Urban Radar
Urban Radar is a podcast series brought to you by Professors Tom Goodfellow and Beth Perry, which reflects on current events and emerging trends through the lens of cities and urban life. Drawing on the unique range of urban expertise in the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester, we place urban dynamics at the centre of contemporary global affairs.
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Podcast production, presentation & editing: Tom Goodfellow & Beth Perry
Post-production editing & marketing: Polly Clifton
Production support: Jack Clayton
Distribution, promotion & marketing: Vicky Simpson
Music: Horizon (music by Tom Goodfellow, produced by Alan Thomson); Falling Down (music by Tom Goodfellow, performed by the Dice, produced by Alan Thomson); Ghosts (music by the Dice; produced by Alan Thompson); Kilimanjaro (music by Tom Goodfellow, produced by Alan Thompson).
Supported by the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester.
Urban Radar
30. URBAN CHARITY RETHOUGHT: A conversation with Nicola Banks
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In this month's feature Tom and Beth are joined by Professor Nicola Banks from the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester to discuss One World Together, an innovative model of charitable giving that makes sure the bulk of the funding ends up where it is needed most.
Often less than 10% of what we give to charity gets to where it's needed, and communities are not always the ones deciding what it gets spent on - even though they are the best placed to identify and address local challenges. What if there is a different way?
We discuss:
- Why are traditional approaches to charity unsuited to addressing urban poverty around the world?
- How does the reduction of international aid impact the existing structural and institutional inequalities which underpin dominant development and donor models of charitable giving?
- How do innovations like One World Together help us rethink charitable approaches to addressing urban poverty?
Guest:
Nicola Banks is a Professor of Global Development in the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. Her research situates development as a long-term process of transformation and social justice. She has undertaken decades of research on urban poverty, youth and the role of NGOs in global development, including work on employment and livelihoods among the urban poor in Dhaka, Bangladesh and an ESRC Future Research Leaders award to look at youth experiences of urban poverty in Tanzania. She is Director of Social Responsibility for the School for Environment, Education and Development (SEED) and in 2022 launched One World Together, a global movement for trust-based giving which has been recognised for outstanding social and environmental impact through the University of Manchester’s Making a Difference Award.
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Read more:
Power and its discontents: The long road to systemic change in the aid sector - ScienceDirect
NGOs, States, and Donors Revisited: Still Too Close for Comfort? - ScienceDirect
Hosts:
Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441)
Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)
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Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast.
Hello! And in this month's feature we are joined by Nikki Banks from the Global Development Institute to discuss why are traditional approaches to charity unsuited to addressing urban poverty around the world?
SPEAKER_01How does the reduction of international aid impact the existing structural and institutional inequalities which underpin dominant development and donor models of charitable giving?
SPEAKER_03And how do innovations like One World Together help us to rethink charitable approaches to addressing urban poverty? Welcome to Urban Radar, the podcast taking an urban lens on current affairs. I'm Tom Goodfellow, Professor of Urban Development at the Global Development Institute, the University of Manchester.
SPEAKER_01And I'm Beth Perry, Professor of Urban Epistemics at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. So, Tom, we're going to talk today about financial giving, but not the kind dominating the media in the UK at present, are we? Because there's quite a hot topic around the question of donations and gifts, particularly those received by politicians. And particularly this five million pound gift received by Nigel Farage from Christopher Harborn, the crypto king. And of course, these political donations are kind of one sort of gift giving. And the critical issue being discussed at the moment is whether or not that's being used to influence votes. Of course, international listeners may also know that avoiding this question has been what's triggered a by-election in Clacton, a contest between Nigel Farage and a bin, uh Count Binface. So we know there's been lots of scandals about these kinds of issues and debates on what and whether gifts can buy you anything within politics.
SPEAKER_03Yes, we might take a look at Count Binface in the next episode. But for now we're looking at a very different kind of giving, which is about urban, charitable giving, and particularly with respect to urban areas and urban poverty around the world. And so we're interested in thinking about what's happening to charitable giving in the context of the reduction in international aid and actually long-standing debates about the efficacy of aid and the efficacy and equity of conventional modes of giving through large charities.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and of course this matters so much at the moment because the statistics are quite dire. I think some of the recent OECD statistics state the dramatic reduction in global overseas development assistance. For instance, I think some of the bilateral overseas development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa has fallen by over 25% in 2025. Our aid from Britain to Africa's cut by more than a half. And of course, I think you covered back in episode one the total operational shutdown of USAID.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean it is an issue that's come up quite a lot as we've done our monthly radars. Um, just thinking about those direct consequences of reductions in aid. But there's also the way in which aid and the reduction of aid intersects with shifts towards NGO and donor practices and who donors partner with, where their money goes through, the behaviours and attitudes of the public as well as governments towards giving and towards working with different kinds of charities. So we're really excited to be having a conversation where we can try and understand some of these debates and some of these long-standing problems with conventional modes of giving through NGOs. So it's really excellent that we have here on our doorstep today Nicola Banks, Professor Nikki Banks, who's going to be talking to us about this so we can really learn about these different approaches to giving that are emerging in the current context. Nikki's a professor of global development here at GDI in the University of Manchester. Her research situates development as a long-term process of transformation and social justice. And she's undertaken decades of research on urban poverty. That makes her sound older than she is. She's younger than you. Yeah, she's definitely younger than me. And you.
SPEAKER_00Definitely younger than me. We'll cover that in October.
