The missing business case for ending Tuberculosis

August 24, 2026 Leave a comment

Tuberculosis (TB) presents one of the most enduring paradoxes in global health. It is preventable, diagnosable, and curable, yet it remains among the world’s deadliest infectious diseases. Every year, millions of people fall ill, and more than a million lose their lives to a disease that medicine has known how to treat for decades. The burden is concentrated overwhelmingly in the Global South, particularly in countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Yet despite this enormous human and economic cost, TB continues to attract only a fraction of the funding mobilised for many other global health challenges. The question is not whether TB is a public health emergency, but rather why a disease with such a high burden struggles to attract sustained investment.

The answer lies less in epidemiology and more in economics. Global health financing is often driven by a combination of political attention, public visibility, strategic interests, and commercial incentives. Diseases that threaten wealthier populations, generate public fear, or offer lucrative opportunities for innovation tend to attract substantial resources. Tuberculosis does none of these particularly well. It is largely a disease of poverty, affecting populations with limited political influence and weak purchasing power. As a result, the market signals that typically drive investment remain weak, even when the social need is overwhelming.

This disconnect is evident in the global financing landscape. Governments meeting at the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Tuberculosis in 2023 committed to mobilising US$22 billion annually for TB prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care by 2027, alongside US$5 billion annually for research and development. Yet current financing remains far below these ambitions. Many high-burden countries continue to face significant resource shortages, and funding gaps persist across national TB programmes. Research funding is even more constrained. Global investment in tuberculosis research remains only a fraction of what experts estimate is necessary to develop better diagnostics, shorter treatment regimens, and more effective vaccines. The world has repeatedly declared its intention to end TB, but its financial commitments suggest otherwise.

A major reason for this shortfall is the narrow donor base supporting the global TB response. Unlike some other health sectors that benefit from a broad coalition of governments, foundations, corporations, and private investors, TB relies heavily on a small number of actors. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GFTAM) remains the largest external financier of TB programmes worldwide. A handful of bilateral donors and philanthropic organisations account for much of the remaining support. Outside this relatively small circle, engagement is limited. Family foundations, corporate social responsibility programmes, impact investors, and development finance institutions have yet to embrace tuberculosis as a priority issue at scale.

This concentration of funding creates vulnerability. Any reduction in donor commitments, shifts in geopolitical priorities, or fiscal pressures in donor countries can quickly undermine progress. Recent debates around development assistance budgets and declining aid commitments have highlighted the fragility of the current model. The reality is that the global TB response rests on a financial foundation that is both narrow and uncertain.

The deeper challenge, however, is that tuberculosis has never been successfully positioned as an investment opportunity. Unlike cancer therapies, medical technologies, or chronic disease management solutions, TB offers limited prospects for commercial returns. The populations most affected are often served by publicly funded health systems or donor-supported programmes. Pharmaceutical companies face uncertain revenue streams, while investors struggle to identify scalable business models capable of generating attractive financial returns. In a world increasingly shaped by market logic, tuberculosis suffers from a lack of investability.

Yet this perception obscures a much larger economic reality. Tuberculosis may be one of the highest-return investments available in international development. The disease primarily affects people during their most productive years, reducing labour force participation, household earnings, and economic mobility. Children leave school to care for sick relatives. Communities lose workers, caregivers, and local leaders. The economic impact extends far beyond health systems, affecting productivity, human capital formation, and long-term development outcomes. Every case prevented and every patient cured generates benefits that ripple across households, communities, and economies.

The problem is that these returns are largely social rather than financial. The benefits accrue to governments, employers, families, and society as a whole rather than to any single investor. Economists describe this as a classic market failure. The social return on investment is extraordinarily high, but the private return remains relatively low. As a consequence, the market underinvests in solutions despite their obvious public value.

This is precisely why tuberculosis requires a different financing narrative. For decades, the disease has been framed primarily as a public health challenge. While this framing is accurate, it is insufficient. Tuberculosis should also be understood as a development challenge, a labour market challenge, and a human capital challenge. Countries across Asia and Africa are investing heavily in education, skills, entrepreneurship, and economic growth to capitalise on their demographic dividends. Yet the continued prevalence of tuberculosis silently erodes these investments by reducing productivity and weakening workforce participation.

