing solution be adapted rather than starting afresh?
  4. Have you spoken with others working on the same problem, and if you are not collaborating with them, why not?
  5. Is your solution appropriate to the economic, technical and cultural context?

Implementation

  1. Have you researched the scale of the problem before starting?
  2. Will you work with local people and organisations, and if not, why not?
  3. Are you making full use of your local partners’ skills and experience, and how?

Evaluation and after

  1. How will you measure impact, and how will you know whether the project has succeeded?
  2. Will you scale up or out, and if not, why not?
  3. What is your business or sustainability model?

Transparency

  1. Will you publish your summary proposal and progress reports online?

Beyond funders

Although the Charter was written with donors in mind, the questions work just as well as a checklist for anyone developing a solution for communities in the developing world, which is why it has also been used to guide students and entrepreneurs. See our page for students for more.

The original website

Screenshot of the original Donors Charter website homepage