Before You Monetise – What Your Donor Agreement Says
By Dr Lucille Abruquah
The Honest Starting Point – It Depends on the Agreement
I want to be direct about something: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Every donor agreement is different, and the only way to know exactly what you can and cannot do with project knowledge is to read your specific agreement or ask your programme officer directly.
But after looking into how the major funders most of you work with actually handle this, I can give you a realistic picture of what tends to be true and exactly what to check before you build a paid product from donor-funded knowledge.
What This Looks Like With Former USAID Funding
USAID, as most of you know, no longer exists in its original form. The agency was shuttered in early 2025, and for many West African nonprofits, the closure was abrupt: contracts were terminated overnight, programmes were wound down under pressure, and staff were let go in circumstances nobody had planned for.
If your organisation had active USAID funding before the closure, the data rights question doesn’t disappear with the agency; it just shifts.
The question is no longer “what does my USAID agreement say about data?” It is “what does my termination agreement say?”
Termination agreements, the documents that governed how your contract ended, often contain clauses about what happens to project data, deliverables, and intellectual property after the relationship closes. In the chaos of closure, the fine print is rarely the first thing anyone reads. Most organisations were focused on people, programmes, and communities, as they should have been.
But if you are now considering packaging, selling, or brokering knowledge that came from a USAID-funded project, that termination agreement is worth finding and reading carefully.
As for organisations entering new US government funding arrangements, bilateral agreements negotiated directly with the State Department or through successor programmes, the data rights landscape is still emerging. These agreements are being negotiated with minimal public disclosure, and their terms are not yet well-documented across the sector. Until clearer guidance exists, the same principle applies: read what you signed, and ask before you act.
The practical takeaway that holds regardless of which US funding arrangement you had: Even where a funder has rights over raw data, your analysis, interpretation, and expertise regarding that data is typically yours. The dataset may be part of the agreement. What you learned from it and what you can teach others about it usually doesn’t.
What This Looks Like With EU Funding
EU funding is more varied, and it depends heavily on which type of EU grant you have. If you’re working under an EU research and innovation grant, the general principle is actually more favourable to you: results generally belong to the organisation that produced them, with an obligation to disseminate and grant fellow project partners access, not to hand ownership to the EU itself.
But most of you are not working under research grants; you’re working under EU development cooperation grants, and those typically don’t follow one single EU-wide policy. Instead, the specific terms are written directly into your individual grant contract. This means there is no shortcut here. The visibility requirements, reporting obligations, and any restrictions on the reuse of project materials will be set out in the specific agreement you signed, not in a general EU policy you can look up.
The practical takeaway: pull out your specific EU grant agreement and look for the sections on “visibility,” “dissemination,” and “intellectual property” or “results.” That’s where your real answer lives.
What This Looks Like With Foundation Funding
Foundations (Co-Impact, King Baudouin Foundation, Gates Foundation, and similar) generally don’t publish a single overarching data or IP policy the way USAID used to. Instead, this is almost always governed entirely by the individual grant agreement you signed with that specific foundation.
This is both simpler and harder. Simpler, because there’s no large bureaucratic policy to decode. Harder, because there’s no shortcut; you genuinely have to read your specific agreement, because foundation terms vary widely from one funder to the next and sometimes from one grant to the next within the same foundation.
The Five Things to Check Before You Monetise Anything
Regardless of which donor funded the work, go back to the original grant agreement and look for clauses covering these five things before you package, sell, or broker any project-derived knowledge.
• Data ownership and rights. Does the agreement say who owns the data your project collected? Does the donor have the right to obtain, publish, or reuse it? This is the single most important clause to find.
• Publication and dissemination requirements. Many agreements require donor approval before you publish project-related materials externally or require specific branding and acknowledgement. Check whether you need sign-off before turning a project into a case study, a course, or a report.