Reframing TB as an economic issue rather than solely a health issue could unlock new sources of capital. Development finance institutions could view TB investments as essential components of economic resilience. Corporate CSR programs could recognise tuberculosis as a workforce and community development issue. Family offices and philanthropists interested in inclusive growth could support interventions that strengthen human capital among vulnerable populations. Impact investors could explore opportunities in diagnostics, digital adherence technologies, and community-based healthcare delivery. Innovative financing mechanisms, including blended finance and outcome-based funding, could help bridge the gap between social value and financial participation.

Such approaches would not replace traditional public health financing, nor should they. Governments must remain the primary funders of national TB responses. However, relying solely on governments, multilateral agencies, and a handful of foundations is unlikely to generate the scale of resources required to end the epidemic. The financing ecosystem must expand, and that expansion will only occur if the narrative changes.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of tuberculosis is that its persistence is no longer primarily a scientific problem. The tools to diagnose and cure the disease already exist, and innovations are emerging. What remains missing is sufficient investment and political commitment to deploy these solutions at scale. In an age that celebrates technological breakthroughs and billion-dollar innovation ecosystems, the continued burden of a curable disease reflects not a failure of medicine but a failure of financing.The global community has largely treated tuberculosis as a charitable cause. It is time to recognise it as an investment in human productivity, economic resilience, and social stability. Until funders, policymakers, and investors view tuberculosis through this broader lens, the gap between disease burden and financial commitment will persist. The missing business case for ending tuberculosis is not a lack of evidence that the returns are absent.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

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First Published on LinkedIn: 26 June 2026

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Building Demand for Development

July 13, 2026 Leave a comment

India’s rural development dialogues have treated health, education, and income as parallel priorities often pursued through separate policy silos. Budgets are allocated, schemes are launched, infrastructure is built, and targets are set, all with good intent. However, one foundational truth remains insufficiently acknowledged, that increasing rural incomes is not merely an economic goal but one of the most effective demand-side interventions for health and education. Without income security, even the best school education systems and local health facilities struggle to translate access into outcomes. With income growth, aspirations gain purchasing power, the choice basket expands, and human development accelerates in ways no standalone welfare program can achieve.

The constraint on health and education in rural India is rarely a lack of awareness alone. Most families understand the value of a healthy body and an educated child, but they cannot act on that understanding consistently. Irregular incomes, seasonal employment, debt cycles, and exposure to shocks force households into a constant state of prioritising needs and what is immediately affordable. In such conditions, preventive healthcare is postponed until illness becomes unavoidable, and education becomes negotiable once opportunity costs rise. When incomes increase, particularly when they become predictable rather than sporadic, this calculus begins to shift fundamentally. I have witnessed this change countless times among the families from rural livelihood and entrepreneurship development programs across multiple states of India, from the north to the northeast.

The first visible change that accompanies rising rural income is in health-seeking behaviour. As disposable income grows, households move from reactive to preventive care. They begin to spend on nutritious food intake, diagnostics, maternal health, and timely treatment rather than relying solely on home remedies or last-resort interventions. This is observable across rural belts where livelihoods have stabilised through dairy cooperatives, non-farm employment, or entrepreneurship opportunities. Increased income reduces the psychological cost of seeking care. A doctor’s visit no longer feels like a financial gamble, and medicine is no longer a choice between recovery and indebtedness. Over time, this shift translates into lower morbidity, higher productivity, and a virtuous cycle of income and wellbeing.

Education follows a similar but slightly delayed trajectory. At very low-income levels, schooling competes with survival. Children’s labour, whether on farms, in family enterprises, or in caregiving roles, has immediate economic value. As incomes rise, the opportunity cost of schooling declines. Families are more willing to keep children in school, invest in better quality institutions, often private schools in their own villages or neighbouring towns, and support supplementary learning such as tuition or digital tools. Crucially, income growth often changes learning outcomes and ambition, and not just enrolment. Education stops being about literacy alone and starts being about mobility, including English proficiency, technical skills, credentials, and pathways beyond the village economy.