SPEAKER_03Decades of research on urban poverty, youth and the role of NGOs in global development, including work on employment and livelihoods among the urban poor in Dhaka, Bangladesh. And an ESRC future research leaders grant looking at youth experiences of urban poverty in Tanzania, among many other things. She's director here of social responsibility at the School of the School for Environment, Education and Development here in Manchester. And in 2022 launched One World Together, a global movement for trust-based giving, which has been recognised for outstanding social and environmental impact through the University of Manchester's Making a Difference Award.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and I've been wanting to know a lot more about One World Together for some time now, especially given my connections to the Community Savers in Manchester, who are a partner in the initiative. And I know would be able to do amazing things with £5 million if anyone wanted to gift it to One World Together.
SPEAKER_03So we should add that for those interested in a bit more background on Community Savers, we do talk about that organisation a fair bit in our conversation with Diana Mittlin and Melanie Lombard. And here we'll be broadening out to a range of other things that Nikki's been involved in. But I think we're talking too much. So let's get cracking. Let's go. Yes. Okay. Nikki. It's great to have you on. We've wanted this for a long time, as Beth said. So your early work was primarily around urban poverty in countries, including Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Uganda. Can you tell us a bit more about what you were exploring in that early work and how it shaped your understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the international aid sector in those contexts?
SPEAKER_02Great. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Beth. That's a really nice opportunity to look back a bit further, actually, because I've been so, I guess, immersed in the setting up and getting started with One World Together that my urban background has taken a back seat. But when I trace it back like this, it's all so deeply connected that it's a lovely full circle to reflect on. So my Bangladesh research was a very long time ago. That took me back to my PhD days. And I was basically exploring what it means to be living and working in a megacity like Dhaka when you live in an informal settlement. So I focused particularly on the role of employment in helping people escape poverty or not over time. So what is it that it takes at the household level to do better and incrementally improve your livelihoods for yourselves and for the next generation? And what came out really strongly there is it's not about anything that you can do or give or transfer to households living in urban poverty. Because those experiences at the household level are so deeply interconnected with the political realities of living in an informal settlement community, that that's not enough. Giving something or accessing a service or an asset is never enough because it can be taken away as quickly as it's given. So in these four communities I was looking at, the households that were doing better over time, yes, you could measure it in the fact that they were able to access a bit of extra finance to invest, that they could get a good job working with a formal s a formal contract and good perks of employment, or that they lived in a settlement that was closer to the city centre. So you could tell that traditional story of give a household an asset and they'll do better. But when you look at who is getting the assets, it's those households that are most connected to the influential figures at the settlement level. And that's intricately tied to city politics and national politics. So what you also found is that there were households that were trying really hard to make the same investments as their neighbors so that they could follow the similar trajectory, so they could get that formal job with employment security, a higher income. But they and they would be, they would be taking loans, they would sell assets, they'd do everything they could to try and follow the same path. And they might be able to get that job, but they don't get the job with the um actual employment contract or with the same salary. So they actually end up worse off. So it's this idea that almost individuals have have quite limited ability to improve their own lot in life if they don't have that right that right connection. Um that also has an implication on NGO programming and and how we do development. Um one thing I saw quite clearly in Bangladesh was that NGOs that come into urban settlements, they come in and they use the existing social and political infrastructure. So they'll use the house owners to kind of um build and kind of uh operate and manage local water points so that those local leaders can almost kind of profit most and that the tenants end up paying more for their their services, they might get pushed out further. So you see NGOs coming in and reproducing some of the inequalities that already exist. Uh and not making it harder for people necessarily, but making it easier for the people in power to consolidate and maintain that power. So over the long term, real transformation is actually very hard to see on the ground. Um and then as you say, my postdoctoral research, it stayed within the kind of experiences of urban poverty, but I moved focused towards East Africa. At that point, I'd spent a year living and working with BRAC in Uganda, which I absolutely loved. Saw how much of a priority urban youth are.
SPEAKER_01Like they make such the listeners who don't know what BRAC is.
SPEAKER_02BRAC, sorry, it's a Bangladeshi NGO, so there's the link between why I moved to East Africa. Uh and it's I guess one of the biggest NGOs in the world. We might not have heard of it because it's not from the UK. Um, it's not one of the northern NGOs, it's one of the only examples of South to South charity um uh travel, I guess. It's a huge organization, it's amazing. It's kind of used its model of microfinance and community development to work across many parts of the world now. I I saw there quite how important the youth question was. Um young people make up huge pro proportions of urban populations across the continent, particularly in big cities. And the labour markets there just can't absorb the huge numbers of um young people that are looking for and needing work. Um so that was where I, when I came back to the University of Manchester and moved into my postdoc, decided that's the question I needed to look at. So when I started my postdoc looking at young people's experiences of urban poverty in Tanzania, that was really at the heart of what I was looking at is how could we do better for these vast youth populations? I think what I found there, which is somewhat depressing, is quite how acutely damaging the experiences of growing up in urban poverty is. And that's you, and again, you can measure that in the traditional ways. You can measure that in the fact that young people can't earn a daily income with which they can s can eat that night. It's um you can measure it in the fact that young men can't afford to get married and young men women don't want to marry them because they don't have a stable job and that affects their ability to become seen as adults and kind of proper citizens in the community. There are so many dimensions that that I think the story is well known. But what I I found was actually to really understand the experiences of growing up in a city, you have to bring in sort of a developmental psychology lens to see what's happening to us as individuals at that phase in life and recognize that when you're growing up in the city surrounded by poverty, disadvantage, quite often violence, crime, insecurity, all of those kind of developmental skills and assets that we need to be fully functioning individuals that turn into sort of thriving adults, those are constrained because we don't have role models, we don't have stable families, we don't all of those things are missing.
