Why Unrestricted Funding Alone Won’t Build Civil Society Resilience
By Moulaye Camara
There is an important funding reform conversation happening across international development right now. The argument is familiar: civil society organisations have spent too long trapped in restricted project-funding cycles, and the solution is to increase unrestricted funding so organisations can operate more strategically rather than constantly adapting to donor priorities.
The Trust-Based Philanthropy movement has helped push that conversation forward in meaningful ways. And I do not believe the argument is wrong. However, it is incomplete because unrestricted funding alone does not solve an institutional systems problem.
Over the past thirty years, working with civil society organisations across Africa, Asia, and fragile-state environments, I have observed something consistently:
The organisations that can effectively absorb and deploy flexible funding are usually those that already possess strong governance systems, operational discipline, financial visibility, and institutional infrastructure. They have treasury management structures, not simply bank accounts. They have financial policies that survive staff turnover. They have functioning board oversight, internal controls, audit readiness, succession planning, and operational coordination systems that were built deliberately over time, not assembled reactively during donor reporting periods.
In other words, they possess institutional resilience before the funding arrives.
Organisations that struggle with unrestricted funding often do so because of underlying infrastructure. And there are many examples.
Give flexibility to an institution without systems, and you have not necessarily empowered it. In some cases, you may have exposed operational fragilities that already existed beneath the surface. When governance failures, financial irregularities, or institutional breakdowns emerge later, they are often interpreted as evidence that localisation itself does not work. But many of these failures are not fundamentally localisation failures. They are infrastructure failures.
The more important funding question
This is why I increasingly believe the sector may be asking the wrong question. The central question is not simply:
“How much of our funding is restricted versus unrestricted?”
The more important question is:
“Do the organisations we fund possess the institutional infrastructure required to manage either type responsibly and sustainably?”
Because if the answer is no, and across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, the answer is often still no, then the funding mechanism itself becomes secondary. What many organisations need first is sustained investment in the systems that make all funding productive.
That includes:
- Governance structures that do not depend entirely on a single founder;
- Fiscal management systems built for complexity;
- Operational risk frameworks;
- Internal controls;
- Board oversight mechanisms;
- Institutional reporting systems;
- Policies that can withstand leadership transitions and staff turnover.
None of these things is especially glamorous. They rarely appear in programme photographs, beneficiary metrics, or donor storytelling campaigns. But without them, even the most flexible funding arrangement in the world may struggle to produce long-term institutional resilience.
What responsible institutional investment looks like
The most transformative investment many foundations, multilaterals, and impact-focused funders could make in African civil society today may not simply be larger unrestricted grants. It may be a sustained investment in the institutional infrastructure that enables organisations to manage complexity, responsibly absorb flexible funding, and sustain operational continuity over time.
That requires a different kind of patience. It requires recognising that institutional resilience compounds slowly. An organisation with strong governance systems, operational discipline, financial visibility, and credible leadership capacity does not simply deliver one successful programme.
Over time, it attracts co-investment, retains institutional knowledge, develops future sector leaders, strengthens donor confidence, and becomes capable of surviving leadership transitions without organisational collapse. That is part of the institutional challenge that eventually led me to rethink infrastructure support for civil society organisations.
It is also part of the thinking behind the Civitas Resilience Platform™, which is preparing to begin working with an initial cohort of founding organisations in 2026. Not as another short-term training intervention, but as an attempt to help organisations strengthen the operational systems, governance structures, and institutional capabilities that long-term resilience requires.
Because without institutional infrastructure, even the most progressive funding reforms risk reproducing the same fragilities they were intended to solve.
(Moulaye Camara is a strategic financial and operations executive, board leadership and governance expert, Founder and Managing Director of Axiom Institutional Systems and BAARA Consulting, and architect of the Civitas Resilience Platform™)