This transition from survival to investment is critical as human capital investments respond strongly to income thresholds. Below a certain level of income, households simply cannot afford to plan long-term, and above that critical level, behaviour changes rapidly. Rural India today stands at precisely this inflection point. Decades of infrastructure expansion, electrification, and digital penetration have laid the groundwork. What remains uneven is sustainable income enhancement pathways at scale. Where it happens, demand for health and education services rises organically, often faster than supply systems can respond.

However, increased income alters expectations and does not merely increase consumption. Rural households with higher incomes begin to demand quality, accountability, and outcomes. They compare schools, question teaching standards, seek second medical opinions, and are willing to pay for reliability with profound implications. It challenges the assumption that rural citizens will accept poor service quality indefinitely. It also creates space for private, social, and hybrid service models like low-cost clinics, diagnostic centres, skill academies, and ed-tech platforms that were previously unviable due to weak demand. Income growth can enable choice for households, who would increasingly adopt mixed strategies of using public facilities for some services and private providers for others. This duality can, if managed well, improve overall system performance. 

The ripple effects of income-driven demand can extend beyond individual households. As spending on health and education will increase, local economies will diversify. Teachers, health workers, lab technicians, transport providers, and service support staff will find employment closer to home. Women’s participation in the workforce will rise as care responsibilities will reduce and aspirations will expand. These multiplier effects will strengthen rural markets, making income growth more resilient and less dependent on a single sector like agriculture.

However, income growth alone is not sufficient, as demand without supply will lead to frustration, not development. In many rural areas, rising incomes have resulted in out-migration for services, with families travelling long distances or relocating temporarily to access quality healthcare and education. This is not a failure of income-led development, but a failure to anticipate and respond to it. Both public and private supply systems must be designed to scale alongside income growth. Physical access, skilled personnel, digital connectivity, and trust are essential if local ecosystems are to capture the benefits of rising demand.

Livelihood programmes and social sector investments are often conceived independently. Income-generation schemes focus on outputs like jobs created and enterprises supported, while health and education programmes focus on inputs like schools built, staff hired, and beneficiaries enrolled. What is missing is an integrated demand-supply lens. Rural income enhancement should be explicitly recognised as a human development strategy, with parallel investments planned in service delivery capacity. When livelihoods improve in a region, health and education infrastructure should be strengthened proactively, not reactively.

For corporate social responsibility (CSR) and philanthropy, this insight could be particularly valuable. Rather than choosing between livelihoods and social services, funders should see them as sequential and reinforcing investments. Supporting rural entrepreneurship, value chains, or digital livelihoods creates the conditions for sustained demand for health and education. Complementing this with investments in service quality of teacher training, primary healthcare strengthening, telemedicine, or skill education will maximise impact. Fragmented interventions will yield fragmented outcomes, while integrated strategies can create lasting change.

When rural citizens earn more, they become more vocal stakeholders in the local political economy. They demand better governance, transparency, and responsiveness. Health and education, being highly visible services, often become focal points of this demand. Income growth thus strengthens democratic accountability. It shifts the relationship between the state and citizens from charity to entitlement, from gratitude to expectation. 

India’s development journey offers ample evidence of this dynamic. States like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra that have successfully diversified rural incomes through improved irrigation, manufacturing clusters, or services consistently outperform others on health and education indicators. The lesson is that the effectiveness of social spending is amplified when households have the means to engage with it meaningfully. Supply creates possibility, and income creates participation.

As India looks ahead to the next phase of rural transformation, the question is no longer whether to invest in health, education, or livelihoods, but how to sequence and integrate them. Treating income growth as the foundation of demand generation reframes the debate. It reminds us that people are not passive recipients of services, but active decision-makers whose choices shape outcomes. Empowering those choices through income security may be the most humane and pragmatic development strategy to have. This has the potential of unlocking a chain reaction that will turn latent needs into effective demand, services into systems, and welfare into wellbeing. Healthier bodies and educated minds do not emerge in isolation, but they grow where households have the freedom to choose them. And that freedom, in rural India, begins with income.