SPEAKER_03It's so interesting and it r it reminds me, sorry, uh just of something I was reading recently about child soldiers in in Uganda, in northern Uganda, and there's a lot of research on those long-term effects of being a child soldier, and obviously a lot of trauma at that developmental stage. And we don't always apply that same lens to people who've grown up in a different kind of crisis often, with like a lot of violence sometimes, very limited access to services at that key period of life. I should add as well for listeners that Nikki was the um led on the youth and capability development domain within the African Cities Research Consortium's foundation phase, and there's a report summarising across different cities that that work on youth.
SPEAKER_01I was also thinking actually, and I'm sure you've already spoken with each other, but it reminds me of the conversation we had with Sarah Marie Hall last episode where we're talking about youth futures and austerity and the effective and emotional dimensions of growing up waiting in the kind of wake of all of these crises. Very different contexts, but a similar kind of issue. I mean I think you've given us a lot of threads that we can pull through the rest of the conversation already. There's this idea about how we need to move away from individual responsibilisation of particular groups and particular individuals, assuming that one person's experience might be replicated without understanding the benefits, the networks, the capital that they can draw on to make their own way. You've talked about demographics, obviously, and the importance of the kind of youth voice and the youth perspective, and really how we need to understand localisation and locally led development approaches from all of these different dimensions, including that emotional effective dimension, in order to be able to have a good understanding of what's required on the ground. And I guess that's what's led you to your very strong critique of the managerialist underpinnings of the age chain and the way that power and resources are kept at the top, where the granularity of people's life experiences and what they need and how it works simply isn't visible. Um and I know you've recently published an article in World Development, which I think has got a great name on the long road to systemic change in the aid sector. So I just wanted to hear a bit more really about how your work on locally led development uh from Dhaka, from Uganda, from Tanger, has uh like led you to this critique.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Um Thank you, Beth. Uh so alongside that urban research, I kind of got drawn into this kind of research around the NGO and charity sector in particular, although framing that within the big the bigger aid chain, because you can't look at it independent of the aid chain, um, quite serendipitously. It was never like a deliberate choice to follow these two tracks, but it's definitely all been shaped and run alongside to bring to bring together in this way. Um so my earlier research in this area was definitely just around the typical academic critique of look, what's this is the system we have, this is clearly not working because we've decided that the whole logic of this system of aid can only been be delivered through very professional means, through through very professional organizations, through very easy-to-measure, universal solutions that can be cut and paste no matter where you are in the world. I think any of us that's worked on the ground in these communities, whether we're exploring the efficiency of aid or not, we understand that both individuals and communities are so different from one other another. We recognize that we can come into a community and we won't understand that community for months, if not years. It's you see the real story of change and what's happening on the ground only through that long exposure. So this idea that you can come in from the outside, design these perfect projects that might work in Dhaka but might also work in Tanzania, in um Dar es Salaam, seems just wrong. Um it's also kind of when you look at it from that southern perspective, from the community perspective, it's just not right. So nobody will respect that the community is the one living and experiencing these phenomena and have the best solutions, but can't access the funding that they need on the right terms to address them. They have to fit their priorities into what the donors want. They have to spend more time reporting on what they're doing with their money than actually doing the work on the ground with the communities. It's a completely different skill set. And we're funding the skill set that is pulling community organizations away from the work they want and need to be doing. Um so that that was kind of a a long-term project, and what became clear was that things just weren't changing. What's changed since I first started doing this research is now that aid and the charity sectors are speaking the language of change. So localization came to the fore in 2016, um, at the same time as the idea of locally led development, both very similar concepts, um, but one for the humanitarian sector, one for development broadly, but both recognizing that we can approve the efficiency and the ability of our aid funding to do better over the long term, if we can get funding directly to local and national actors. Um, around the same time, we also had the shift the power movement, which was asking, but from the bottom-up perspective, you guys need to be accountable to us. You need to give us the decision-making power as well as the financial resources that we need to be able to do the work we need to do for our communities. So over a 10-year period, we've been talking about this more than anything in the sector. And this is before the crisis. I'll talk come to that soon. Um, but nobody really knew what was going on in practice. We could we could measure it, uh, like how much of so there was a the there was a commitment but in the grand bargain that all of the big multilateral and bilateral um actors suggested that we should be spending 25% of all of our humanitarian funding directly to local and national actors. So we can measure it against the target. Um, and even there the story is not rosy. So in 2024, which is the latest figures, it was um somewhere between 9 and 10% we've reached. And that's come down from about 10.5% the year before. So we're actually doing worse than we were to begin with, and we're nowhere near that target after a decade.
SPEAKER_01Just in the UK, when you say we, we're doing international humanitarian funds.
SPEAKER_03So that's only 9 or 10 percent of funds that go through major NGOs actually end up in country, or or is it aid overall? Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02It is humanitarian funding in specific this one. That's where we're where we're measuring it against. But that will be all of the humanitarian agencies, the multilaterals, the bilaterals, and the charities.
SPEAKER_03So over 90 percent is basically saying out of the country.
SPEAKER_02Yes. So some of the money that goes some of the money that is intermediate intermediated will eventually trickle down. Uh a small proportion of it. That's part of the problem.
SPEAKER_01It's a vast amount.
