Building Equitable Partnerships: Moving from Rhetoric to Action

By Eunice R. Agbenyadzi and Anita Awuku Asare

 Partnerships are a unique feature of humanitarian and development work. Organizations build partnerships to optimize complementarity in achieving goals that they may not be able to achieve alone.

There is never a dispute about the importance of partnerships for achieving development outcomes; The debate is about what kind of partnerships is needed to create the societies that we want.

In the discourse on shifting power, it is believed that equitable partnerships foster local ownership, enhance mutual accountability, and lead to sustainability.

From right: Eunice R. Agbenyadzi, Head of Programmes, STAR-Ghana Foundation, Abraham Owusu Antwi, Projects Manager, Care International, and Eugenia Ayishetu Ayagiba, Women's Rights and Campaign Manager, ActionAid Ghana

In contribution to practice and peer learning, STAR-Ghana Foundation has introduced a learning café, dubbed ‘Conversations with Development Actors’ to harvest insights from individuals and organizations involved in charting new pathways for promoting community development.

For this series, the topic was Building Equitable Partnerships for Results: Working with Grassroots Organizations. We chose to spotlight partnerships with grassroot organizations for several reasons. Grassroots organizations directly work on the ground, thus earning them trust of their communities.

They are most likely to understand best solutions to challenges faced by their communities and are well-placed for frontline actions in emergencies. While some are organized, many remain informal, which can be both a strength and a gap.

Comparatively, they are also the most underfunded. For some funders, working with grassroot organizations presents too many risks for them. Yet, there are funders navigating this challenge and building meaningfu
l collaboration with grassroot actors and have experiences we can learn from.

We were joined by three organizations - Plan International, Care International and ActionAid Ghana - to discuss the topic.

Some participants during the learning event 

In this piece, we share highlights and insights from the conversation.

What does equal partnership mean to your organization?
To the panelists, it means engaging on equal terms, leveraging community resources, seeing things from the perspectives of communities and finally, recognizing and honoring local partners and communities’ contribution to development.

“Equal partnership means mutually agreed partnership on equal terms, from project ideation to implementation”, says Sarah Edris Asiedu, the Local Fundraising and Partnership Specialist of Plan International. This means ‘we see each other as contributing and agreeing to how we work together on an initiative”.

“Equal partnership could also mean leveraging on the available resources that communities may have for the desired change, Abraham Owusu Antwi, Project Manager of Care International adds.

“We see our organization as part of the community, thus we work hand-in-hand to challenge the system of injustice, as the communities may perceive it to be”, says, Eugenia Ayagiba, the Women’s Rights and Campaign Manager of ActionAid Ghana.

Eunice Agbenyadzi of STAR-Ghana Foundation adds, “equal partnership is a recognition on the part of parties that it takes people’s knowledge, interest, ability and money to bring about change, thus it appreciates the value that partners bring to co-creating and implementing ideas for change”’.

Describe a typical way of establishing partnership in your organisation. Would you say you are engaging your partners differently? In what ways?

“We facilitate communities to act on their needs”, says Abraham Owusu Antwi. Eugenia adds that AAG works with ‘value-based partnership principles. We are an organization that fights against injustice and poverty; therefore, we partner with organizations of people living in poverty and their representatives’.

she explains, “We start thinking about exit right from the start of a partnership. We work towards weaning off.”

Sarah adds that Plan International has appetite for risk. “We work with small organizations once there is mutual alignment. We adopt a mutual appraisal where we jointly assess existing gaps and strengthen their capacities with locally led organisations. Mutual oversight is established through feedback mechanism where partners report to Plan and Plan in turn reports to partners.

There are also instances where we are invited by local organizations to partner to deliver a project; in this case, we become a sub-grantee, and the local organization becomes the prime.

From the STAR-Ghana perspective, Eunice shares that about 70% of the Foundation’s partnerships are with grassroots organizations. Like others, STAR Ghana Foundation builds partnerships on shared interest where mutual alignment is key.

She adds also that the Foundation supports local organizations to thrive through partnering and learning around the development of alternative financing, for example, local philanthropy and volunteerism.

Additionally, the Foundation’s learning is in two-ways. On one hand, partners are supported to strengthen their capacities, and some partners act as technical advisors to the Foundation. The Foundation also learns to transform its systems and improve partnerships through feedback from partners.

What are some of the barriers, in your experience to nurturing equality in partnership?

Some of the barriers flagged include restrictive funding, poor negotiation of local organizations due to survival needs.

Sarah shares that the ‘unwillingness of donors to fund institutional strengthening leaves INGOs little room to invest in the growth of organizations. We also join in advocacy for flexible funding, so that at our end, we can commit to the institutional strengthening of our partners.

Eunice adds that from the angle of grassroots organizations, there is a sense of acceptance of the status quo, without questioning or challenging norms, even when the opportunity is available.

This can be attributed to the fear of losing out on opportunities. To address this challenge, she adds that STAR-Ghana Foundation proactively reaches out for feedback and builds in assurances during partnership development process to encourage honest conversations.

“Building equitable partnership is difficult and requires time to allow for participatory processes. Donors are often not willing to support these processes, but we must continue to negotiate.”

From your experience are there things that grassroots organizations should be doing to proactively influence their partners?

• The conversation on Shifting Power is for grassroots organizations to own their voice, own the space and constructively challenge things that must be changed. Organizations should challenge donors in ways that reconstruct partnership. This implies that grassroots organizations must be interested and involved in shaping donor practices, supporting campaigns that target and call for donors to act on their commitments to locally led development.

• Organizations should also reimagine their mobilization. They must recommit to constituency building to ensure that the issues of constituents are adequately addressed and build partnership around issues, while strengthening their communication to increase their support base.