If this essay made you reflect on how income shapes opportunity, choice, and human potential, subscribe to my blog for one new article every week in your inbox. It’s free!

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

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Digital Literacy vs Digital Confidence

June 15, 2026 Leave a comment

The digital divide in rural India is often described as an access problem. Smartphones are becoming increasingly common, data is becoming more affordable, and women are increasingly present on digital platforms, sharing messages, watching videos, and making video calls. However, this apparent inclusion masks a deeper exclusion. When it comes to using technology for business, like sending payments, managing accounts, registering enterprises on platforms, or selling online, many rural women hesitate. The contradiction is striking as access and skills exist, but ownership and confidence do not. The real barrier to digital inclusion is not digital literacy, but digital confidence.

Consider the experience of a rural woman entrepreneur who runs a home-based food business. She owns a smartphone, uses WhatsApp comfortably, and receives digital payments from customers. Yet she avoids sending money digitally, hesitates to use business apps, and depends on a family member for anything that she thinks is ‘important.’ Her fear of ‘what if something goes wrong?’ is not about a lack of knowledge, but about a lack of trust in oneself. Across rural contexts in India, women are digitally present but not digitally empowered. While they are users of technology, but unfortunately not the decision-makers within it.

Most development programs approach this challenge through the lens of digital literacy. Literacy is usually defined as the ability to operate a phone, navigate apps, recognise icons, or complete basic digital tasks. Training programs, device distributions, and short workshops are designed to tick these boxes. Once completed, women are counted as digitally included. However, literacy does not translate into agency. Knowing how to open an app does not mean feeling confident enough to transact independently. Watching a demonstration does not prepare someone to make decisions in real situations. Literacy teaches what to do, whereas confidence determines whether one dares to do it.

Digital confidence, unlike literacy, is rarely named, measured, or funded. It refers to a person’s trust in their own ability to use technology without fear, their willingness to make mistakes, and their sense of belonging in digital spaces. This confidence is more psychological than technical, emotional rather than instructional. For rural women, digital confidence is shaped by years of social conditioning that discourages experimentation, independence, and risk-taking. Without this confidence, technology remains something to be handled carefully or delegated to others.

The reasons for low digital confidence among rural women are structural and gendered. Financial fear is a major factor, with stories of fraud, which are often exaggerated, circulating widely. A single mistake can lead to loss of money, blame from family members, or public embarrassment. Cash, by contrast, feels safe and visible as it can be counted, corrected, and recovered. In this context, avoiding digital tools becomes a rational choice rather than a sign of ignorance.

Gendered control over technology further weakens confidence. In many households, men act as informal gatekeepers of digital systems. Even when women own phones, passwords, banking apps, and registrations are often managed by husbands or sons. Over time, this creates dependence and reinforces the belief that digital decision-making is not a woman’s responsibility. What begins as ‘help’ slowly turns into exclusion.

Men are often allowed to experiment, fail, and learn, while women, especially in rural settings, are not afforded the same grace. A mistake made by a woman is quickly interpreted as evidence that she should not be engaging in business or technology at all. This low tolerance for failure discourages curiosity and reinforces caution. When the social cost of error is high for women, playing safe becomes the only viable strategy.

Design and language barriers also play a role, as many digital platforms are not built for first-generation users. Interfaces are cluttered, English-heavy, and filled with technical or financial jargon. For women with limited formal education, each unfamiliar term reinforces a sense of exclusion. Technology begins to feel alien, designed for someone else, and confidence erodes further. The consequences of low digital confidence are visible in how rural women run their enterprises. As a result, businesses remain informal, small, and dependent on intermediaries. Family members or middlemen step in to handle digital aspects, capturing control and value. Instead of reducing inequality, technology ends up reinforcing existing power structures.

Evidence from the ground suggests that when confidence is addressed, outcomes change. In India’s SHG networks, women who participate in repeated, hands-on digital practice sessions gradually begin to transact independently. Rural women entrepreneurs who learn in peer groups adopt digital tools more confidently than those trained in isolation. The turning point is rarely a new app or feature; it is the moment a woman completes a task on her own and realises she can do it again.