SPEAKER_02It's a vast amount. Um So yes, that was just just wrong. Um And then we we also realised that we didn't have much of a picture of what was changing as more and more charities, more and more organizations were speaking the language of locally led development, what's actually changing on the ground. So that world development came out of a beautiful collaboration between myself and researchers in the Netherlands, Uganda, and Ghana. And we did a mix of kind of qualitative research in Uganda and Ghana around programs that were trying to shift the power. And then a survey across the global north and south that was asking people what they were doing, what was changing, what was not changing. And I think the overall findings were also quite bleak. Like it's not for a lack of good intentions. People are talking the talk, but they're not walking the walk. They can't walk the walk of locally led development because they are little cogs in a very big, it's not even a sh a machine, it's a very big industry that is it will not let go of that managerial logic and that language of risk. Um to speak the language of sh locally led development requires a completely different organizing logic and it requires a level of trust. Doesn't require letting go of accountability, it requires new forms of accountability through relationships rather than um strict.
SPEAKER_03So on that rather depressing and bleak note, we can that's a good point to move into the much more positive story we want to tell, which is about One World Together, which uh so this critique led you to set up with a co-founder of this organization. So I wonder if you could tell us more what is One World Together and what are the principles behind the approach.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Of course, I would be delighted to. So somewhere in in this kind of um last five to ten years, I also did another one of those little side projects that just was a bit of interest on the side, but turned out to be this really kind of light bulb moment for me. Um, because we mapped the UK's development charity sector. So we wanted to know we we know how big it is by the biggest organizations, but it's much more complex than that. There are hundreds of organizations from the tiny right up to the hundreds of millions. So we wanted to understand the picture and the sectoral mechanics, where the income was coming from. And one of the many interesting findings that came out of that was there is a solution that nobody is speaking to yet, because it's not actually the government funding that props up the UK charity sector. It's that government funding that has kind of created the language and logic through which the charity sector works. But the biggest funder is actually the UK public. Um so this was before the pandemic, the figures went up to 2015, but at that point we were giving £2 billion a year on average to development charities. So charities based in the UK but working international charities.
SPEAKER_01So direct individuals giving directly to international charities.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and that's 40% of the whole sector's income. And I think the government funding might have been around 70% in comparison. So there was just this moment of, well, that's the solution right there. Because we as the public, when we give to a charity, we do that because we believe in the cause. We trust that that charity is spending the money in the best way to meet that cause. And we don't ask for a complicated report or a log frame analysis every every six months or every year. We just think, right, they're good, they're the right people to get on with it. So there was this question what if we could get even of a fraction of that two billion pounds a year directly to the community level? That's not happening. So you you the one thing, so we have I've talked about all of this data and this being able to track how much money reaches local and national activities. The one place you can't do that is at the charity level distinguishing between where private giving goes when it comes to the charity.
SPEAKER_01I was going to ask whether that was included in the 90% not reaching its destination.
SPEAKER_02So you can look at a big charity's website and they'll say every pound that you spend, 40 pence will be spent on development projects and 40% will be spent on humanitarian projects. We won't tell you where. But there was a very interesting piece by Oxfam's latest, uh last executive director quite recently, around the FCDO Global Partnerships Conference. She published something that said, is it right that a UK charity is spending £120 million on fundraising in the UK with the principle that most of that money will be spent on jobs here in the UK? So charities are leaning into the aid crisis primarily to keep things functioning as they are here. So of that ATP of programs, most of it will be spent in the UK and only a fraction of it will reach the ground. So One World Together is, I think we've just started with this simple idea of, well, we know these amazing community organizations because one of the greatest privileges we have as researchers is seeing change on the ground and what might lead to new change, new ideas, new futures. And we know that there's trust and belief and hope from the public in terms of giving. So why can't we connect those things? So One World Together is us trying to offer that new form of intermediation for people's generosity. People can give as little as £1.25 a month to us because we recognise that actually what this is going to take is a large number of us giving a small amount to build that better future. And we pull all of those donations and we just literally every every quarter we give it out to these four brilliant partners. One of them is Community Savers here in Manchester, because as you know very well, even better than me, they do incredible work fighting for their communities and fighting for more inclusive forms of development here in Manchester. We've got a sort of a sister organization, Mangano Wawanava Gigi, who I'm sure have also been on your podcast, who are doing equally incredible transformative work in Nairobi and across Kenya. So we've we've got two of these more social movements approach of communities mobilizing, communities identifying their own problems, communities recognizing the futures they want to see and what they need to do to get there. And then we also fund two more sort of traditional charities working with young people, but going above and beyond your typical, we're going to train you and then set you off into the world and hope you get a job. They provide mental health support, they provide childcare vouchers, they provide mentorship. So they're putting in place all of the conditions that you need to overcome what I'd seen before as the kind of problems with charity, which is just give them training and they will get a job.
SPEAKER_03Where are they based?
SPEAKER_02Um Raising Futures Kenya is run by Cedar Hope Training Centre in Nairobi. Um and then Play It Forward are in Livingston, Zambia, and they use football as a powerful force for change.
SPEAKER_01Well we want to come on to that on the second, don't we?
SPEAKER_03The context of it will be.
SPEAKER_01It is the time. It is the time. But I was just so you said £1.25. And this is given by direct and individual. So I actually meant to do it before the podcast was to change some of my direct debits around. I haven't signed up yet. Confession, everybody, but I will. Right. So one pound. Accountability is real. By the end of this podcast, we will all be So £1.25 leaves my bank account.
