[aesop_image img=”https://futureofgood.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/unnamed-8.jpeg” panorama=”off” align=”center” lightbox=”on” captionsrc=”custom” caption=”Global Affairs Canada director general, Brandon Lee, speaks in Ottawa on October 20, 2022. Photo: Neha Chollangi
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Global Affairs Canada will drastically change how it manages grants and contributions over the next half decade, working to move away from processes many in the global cooperation and aid  sector have described as “too complex, too time consuming and too costly.”

Speaking at the International Cooperation Futures Festival in Ottawa, Global Affairs Canada director general, Brandon Lee, told attendees he’d turn to the same strategies used by the private sector and tech start-ups to revamp and streamline what’s currently a long and laborious process of applying for grants and contributions.

 “This kind of reform is the heaviest lifting; it’s fixing a building from the plumbing and the foundation. It’s the most unsexy, uninteresting sounding work that you can do,” Lee said. “But it’s actually the deepest and most profound way to make true long-standing reform and innovation.” 

Global Affairs will deploy an “agile development approach,” allowing it to pivot and adjust in real-time, as feedback is received. Global cooperation and international aid organizations can engage with the redesign process in various ways, including through an online portal and chatbot. The end result will be a grants and contributions system co-designed and co-developed by the international development community, he said.

Getting there will take a collaboratively designed “north star” to guide the overhaul process.  “I’m trying to be as audacious and ambitious as possible because we owe it to ourselves to do so, but I’m also trying to be as transparent as I can,” he said

Working towards shorter approval times will require a nuanced approach to assessing risk, he said. That could mean applying a different “risk lens” to partner organizations with a strong history of delivering on promises and fulfilling goals, in order to reduce bureaucracy.

“This is really good news … I think the whole sector is cautiously optimistic,” said Nicolas Moyer, CEO of Cuso International, one of Canada’s longest serving international development organizations. “I think it was presented in a very compelling way that demonstrated Global Affairs had really heard the grievances that have been shared by their partners.”

 He hopes the proposed overhaul will improve all aspects of the grants and contributions matrix, including reporting cycles and funding management systems.

“There are frictions at many levels of the interactions, not just with our organization, but throughout the sector,” Moyer said. “There’s a lot of things that can be done just to simplify the cost of doing business with Global Affairs.” 

He’d like to see a streamlined submission process and reduced red-tape, as well as shorter wait-times, less duplication and an end to “undo bureaucratic oversight of decisions being made by partners” for established partners with a proven track record. The funding process often takes between 18 and 20 months.

The director general agreed with those sentiments, pointing out the systems used today by Global Affairs Canada today were largely developed in the mid-1990s.

 “The reporting that we’re asking partners to do is enormous and too burdensome, too heavy,” Lee said. “So, we are truly working from first principles, rethinking all of our policies and our processes around how we manage grants and contributions.”

In any given year, Global Affairs Canada manages about $6 billion in grants and contributions, ranging from a few thousand dollars to support an international Pride event, to a $75 million budget contribution to the United Nations. 

Lee expects transforming the management of grants and contributions to require three phases over five years. The first “foundational phase” is expected to take 12 to 18 months, to be followed by an “automation phase” where goals and aims set in the first phase are prototyped.

“We’ll start seeing the results of the full systems roll out in four to five years,” Lee said. “For those of you that know how fast government can move, it’s extremely fast.”

 Leah Ettarh, executive director of the Alberta Council for Global Cooperation, said the reworking of the relationship between Global Affairs and its partners is a great opportunity, but that more details are needed.

 “Asking for trust, asking for bravery and for an understanding that things along the way will fail, I think it’s a very different message and approach that we’ve seen across government, so there’s a healthy skepticism,” Ettarh said. “But I wouldn’t work in the international aid sector if I didn’t have hope for change and the belief that things can get better.”

 For a “small-medium” organization like the Alberta Council, long wait-times make it difficult to retain staff, momentum, institutional knowledge and the capacity needed to respond to crises as they arise, she said. Even small changes, like digitized forms, would go a long way to simplifying the process.

 Lee said the next step, from his perspective, is to form a sub-committee of forward-thinking partners to help guide the department on core issues of transformation. The committee is expected to hold its first meeting in November or December 2022, with a sector update and discussion to follow in February 2023.

 “I really hope that I’m demonstrating a new way of working with GAC and the federal government,” Lee said. “And I hope that partners are receptive to it and can meet me where we can be most effective together.”

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