Coalitions: Working Together Across Sectors to Scale Up Impact . IPASA Newsletter 2023.

Coalitions: Working Together Across Sectors to Scale Up Impact

Charlene Petersen-Voss, Special Projects Manager and Sibongile Khumalo, Executive Director of The Learning Trust 

The power of collective action 

The world is riddled with daunting and complex challenges that no single person or organisation can claim to know the solutions to. From poverty and food insecurity to climate change and catastrophic pandemics, these challenges continuously threaten human advancement and remain at the top of the list of pressing issues. Many of them are clearly interconnected, and for this reason, it makes complete sense that finding solutions requires collective efforts from all of us. Merely acknowledging the challenges and collaborating to address them is not enough to overcome them. A strong desire for change is needed to drive us towards a resolution.

Enter “collaboration”. It was probably at the advent of the 21st century that we can remember the word being touted as the panacea to get us out of the complex web of challenges. Collaboration has most notably become a catchphrase in the development sector, with many of us agreeing that it is much easier said than done. Unlike its cousins, cooperation and coordination that can be somewhat transactional, collaboration is supposedly a lot more transformational in nature. It requires a relentless effort towards a goal and demands that we bring our whole selves to the process of deliberate change.

Undeniably, there is power in collective action. However, as with any undertaking by a group of actors, success is most likely achieved when we are guided, inspired, and supported towards the goal. Given the complex challenges that we are attempting to solve, collaboration offers a powerful tool for mobilising people and organisations towards action, bringing community issues to prominence and identifying models that work and lend themselves to being scaled. 

An alliance towards education recovery

Despite making steady progress, South African education was already struggling pre-pandemic, according to multiple international benchmarking assessments, and this affected the after-school sector. As we slowly emerged from Covid-19, The Learning Trust (TLT) and its partners saw collaboration as an obvious means through which we could coordinate after-school efforts. Recognising the potential pitfalls of alliances, we understood the importance of not only establishing a coordinating body and appointing a clear leader, but also actively engaging the collective to provide input, guidance, and hold the structure accountable. With TLT as its Secretariat, we convened the After School Catch-up Coalition to support widespread education recovery. It is an organically growing structure that provides a collective learning platform, jointly raises funding for projects and leads advocacy around making after-school ubiquitous.

Along with after-school providers, materials developers, and interventionists, we involve a diverse range of stakeholders in our efforts. This includes funders, advocacy and research groups, public employment initiatives, provincial and district education departments, and policymakers, all of whom have varying levels of commitment and responsibility. The conceptual guidance and seeding investment that we received from the Allan & Gill Gray Philanthropies South Africa was the critical impetus upon which we were able to approach other donors. It helped rally the initial momentum behind the Coalition and has lent us the credibility we needed.

With limited philanthropic and corporate giving, it stands to reason that civil society organisations would look to tap into public coffers, to enable the scaled approach that is required to reach every learner in the system. While learning recovery is central to our sector, we also recognised an opportunity to tackle the persistent problem of unemployment in South Africa. To achieve this, the Coalition aimed to establish a link between employment and learning outcomes.

Heeding the call for social employment 

Deployed through projects, the Catch-up Coalition’s biggest venture by far is the Social Employment Fund (SEF) project funded through the Industrial Development Corporation. At its core, social employment recognises that there is no shortage of work in our country, despite the tragic irony that there seems to be no work opportunities. Perhaps the most important work done by the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator has demonstrated that beyond employment opportunities in the formal sector, the informal sector holds potential for meaningful and viable work that will move our society forward.

It is no secret that many non-profit organisations make use of largely unpaid volunteers to run their programmes. While we’ve found that funders want to support a stable and quality organisational workforce, the emerging players are hardly able to attract and afford highly skilled labour. It remains both a challenge and an urgent need to invest in adequately staffing non-profits to deliver work for the common good. We therefore leveraged our collective expertise to meet the presidential priority for employment creation and to access government funding towards this end. With substantial wage resources covered, our non-profit partners could then hire the requisite labour that allows them to undertake projects over and above their core work.

The challenge of measuring change 

It quickly became evident to us that none of the individual after-school programmes would have been capable of creating jobs and managing over 3,300 people across all nine provinces without the coordination and support of an established intermediary, such as our organisation.

Understandably, large government funding initiatives require mature organisations with strong financial muscle and capacity to facilitate at scale. Therefore, the Secretariat role that we play has been pivotal in unlocking funding, creating an enabling environment where diverse partners can co-exist, and analysing the collective difference we are making. Our role has further involved:

Setting parameters and responsibilities of all partners
Raising and awarding annual grants to organisations
Managing multiple projects of the Coalition
Convening peer learning circles
Administering the complex data tracking platform
Measuring and advocating for the Coalition’s impact

Our partners share data, findings and lessons learned along the way. As a result, we have observed that the Coalition not only minimises duplication of efforts and competition for resources within communities but also fosters a collaborative culture in the sector. However, given the substantial amount of public funds involved, it is unsurprising that the accompanying expectation is to demonstrate evidence of impact.

It remains to be seen whether the Coalition will convincingly demonstrate irreputable evidence of impact at multiple levels for our respective donors through our grant reporting and other measurement. We are convinced that the partner organisations of the Coalition will gain important programmatic insights, while employment participants will enhance their skills and experience, and learners will benefit from the care and support of a multitude of adults invested in their success. We believe that as we continue to advance our research, measurement, and advocacy efforts over the initial three-year phase, our investment case for the after-school sector will become even more compelling.

Many lessons have been learned already

Never before has the capacity of our small community-based partners been so challenged. The mere administrative fortitude and human resources required to make it all work is enormous. We have relied heavily on our pillars of coupling grant funding with ongoing capacity strengthening, which has not failed us. Organisationally, we are having to balance our core work of strengthening emerging organisations, with the lure of lucrative public-funded projects. Because we know that the two are complementary, we are working closely with our board and long-standing donor partners who legitimately want to ensure our longevity and financial sustainability.

While convening and managing these vast project operations has not been without its challenges, the Coalition has been our most rewarding and impactful collaboration initiative. We therefore take solace in Nora Robert’s words that “There’s no reward without work, no victory without effort, no battle won without risk.”