SPEAKER_03Um, I mean there's a 125, the bare minimum. Yeah, I'm gonna go for 10.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm just gonna take pounds for bank. Okay, I'm just saying this this is what you're asking for on the website. 125, you know, less than a pint of beer. Um, much less. Uh and um you then pool it together in the Solidarity Fund, distribute it to partners, and there's no top slicing. As much as possible goes out as it can, but you must have some sort of infrastructure. So there is can't do it all with no one, can you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, we very deliberately designed it to keep our operational costs lean and to build in the prospect of financial account uh financial sustainability in the long term. Because otherwise, as we are right now, we're locked into that same cycle of looking for grant funding. So, what the model is is for those monthly donations come in. Um, One World Together keeps 17%, which is the equivalent of two months in every year for our operational costs. But 10 months, every single penny goes into the Solidarity Fund and is given without restrictions that say this is what you must do with the funds to our partners. So we've got a as we get bigger and more people join us, we'll be able to reduce that 17% down to one month's donations.
SPEAKER_01But but for now that's that's how we And I can see that, sorry, that there's obviously a very pragmatic innovation here in terms of identifying a problem and then fixing the problem. And I'm just wondering as an academic as well, going back to some of your previous work, is there a conceptual innovation here as well in terms of how you're thinking about charitable giving in the context of urban poverty reduction?
SPEAKER_02So I think what we're doing is two things, and they're both innovative. One is the kind of the the new system, the new infrastructure that just connects generosity with um communities around the world. So building the mechanics and the infrastructure for genuinely community-led development. But the other, and I I I'll say we I don't think we've got this right yet, the other is that we truly believe that what we're doing is returning to this innate sense of rediscovering what gener generosity is. Like innate in all of us is the need to be part of a community. And as we have become a very individualistic society, we've lost sight of that. We might still give to charity, but the charity system has also cultured us into believing that the transaction is is what counts. Um and it it kind of sees the hero as yourself as doing your bit of good by donating and and solving the problem. But what we're trying to build is this recognition that that it's the solidarity that matters as much, if not more, than the finance, because it's the recognition that we are all in this big world together and that we all care for each other, because that that is, if you look across all of our partners, we've got these beautiful blogs from our community building summit where we were all together in Nairobi a few months ago. And underneath all four partners, what the Solidarity Fund is converted to is hundreds and then thousands of acts of care. Because the flexibility of those funds lets our partners respond to every individual needs as they go along. Um so yeah, the the the finance is just is just getting to the place where it can have the most impact. And I think when you start seeing it like that, you you see a different aspect to generosity. It's not about the money, it's about bringing us all together in this shared sense of humanity. Um so that that's what we're trying to do, and we haven't found the right way of doing it yet.
SPEAKER_03Um why do you say that, Savan, just that you haven't found the right way? You mean like society hasn't, the world hasn't, although One World Together is still refining its approach?
SPEAKER_02I think it's a there's a lot of mixes there. One is that you're speaking a totally different language to what we've heard before from the kind of traditional charity way. Um there is so much evidence that says to do effective fundraising, you have to speak with urgency. You have to talk about somebody's life is going to end if you don't give money now. And we're telling a very different story, which is we need to invest together so that the right actors can build real change, no matter how small, but scaling and connecting that up across the world. It's a very different, it's a very different concept that we're offering. And I think the problem we have is that we miss that urgency that says, sign up now. Um we've tried a couple of different things that have not had traction. We tried an online community space to bring everyone together, and we're finding it's really hard to create this sense of being and feeling and connection in a very modern world. So technology offers us a lot of advantages, but it's also really hard to.
SPEAKER_01And I mean it's really in the name, isn't it? One world together. And I think one of the things that's quite literally powerful about what you're talking about is that often when we think about charitable giving, we assume we might be empowering someone else, someone in a distant place where we maybe get a letter or a drawing from time to time. Um but actually we are also experiencing power within if we know what's happening to our money, where it's going, and how then we are part of that reciprocal process.
SPEAKER_03So, I mean, maybe it'd be helpful to go even more specifically, because you've given us a sense from talking about how you all got together in your summit and talking about how you know how the financial model works. But if we take one of your partners, and as it's World Cup season, let's let's talk about Play It Forward, your partner in Zambia. Uh, can you tell us a bit more about what that organization does, perhaps you know, why you chose them and what difference One World Together and your approach makes to what they do on the ground?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Um so Play It Forward are an incredible organization. They've actually got two arms to what they do. They have a football academy that brings young men and young women all the way down from childhood right up to young adulthood into football as a place for bringing people together. They've had amazing success. Um, three young women went to the World Cup and played for Zambia, under 17, I should say, um, last year. And only a week or two ago, the the senior boys made it into the Zambian National League. Wow. So they're coming from under it is incredible. They're coming from Livingston, not the capital city. A lot of the young people are growing up, not just in poverty, but an acute crisis. There's long-term drought, there's no electricity, there's large-scale hunger. Life is tough up there, but football is giving them a space to kind of really realize their dreams and and and fly quite literally. Um, so that's that's the kind of vehicle for kind of mobilising the whole community. But their sort of NGO arm is also using that as an entry point for a much range, much wider range of developmental needs. So homework, clubs, technology skills, development, working with the communities and parents, sexual and reproductive health, to try and sort of address some of the challenges of young motherhood, um, STDs, or these issues that come up time and time again with young people um living amidst poverty. Um so that that that is the the the kind of long-term developmental work which football helps to bring people in and around. Uh the Solidarity Funds are so powerful. Um so we were with Rebecca and O'Brien that leads Play It Forward um in May this year. And when you hear what when you hear them talk about what they do, it's not about football. They're talking about all of the the infrastructure of development that you need to put in place at the community level. So for every child that comes into one of their programs, they go and they'll go to the their household to do a vulnerability assessment. And they learn that apart from the meal that they get at the um at their training center, there's no other food that those children will eat that day. That and if they don't know that, then they can't put in place the care and the support that that children need in the classroom. Um so our solidarity funds, and I find it really shocking that I have to say this, because it took me completely by surprise. This is an incredible organization with with a a large budget. The programs that are hardest to fund, they're actually unfunded, are nutrition. So giving every single child that comes through their doors each day a meal is not paid for by your traditional partner. Is that what they've seen as core costs? I think it puts the price up. It's it's core costs. If you're trying to design a budget that is value for money, you kind of strip out these bits that actually are the magic that enable kids to stay in the not just stay in the classroom, but to actually learn while they're there. Um and then the other thing is educational books and materials that students aren't just going to class or dropping out. They they have what they need to learn. Um so the Solidarity Funds are are supporting those kind of, again, acts of care, providing the the kids with what they need to actually thrive. And another really important one, helping keep staff. So when you're young and growing up, you don't have lots of role models all the time. But a football coach is a huge social kind of asset for you. That's not the right language. Um but play it forward, we're losing coaches because um they were all kind of going to other jobs. So they could use our solidarity fund to up the salary level to retain staff. And that's not just retaining staff or giving people a job. That is like the continuity for young people of knowing that their trusted figure is still going to be there for the long term. That's really powerful.