• Confidentiality and beneficiary data protection. This sits entirely separate from donor rights. Consent that beneficiaries gave for the original project purpose does not automatically extend to secondary commercial use of their data or stories. This matters regardless of what the donor agreement says.
• Restrictions on commercial use. Look specifically for language about “commercialisation,” “exploitation,” or “for-profit use” of project outputs. Some agreements say nothing about this; others explicitly restrict it.
• Attribution and branding obligations. Many agreements require continued donor acknowledgement even after the project ends, if you reference or reuse project-related knowledge later. Check how long that obligation lasts; some are indefinite.
When in Doubt, Ask, Don’t Assume
Here is the simplest, lowest-risk move available to you: send your programme officer a short, direct email.
Something like: “We’re exploring ways to use anonymised, aggregated learnings from this project for a training programme / publication / consulting offer. Could you confirm whether our agreement allows this, or point me to the relevant clause?”
This single email does three things. It protects you from a compliance misstep, signals to the donor that you are a careful, trustworthy organisation, exactly the kind of signal we have spent eighteen issues talking about and, more often than people expect, it opens a door. Donors are frequently supportive of grantees building sustainability through their own knowledge, especially when asked directly and professionally.
Donors generally respond well to organisations that ask rather than assume. The organisations that get into trouble are rarely the ones who asked an awkward question; they are the ones who never asked at all.
And if you are sitting with your specific agreement right now, genuinely unsure how to read a clause or what it means for your plans, that is exactly the kind of question we work through together in a Beyond the Grant strategy call. Interpreting your own agreement is sometimes the hardest part, and a second, experienced pair of eyes can save you months of uncertainty.
Final Thought
Everything we explored before about mobilising resources from your knowledge still holds true. Your data, expertise, case studies, evidence – these remain genuine assets, and the funding contraction happening across the sector makes activating them more urgent, not less.
But assets come with terms. Reading those terms before you build is not caution for its own sake; it is the same discipline that makes TRACE and PROVE work in the first place. You don’t skip the documentation step because it’s inconvenient, and you don’t skip the agreement review step either.
Do the check, send the email if you need to and then build with confidence, knowing exactly what ground you’re standing on.
Going Forward – Negotiate What You Can and Know What to Ask for
Understanding your existing agreements is step one. Shaping your future ones is step two.
As African nonprofits build stronger knowledge assets, better evidence systems, richer data, and more distinctive methodologies, the question of who owns what at the end of a grant relationship becomes increasingly important and yet most organisations sign grant agreements without ever raising it.
That needs to change.
Some funders, particularly large institutional donors like the EU, work from standard template agreements with limited flexibility. Their terms are largely fixed and negotiating them significantly is rarely realistic, especially for smaller organisations without significant leverage. Know this going in and focus your energy where it can actually move.
Other funders, particularly private foundations, corporate donors, and increasingly some bilateral arrangements, have more flexibility than most organisations realise. The template is a starting point, not a ceiling and organisations that come to the table with a clear, reasonable ask are often taken more seriously, not less.
When you have room to negotiate, here is where to start:
Ask for a clause that distinguishes between raw project data, which the donor may have rights to and your organisation’s analysis, methodology, and learning, which should remain yours to use, publish, and build on.
That single distinction protects your most commercially valuable knowledge assets while respecting the donor’s legitimate interest in the data their funding generated. It is not an unreasonable ask; it is a professional one, the kind that signals you understand the value of what you produce and intend to steward it responsibly.
The organisations that will build the most sustainable income streams from their knowledge are not just the ones that document well and deliver consistently. They are the ones who, from the very first grant agreement, begin to think of their knowledge as an asset worth protecting.
That thinking starts at the negotiating table. Not after the contract is signed.
(Dr Lucille Abruquah is a Ghanaian sustainable development expert, Adjunct Lecturer and Director of Grants Development at Nobel International Business University, and Grants Specialist at the Ghana International School. Subscribe to her The Systems Edge newsletter for more thought leadership insights on funding and fundraising issues)
