By Giuliana Bland (Jim Joel Fund), Nathalie Koenig (Solon Foundation) and Ntjantja Ned (Masoleng Rising)
Climate impacts on all aspects of people’s lives
Recent floods in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Mpumalanga and Limpopo have once again shown us how unequally climate-related shocks are experienced. A flood, drought or heatwave affects people differently depending on where they live, the resources available to them and the support systems around them. The communities most affected are almost always those already carrying the greatest burden of poverty, food insecurity, unemployment and inadequate infrastructure. Climate is therefore not only an environmental issue – it is also a social justice issue.
For young children, the pressures are deeply interconnected. Climate-related shocks affect livelihoods. Livelihoods affect household income and food security. Financial strain increases parental stress places pressure on relationships and can contribute to higher levels of violence within communities. All of this ultimately affects children’s health, wellbeing, development and their ability to thrive
Alignment between lived reality and funding priorities
Working alongside community-based organisations, one is often struck by the fact that some of the most important climate adaptation work is not labelled as climate work at all. It looks like an early learning programme finding ways to continue feeding children when household food insecurity increases. It looks like practitioners supporting families after floods or periods of extreme weather. It looks like community organisations adjusting services when transport routes become inaccessible or essential infrastructure is disrupted. But it actually is climate adaptation and resilience in practice.
Much of the most meaningful climate adaptation work is already happening, carried by practitioners and community members who do not see it as climate work. The question for philanthropy is whether funders are alert enough to see and understand what climate responses look like in the lived realities of communities.
The next logical question is whether the right people are involved in determining funding priorities. It is not uncommon for funding priorities to be shaped by well-meaning people thinking carefully about what they think communities need. Often, people who determine funding priorities are far removed from the practical realities those communities are navigating daily. It’s far easier to develop frameworks about what needs to shift, than to actually be there to experience it – driving eroding roads, dealing with a leaking roof, deciding whether children should come to school when heavy rain is coming.
The people closest to implementation — practitioners, caregivers, community members — are rarely the ones shaping funders’ strategies. And yet they are the ones who will need to translate it into something practical and grounded, often in conditions that are already stretched. If the people doing that last mile of work is not motivated, aren’t seen and aren’t resourced, no strategic framework can close critical funding gaps.
In communities, people are already taking initiative to survive climate-related extreme weather events, using what is in their environments and what is stored in their diverse indigenous knowledge systems. What is required is support and solidarity from the broader society. The burden of proof of what is needed, what is being done, and what works should be shared – community-based organisations would be suitable partners in this journey, not simply recipients of frameworks developed elsewhere.
External efforts to help can crowd out local resilience
There is a real risk that funder initiatives could have unintended consequences, including stifling local resilience. Funders should be mindful of funding practices, and “doing development” in ways that take up too much space. Defining problems, designing solutions, deciding what counts as impact, imposing how that’s measured can crowd out the very conditions that make local resilience possible. If resilience is already there, maybe the funder’s job is simpler than what we have made it and what we are used to. Funders should make room for community involvement – they must make sure the people holding the answers to community resilience are supported sufficiently to keep going.
When local role players are involved in creating what is needed, there is a different dynamic and a different type of energy. That quality of energy matters enormously in contexts most vulnerable to climate shocks. Motivation isn’t a soft outcome but it’s a precondition for communities developing the agency to direct their own resilience over time.
“I was recently at an event in Zithulele in the Eastern Cape, where local writers and illustrators spent a day creating children’s books using the Book Dash model. What struck me was the energy, the banter, the laughter, the excitement as people saw their stories become actual books. Nobody was starting from deficit. Nobody was asking what this community lacks. People were using their skills and creativity to make something new.“ – Nathalie Koenig.
what effective funder responses will look
Funder initiatives should be designed to meet both immediate and survival needs of affected communities while simultaneously co-creating solutions for resilience going forward. In the IPASA community, there is broad acknowledgement that climate change requires focused, differentiated and multi-dimensional solutions and that means collaboration across multiple sectors.
A practical first step would be for us as funders to adopt a “solidarity lens” which entails reaching out and engaging with community organisations to find common ground on what the immediate needs actually are. That one single step is likely to enable trust-building, which is a prerequisite for influence and successful collaboration. When funders and social partners see solutions through the beneficiary community’s lens, the likelihood of co-creating sustained interventions is significantly higher.
In addition, as funders, we should not ask how we can “teach or educate” communities about resilience – the more useful question is how funders can support and strengthen the resilience that communities are already demonstrating every day. The practitioners running community-based early learning programmes understand these realities because they experience it themselves. They are often supporting children and families through the same challenges affecting their own households, while earning modest incomes and working with limited resources. If funders’ response is simply to ask more of already overstretched practitioners and community organisations, there is a real risk of adding another layer of expectation without addressing the conditions in which community partners live and work.
How funders could think about measuring success
Climate impact is often relatively localised in nature – it is specific to geography, infrastructure, relationship networks, and seasonal patterns. It is essential for funders to think about how we measure success against standardised indicators, given this challenge’s localised character. It also elicits questions about our fascination with the potential to scale up initiatives. Funders must think carefully and honestly about how much of what they are funding is actually scalable. It is important for funders to be realistic about extensive investments in developing strategic frameworks for programming that will ultimately need to be adapted to local contexts.
A thought-provoking resource that can be useful for funders, is Scharmer and Kaufer’s Leading from the Emerging Future, which challenges all of society to move from operating from the “ego” to an “eco-system” with transformation as the shared objective. From this perspective, funders could be open to learning by doing, rather than focusing on directing those they fund to produce proposals proving that what they dream of doing is “worthy, fundable, scalable and innovative”.
Critical questions can unlock better results
When funders and other development sector stakeholders start working differently, they may find that they have some “unlearning” to do, to make space for what is responsive, agile and empowering. This is vital, and raises another question: “Who are the funders that have a long-term vision and who are determined to genuinely transform communities?” And also: “How do they find like-minded community actors to collaborate with beyond their traditional partners?” Another question would be: ” Does climate change challenge all of us to look beyond what is familiar to us?”
The answers to these questions must start with funders being honest about whose knowledge we centre, whose voices carry weight, and whether the way we design and measure our work is actually serving the communities we say we’re trying to support or if we as funders are primarily serving our own need to demonstrate impact.
When we as funders are brave enough to ask the right questions and when community partners are included, it will be possible to unlock context-specific, sustainable solutions that are embedded in the lived reality and knowledge assets of local communities.