SPEAKER_03Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And what's great about that is you can't imagine a northern NGO designing that into their program and judging it to be important or their board saying, yes, we should give a little salary top up. But you know because that organization has said themselves, this is the best use of this small amount of money that will make a big difference.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr.: When we have so many different dimensions to injustice on the ground, or I know when you think about as you do in ACRC, the city as a system, actually it's only local people who know which thread to pull at which moment in time that might unravel some form of inequality. And that can be very different in different communities. So I mean it's why if you look at my CV, I don't always make sense, because I've done projects on food and I've done projects on cultural heritage and I've done projects on transport. It's like, why? Who is who am I? It's because those are the things that make sense at that moment in time. And so when you put unrestricted funds on the table, someone can say, well, we want food projects, which is what Arbathorne, who are trying to learn from community savers, are going for. Or you can say, well, no, we need a football coach or a solar panel, which I've heard you talk about before in another podcast. I mean, this is obviously a really innovative model. Um and we are at a particular juncture with the reduction of international aid and all of the different things we see that's going on around the world, including the increase in defence spending. So in some ways that presents an opportunity for an innovation like One World Together, because these traditional approaches are largely discredited. Um but I presume there's also some challenges because perhaps your model might be seized on as an excuse to reduce funding. Um so I'm just wondering, what do you see as the opportunities and challenges of the current post-development context in relation to your work?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, it's a really good question. I think the most I mean the most dangerous thing about the vast reduction in in funding is is what hap- what crises happens as a result. I think a lot of that is happening in the north, and that's where you're hearing actually the biggest stories of doom and gloom. Um amongst all of the networks that I'm part of of Southern NGOs, there's a lot more talk of hope. There's a lot more talk of this is a reset point, this is an opportunity, this is where we can actually say, let's start again and let's design what's new and what works for us. So I think I we at One World Together definitely lean into that kind of this is a space for hope and opportunity. That doesn't mean that I think it's going to be easy. There's a reason that we have built One World Together outside of the existing aid system because it is fundamentally flawed. So in that sense, I do recognize that this is not the right thing to happen at this right moment, and there will never be a right moment to completely roll back our commitments to a better world. Um, but yeah, it it's not working. We do need an alternative. Um We did a calculation that for all of the money that UK aid has cut, it would take every adult, every working age person in the country, eight pounds. Eight pounds a month to one world together, and we can get that money directly to the community level so that it's funding the kids absolutely 360 degrees wraparound care to help them into the next stage of life. All of that money directly to the communities fighting for change and fighting for the cities that they that they want to see in the future. Um that is a real opportunity that that's what we're aiming for, which is yeah, we we we have been reliant on these systems and in institutions for so long that we haven't realized that they're not even serving us. But actually what we need is new systems and new services that and that's what we're trying to build at One World Together.
SPEAKER_03I mean it is really interesting because it is a it is a such a key juncture in so many ways. It's obviously a it's it's positive and exciting that it is a reset point and people are having to be much more creative and so on. But then at the same time, I guess what's hard is that people in the rich countries in the global north are still paying a lot of tax, uh, you know, or whatever, if not more, just less of it's going to aid, they're being squeezed by economic crisis, and we have these narratives that are very quite kind of nationalistic and so in a sense there's like an opportunity opening up, but like getting people to give is a challenge. And so I also wanted to ask you that in relation to scaling, because you've described this very um, you know, this beautiful model uh that that that is so compelling in its simplicity and its efficacy, working with this small number of organizations. But I guess one of the challenges is that for people who, whether it's because of the urgency of the message or because rightly or wrongly they trust the brand of Oxfam or Amnesty International, um, and they think, oh, I'll give that money. And you obviously choose your partners carefully, but the more and more you have, there's that question of do people know that those organizations will use it? Well, do you have to kind of keep track of what they're doing to convince your public of what they're going to? And that creates more of an administrative burden, then it's harder to give all that money away. So the more you scale up, I guess, the harder it is to maintain that only 17% stays in your operations, or perhaps not?