Building digital confidence requires a different approach. Repetition matters more than certification. One-time trainings raise awareness, but confidence grows through continued practice. Peer role models are powerful, especially when women see others from similar backgrounds navigating technology successfully. Safe spaces for failure are essential, allowing women to learn without fear of financial or social consequences. Trusted human support through community facilitators, SHGs, or NGOs provides reassurance and continuity that technology alone cannot offer.

For policymakers, donors, and practitioners, this demands a rethinking of program design. Success should not be measured by the number of women trained or devices distributed, but by independent usage, decision-making, and willingness to explore digital tools. Budgets must allow for handholding, follow-ups, and time. Behavioural change cannot be rushed, and technology should not be treated as a shortcut to empowerment.At the policy level, digital public infrastructure holds enormous promise, but only if it is designed with gendered realities in mind. Women-first user experience, local-language interfaces, and community-based support systems are essential. Digital inclusion must be understood as a question of agency, not just access. Until rural women believe that the digital world belongs to them and they are confident to click, transact, and decide, technology will remain an accessory rather than a catalyst for entrepreneurship and change. The future of rural women’s enterprise will be built not just on smartphones, but on the transformative moment when a woman says to herself, ‘I can do this,’ and acts without fear.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

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Why good projects struggle for funding

April 6, 2026 Leave a comment

The social impact sector’s irony is that some of the most thoughtful, community-centred, transformative projects struggle to secure funding, while others that are not so well designed, and sometimes even superficial, find their way into donor portfolios. This contradiction is often explained as a failure of proposal writing or organisational capacity, but such explanations only scratch the surface. The deeper truth lies in understanding donor behaviour, including the incentives, constraints, and biases that shape funding decisions. Good projects are overlooked not because they lack merit, as ‘merit’ is not the primary currency in the funding ecosystem, but because of factors like alignment, risk perception, measurability, and institutional incentives.

At the core of the problem is the simple fact that donors do not fund the ‘best’ projects; instead, they support those that align with their priorities. Every donor operates within a specific thematic, geographic, and strategic framework, often influenced by board directives, political factors, or institutional legacy. A project that is highly relevant to a particular community may still be rejected if it does not fit neatly into a donor’s current focus areas. This creates a subtle but significant distortion in the sector, as organisations begin to design projects around donors’ language and preferences rather than the lived realities of communities. In this process, genuinely valuable ideas can become invisible, not because they lack worth, but because they are misaligned with funding narratives.

This is further compounded by the deeply risk-averse nature of development funding. Donors are not neutral actors, and they are accountable upward to their boards, governments, shareholders, or trustees. This shapes a cautious approach to funding, where the emphasis is on minimising risk rather than maximising impact. Established nonprofits with proven track records are preferred over emerging grassroots organisations, even when the latter may have deeper contextual understanding. Similarly, tried-and-tested models are favoured over experimental or innovative approaches. The consequence is a filtering mechanism that systematically excludes many high-potential projects simply because they appear uncertain or difficult to manage. Ironically, the very qualities like innovation, localisation, and adaptability that make a project transformative are often the ones that make it seem risky.

Now there’s a growing emphasis on measurability in funding decisions. Donors desire clear metrics, defined outputs, and quantifiable results for results-based management and data-driven accountability of projects. While this has enhanced transparency, it has also created a bias toward interventions that can demonstrate immediate, tangible results. Projects focused on infrastructure, service delivery, or training programmes tend to perform better because their outputs are easily measurable. Conversely, initiatives aimed at changing social norms, empowering communities, or strengthening institutions struggle to articulate their impact within the same frameworks. The most complex and deeply rooted development challenges are often the least measurable within the funding cycle, and therefore the least fundable. Good projects operating in these areas are disadvantaged not because they are ineffective, but because their effectiveness cannot be readily quantified.

