Looking back, looking ahead

Chief Executive Officer, Kaivalya Education Foundation & Piramal Foundation

Aditya Natraj

Looking back: In the last decade the most positive development in my view is that Indian companies through CSR and Indian citizens through strategic philanthropy are beginning to fund Indian development much more versus international development aid. In the previous decades international organisations supported Indian development a lot more. Looking ahead: I would love to see this trend continue and for philanthropy and CSR to get more strategic and support improvement of government programmes through skills, innovations, audits and systems. The total CSR plus philanthropy amount is less than one percent of what government spends and so it must be used to leverage efficiency of government expenditure by 10-50 percent rather than creating parallel systems.

Founder, Udhyam Learning Foundation

Mekin Maheshwari

Looking back: I believe there were three important things that happened in the sector in the last decade:

1. Stronger partnerships between governments and the development sector.
2. Founders and professionals in their ‘30s and ‘40s with strong professional experience joining the development sector. I think the sector is adding talent and skills, structures and tools to the passion that’s key to driving change.
3. Early signs of collaboration for some projects, though I still believe we have a long way to go.

Looking ahead: I hope we focus on the following, going into the 2020s:

1. More research and evaluation
2. More experimentation
3. More human centred design
4. More use of tech and data and in relevant ways (not just as panacea).

Founder, DESTA Research LLP

Mihir Mathur

Looking back: One positive trend I have seen in the last decade is the increase in formal opportunities for people to move to the development/social sector which provides them a context about what they are getting into and thereby helps them take an informed decision.

Looking ahead: There are two things I would like to see over the next 10 years:

1. Increased cooperation between agencies trying to solve common problems or creating a common future. This cooperation could be built through non-competing collaborations, which are increasingly becoming rare as the development/social sector sees more and more corporatisation.
2. People and institutions realising and sticking to their core identity and not mimicking the game of scaling up operations with an aim of scaling up impact. Realising impact can be scaled up without the need for scaling up operations would be a key shift.

Director, Social Impact & Development Practice, BCG India

Seema Bansal

Looking back: The three positive shifts that I have seen in the development sector are:

1. A focus on outcomes. All development efforts and all organisations in the development space have started speaking the language of impact and outcomes. Today, it’s not enough just to be doing something; measurable impact has to be visible. Funding has become linked to impact and outcomes.
2. Development sector becoming a viable and compelling career across age groups and backgrounds. Ranging from fresh graduates to mid-career professional, the development sector makes for a compelling career value proposition that combines challenging problems, satisfying work environments and reasonable incomes.
3. A greater inclination towards collaboration. Today, I see far more instances of the public sector, private sector and the not-for-profit/development sector come together in meaningful partnership to leverage their respective strengths to address large systemic and complex issues. I do believe this is leading to new ways of looking at the same problems, innovative solutions and far greater impact than before.

Looking ahead: I think the biggest shift I would like to see is development becoming core to our being as individuals, communities and corporates. Equitable growth, equal opportunity, sustainable climate and environment should not be topics that we address on the side but should become core to how we live and how we take decisions every minute/every day. For corporates this means not thinking about development as CSR but thinking about how to maximise societal impact through core business. For individuals and communities, this means deep and constant self-reflection on our actions and choices and making fundamental changes therein to have positive impact on everything and everyone around us, thus constantly building a world that all of humanity wants to live in.

Managing Director, Central Square Foundation

Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja

Looking back: The last ten years saw three important shifts in the Indian development sector:

1. A positive shift in the culture of philanthropy, social good and giving back.
2. A degree of institutionalisation, be it in the form of formal engagement with donors and foundations, or senior leadership teams being built within NGOs.
3. Impact orientation for the long term, such that it’s no longer enough to say, ‘we are doing good and that’s the impact’. There is a growing focus on working with the system for longer term sustainable and sustained impact rather than on a high-touch NGO dependent model alone.

Looking ahead: Collaboration and system ownership is something I would really like to see more of. NGOs collectively coming together to build and offer an integrated solution (versus competing for mind space in transactional manner), that is designed with a transition/ handover plan, so that it can be adopted by the system for the new business as usual practice of how work is done by the system.

CEO, Janaagraha

Srikanth Viswanathan

Looking back: The most important positive development over the past decade has in my view been the gradual but definitive opening up of governments to partnering, resulting in a coming together of sorts, of government, civil society, philanthropy and business to a much greater degree than before. Twenty first century challenges require a partnering approach to problem solving, particularly in India where state capacities will only be built over the long-term.

Looking ahead: The development sector is presently smitten by linear problem solving, of carefully picking the problem that may be relatively easier to solve in the near term rather than solving for the system which in turn can solve the problem. This system is democracy, not just at the central and state levels, but more importantly at the local neighbourhood level. I would therefore like to see organisations in the development sector close ranks and strengthen democracy and citizenship at the grassroots.

Program Director, Gandhi Fellowship Program

Vivek Sharma

Looking back: Three eco-political shifts took place in the social sector in the last decade:

1. Scale: Scale has not been achieved but a perseverance for scale has been the leit motif of the last decade. The social change sector has seriously begun to investigate the barriers to scale and has made some attempts at solving for it, using more corporate practices, which has in fact succeeded at scaling success. Today organisations are more aligned to solving at scale rather than resisting apologetically that scaling up social change is highly impossible.
2. State relationship: The state’s relationship with NGOs has become less adversarial and there is at least a sporadic, if not systemic, attempt at collaborating and cooperating. The state has begun to acknowledge what it can’t achieve and where the social sector can deliver on best practices and replicable models. Similarly, the social sector has become less judgmental about state inefficiencies and has been reflective on the grammar and vocabulary of working with the government.
3. Funding: Impact funding has organised itself as some larger-hearted, newly rich have veered around causes. In fact, one experiences a new social peer pressure among the rich to share a portion of their success. The only problem here has been that social capital is becoming impatient. What needs to be kept in mind is that innovation requires patient capital, but that giving maturity hopefully will be coming over the coming decade.

Looking ahead: One hopes the above sporadic processes will be hard-coded and intelligible models of scale will emerge; the state and the social sector will converge to create models of operational excellence.

The One Big Thing that I expect to see in the coming decade is Tech-for-Good. Technology in the last decade did some lip service to the bottom of the pyramid, but didn’t arrive as a game-changer, which I would imagine the next decade will fuel with a deeper engagement between social dollars and thinker-implementers.