SPEAKER_02I mean, my like our calculations are all that you you'll you'll always, as you go in scale, require more to keep yourself going. So we're managing four partners, we we meet um quarterly all together. One of those every year, every year we're going to bring in our global citizens, our supporters, so that they can actually learn, get to know the partners and kind of feel that change and understand where their money's going. Um so uh as we have eight and then twelve and twenty, fifty, a hundred, it will require more infrastructure. But I don't believe it will require exponential we never.
SPEAKER_03It could be a economy of scale where you actually could even spend less.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and we're trying to build in the processes where we can use AI efficiently for kind of some of the reporting and the kind of stories for change. Like we there's things that you can do to try and minimize that button.
SPEAKER_03Minimize it. It's a good point actually about AI. It's a good that would be a good use of AI, right? Because you're not trying to create lots of jobs in the in the UK. That's not what you need.
SPEAKER_02We are actively pushing against it. Like we know so at the moment, like just for transparency, our operating costs are like £45,000 a year. That's not enough. Like we o it's mainly run, it's it's led and managed by two people on a voluntary basis, and we have two very part-time, brilliant staff. It's not enough yet. Um But we never we're never going to be designing prob programs, ever. Like that's not our job. We literally want to be a connector of finance and a storyteller of change, but drawing on our partner's story. So they're already doing their storytelling. So there's so much- We're an amplifier, we're a connector, but we're not a doer. Um so the the scaling will always have most of the funding reaching the community level for sure.
SPEAKER_03And presumably that I mean, just uh also on the scaling issue, that storytelling as well, is part of how you get more organizations involved as well as more donations. So, you know, this is a big part of urban development and community development is how communities learn from each other, how you kind of build that sense of what you're doing. I mean, do you have a whole range of organizations that you could just scale up to if you had the finance? Is or is it are there other blockers to scaling?
SPEAKER_02No, we I mean we we have to like I think the hardest thing, so we have a big network of incredible organizations. We also want our network of supporters to be able to share the organizations that they know and love so that we can build a collective process. The hardest part is gonna be how do you choose? In a context where we're not telling organizations they have to work in youth development or they have to work in climate change, that's gonna be our hardest.
SPEAKER_01And are you also gonna have any kind of limit on donations? I mean, just we rather opportunistically linked this. To kind of political donations at the beginning. No, but there's an active debate at the moment over when you become too reliant on any one funder. So your current model of micro donations means that the reciprocal power benefits, if we look at it as a two-way relationship, actually accrue quite equally across all of your global citizens and all of your partners. Whereas if you become reliant on any one partner, you suddenly have questions of attribution and causality, and then obviously that's beginning to skew the kind of model. So would you actively resist, say, we have another more philanthropic Christopher Harborn type character who's listening to the podcast wanting to give you five million? You know, would you say, well, no, because it gives you too much power? No. Because the whole model depends on micro. Yeah, yeah. So our belief AR yes crypto.
SPEAKER_02Our belief is that this is an ecosystem that we're building. Um if there is someone out there with five million pounds that would like to endow that to One World Together, that creates us an endowment that could then provide the infrastructure for a long time. It wouldn't change who we are. It would give us the stability that we needed to build and grow and scale. So we would never say no to significant funding that could help future proof One World Together. We would, of course, research where it came from and make sure that it has been come from a place of love and fairness and all of those kinds of things. But The model has been designed for that explicit point. We we cannot build for the future in ways that place kind of solved forms of income or power or control over the future. That that's actively what we are trying to push against. So for us, the the model of micro donations at scale, that's where our power is. That's not to diminish the people with larger forms of larger forms of wealth and equally large forms of generosity. That counts too.
SPEAKER_01Maybe the patriotic millionaires could do something.
SPEAKER_02It's not one or the other. One world together, it takes all of us doing our bit. So affordability for one person is £1.25. Affordability for another person is much higher than that. So we just all need to ask ourselves, what can we do to build that world that we want to see?
SPEAKER_03Nikki, it's been an absolute delight to have you on. How can people get involved? So if listeners want to sign up, they want to know more, please tell us.
SPEAKER_02Oh well, it's very simple. You can head over down to oneworldtogether.org.uk and um sign up for your donation today. We would love to welcome you down to the community. Brilliant. Thank you.
SPEAKER_03Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Thank you.
SPEAKER_03Well, I really, really enjoyed that conversation. Uh you know, I've obviously I've known Nikki for a very long time and um we've known about One World Together for a long time. But you know, you have you have these conversations that are different when you're when you're on the podcast and someone's sitting over there and you're you're trying to explore how it relates to their trajectory and where they got to that point. And yeah, so many things that are interesting. I mean, one is just how timely this all is in terms of shifts in the aid sector. Um and Nikki mentioned this, you know, but obviously this idea of localization has been around for such a long time. But it's just come back in a new form in the context of cuts in aid. So, you know, the current Minister for Development, the current government has this new approach to development, which is about there's four mantras. I don't know if you've heard that. So it's from international intervention to local leadership or something. It's from service delivery to systems support, it's from grants to expertise, and it's what's the other one? Donor to investor. Now we could talk quite a lot about all of those, but basically it's all about, you know, beyond aid. It's partly also about supporting UK interests. But it's also like a mixed bag, though.
