Q&A: What does a good funding partnership actually look like?

The Ford West Africa office has funded three of HAPEI’s programs over the last four years. We asked its Nigeria lead, Tunde Adeyemi, what actually makes a partnership work from the funder’s side, and where they get it wrong.

Most grantee-funder relationships are transactional. Yours with HAPEI is not. What is different?

Honestly, the reporting cadence. Most of our grantees produce a quarterly narrative that takes them a week to write and takes us fifteen minutes to skim. HAPEI produces a monthly one-page that takes them a day and that our whole team actually reads. That difference in time-to-signal changes what we can do with the information.

What did you learn early that you wish you had known from the start?

That the biggest risk to a good program is usually not what the program does. It is what the funder does. We push our grantees to scale before they are ready. We ask them to demonstrate impact on our timelines, not theirs. We fund the visible parts and starve the unglamorous parts. Anyone honest in this sector will tell you the same thing.

What would you say to a funder who is thinking of backing HAPEI or an organisation like it?

Fund the boring stuff. Fund the M&E hire, the finance manager, the second server. Fund the year of learning after the pilot. Do not just fund the launch. Anyone can fund a launch.

Where does HAPEI still need to grow?

Two things. Their partnerships bench is thin, meaning that if a couple of key people left tomorrow the relationship muscle would drop overnight. That is a common problem for organisations at their stage. And they are undersold internationally. Their Kaduna dialogue work in particular should be a case study by now. We have offered to help with that and they have politely put us in the queue. Which is, incidentally, another sign of a well-run organisation.

Edited by Ifeoma Anigbogu.