SPEAKER_01It's a real mixed bag. Some of those things sound like they would align really well with the kind of principles that people like Nikki have and others sound like particularly donor to investor, what's actually happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03So it's quite interesting to think of it in that in that context. I also have some concerns about how the term local is used, because actually they often simply mean uh, you know, national governments making decisions rather than us making them for them, but actually really local leadership. Yeah. Which is what Nikki's talking about and what we we often talk about. Not just like local as in like an African national government makes a decision. You know, that that's often not on people's radars. Um the the kind of really local priorities. And that comes through so strongly here. Uh I think also Yeah, just hearing about the work those kind of charities do really locally. And the way that Nikki talks about, you know, she used the words generosity several times, which I thought was interesting. She's obviously the principle, the founding principle is to correct connect people's generosity, primarily in the north, in richer countries, to um the priorities of local organizations. I mean, it makes perfect sense. But you know, generosity doesn't get talked about very much. People sometimes talk about obligation or charity or responsibility when I feel like that because the whole uh language of aid and the idea of charity is so out of fashion, you know, for for very reasonable reasons uh in many cases, that we don't often hear people come out and say, you know, it it matters to be generous. And people are generous, and they could be directing that generosity better. And I think that's an important point to actually not lose sight of.
SPEAKER_01I mean, it reminds me of a couple of conversations we've had in the Urban Institute with colleagues recently, um, thinking of a conversation with Yannis Kalianos about the idea of the gift and what an urban gift actually is, when it doesn't involve that sense of obligation that you are giving something in order to have some sort of expected reciprocal relationship. And I think that speaks to generosity. I'm also thinking of Anne Kit Kumar's work on uh love and actually how do we think about love within these kinds of relationships? Because actually the way in which we think about our world and whether we are one world together is always based on these transactional relationships. But if you take something like climate justice or climate injustice, we really need to understand how what we choose to do in our lives impacts the lives of others and what they might then choose to do. And so all of these kinds of concepts around reciprocity, uh, gift, generosity, love, you know, they're really important in actually trying to change how we think about all of our relationships to each other.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, definitely. It is really interesting to have these kind of words. You know, you I picked up on that another podcast where you're like, oh, we don't hear that word very much. People don't use that word when they're talking about community development or international development. And it it signifies something very different, coming from a very different place. And that and that's you know, obviously calling it the Solidarity Fund, making this point that it's about mobilising solidarity on a massive scale, not funding from people who have lots of money.
SPEAKER_01You know, it's it's really like And we only touched on it a little bit towards the end, but that idea of um uh ha what the reporting actually looks like was kind of intrigued to hear her say maybe just use AI. Because if you have micro donations that are supporting acts of care that are determined by the community themselves, then all you need back to know that your money is being well spent, if you need that at all, if you don't have trust, is stories of hope. You don't need the sort of real granular accounting of multiplier effects on this or that or numbers of people who have been lifted out of poverty in this way or the other, because what you have is a trusted relationship where you are investing, uh to use that word loosely, in long-term capacity and long-term solidarity.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I think I mean one of one of the things I would want to pick up a little bit more had we more time to talk about it was in a way to go back to what Nikki was saying near the beginning, where she was talking about her insights into urban poverty uh in Bangladesh and Uganda and elsewhere, and how you know capacitating individuals and giving small amounts is never going to change, and I think as people are part of much more challenging structures and systems. And that's I think where some of the difficulty lies, uh both in scaling up and in sort of really for for I guess the public who who who who they need to donate, to see that bigger picture of change. Because one of the things I would want to find out more about is how this sits with the politics of change and sustained reform really in those cities. So this is obviously something we think about in ACRC, working through similar kinds of organizations. Like what does it actually mean to give that in that context? Is it going to result in some small improvement uh temporarily, or is it gonna shift the dial in terms of how people view these communities or these activities and how uh people can overcome those structural inequalities to come back to that?
SPEAKER_01I mean just on the question of structural inequalities, one of the other things that maybe we would have talked about had we had more time was around universities as locations for these kinds of innovations, because Nikki said very clearly that you couldn't do this kind of work from within the existing international aid system. But arguably it's also quite hard to do this from within universities. It requires these kinds of spin-out innovations. But universities certainly here are also turning to philanthropy and the idea of trying to solicit financial gifts in order to keep going as our funding dwindles. So, you know, there's a there's an increased pressure on gift giving, and you mentioned this towards the end as well.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and I think that's a real challenge, you know. I've had other conversations with Nikki where, you know, if she it's frustrating because she has other roles within the university, very senior ones, you know, in the in the department and institute and do some great stuff with students actually.
SPEAKER_01We didn't get onto that at all.
SPEAKER_03And like all academics, she has a she has a serious workload, right? And so I think the university, you know, she has she has been recognised. This work is is is been recognized and and people really appreciate it. But you know, if she just had the time to go and meet with all these different organisations, to do go around every university in the country and recruit students, I'm sure she would. But it's difficult.
SPEAKER_01As you know, this is this is part of my research, and I'm hoping that we might be able to um talk about this a bit more in October when we finalise one of our report reports on co-production. But I think the problem is that, and this isn't about Manchester per se, but you know, our universities often give us awards to recognise what we're doing, but that's to sort of celebrate and raise the profile of it without necessarily investing in us as individuals to help us do it without getting burnt out. And of course, you know, Nikki was the most hopeful and optimistic and joyful person to have on the podcast. But these are realities of doing this kind of work. It's really hard, and we need our institutions to get behind us much more seriously in order to do it well.
SPEAKER_03Well, hopefully they're all listening to this, Beth, and uh we'll all get phone calls.
SPEAKER_01I'm quite sure that the senior leadership at both our universities are tuned in to Urban Radar.
SPEAKER_03Thanks for listening, guys. See you soon.
SPEAKER_01See you soon. Bye.