The nature of donor engagement further complicates the picture, despite frequent references to ‘partnership,’ much of development funding remains transactional. Organisations submit proposals in competitive, opaque processes with limited opportunity for dialogue or feedback. In such an environment, relationships matter enormously. Organisations with prior visibility, networks, or access to donor ecosystems often have a significant advantage, even if their projects are not fundamentally stronger. Trust, built over time, can outweigh the intrinsic quality of a proposal. Conversely, new or lesser-known organisations, particularly those operating at the grassroots level, find it difficult to break into these networks. As a result, good projects often fail not on their own terms, but because they are evaluated in isolation, without the benefit of relational context.

This dynamic is closely tied to a broader structural bias within the global development ecosystem. Local organisations, despite being closest to the communities they serve, receive only a small fraction of direct funding. Donors frequently cite concerns around compliance, financial risk, and administrative capacity, which leads them to channel funds through larger intermediaries. While this may simplify management from the donor’s perspective, it creates a distance between resources and realities. Local initiatives, which may be highly effective and deeply embedded, often remain underfunded or entirely excluded. This is not merely an operational issue, but reflects an implicit hierarchy of trust, where proximity to power and familiarity with donor systems are valued over contextual knowledge and lived experience.

Equally important is what might be called the ‘proposal illusion’, with the tendency to compare the quality of a project with the quality of its documentation. In practice, donors assess proposals, not projects. This places a premium on articulation, structure, and the ability to translate complex realities into donor-friendly language. Organisations with access to skilled writers, consultants, or international exposure are better positioned to succeed, even if their fieldwork is not exceptional. On the other hand, grassroots organisations that may be doing outstanding work often struggle to present it in ways that resonate with donor expectations. The result is a system where storytelling can overshadow reality, and where good projects are overlooked because they are not packaged effectively.

Time horizons further skew funding decisions as donors tend to operate within short funding cycles, typically ranging from one to three years, with success evaluated within this limited timeframe. This creates a preference for projects that can demonstrate quick wins, rather than those that require sustained engagement over longer periods. Yet most of the development challenges, like education reform, livelihood transformation, and social cohesion, are inherently long-term and demand patience, continuity, and iterative learning. When funding is short-term, even well-designed projects can struggle to show meaningful results, making them less attractive to donors. This leads to what is often described as the ‘pilot trap,’ where innovative ideas receive initial funding but fail to scale or sustain due to a lack of long-term commitment.

Another big challenge is the persistent reluctance to fund organisational overheads. Donors often prefer to allocate resources directly to programmatic activities, placing limits on administrative costs such as salaries, systems, and governance. This undermines the very foundations that enable effective implementation. Strong organisations require robust systems, skilled personnel, and institutional stability. When these are underfunded, the quality of implementation suffers, reinforcing donor perceptions of risk and inefficiency. This creates a vicious cycle in which organisations are unable to build capacity, and good projects become difficult to execute at scale.

Underlying all of these factors are the incentives that shape donor behaviour. Funding decisions are rarely neutral as they are often influenced by a range of external and internal considerations. Corporate donors are often guided by brand alignment and visibility, favouring projects that can be showcased or communicated easily. Philanthropic foundations may be influenced by leadership vision, legacy goals, or thematic interests. In each case, the logic of funding extends beyond impact alone. Good projects that do not align with these broader incentives may struggle to gain traction, regardless of their potential.

Bilateral and multilateral donors operate within geopolitical frameworks, where aid allocation may reflect strategic interests as much as development priorities. In the wake of global economic slowdowns, traditional sources of Official Development Assistance (ODA) are shrinking. The U.S., U.K., and several European governments have all announced significant cuts to their ODA budgets. These reductions should have sparked debates about the failures of the aid system, but they largely passed with little reflection. The outcome is a development finance environment that’s simultaneously more selective and more risk-averse. Funders now prioritise large-scale, measurable, and politically ‘safe’ projects that can boast short-term, quantifiable results. Small-scale social initiatives, particularly those addressing systemic or cultural issues like inequality or governance, find themselves outside the funding radar. Even when progressive funding streams exist, for example, climate justice or inclusive innovation programs, they come wrapped in new conditionalities of alignment with national development strategies, ESG benchmarks, or private-sector co-financing. These conditions further alienate grassroots actors who can’t meet such formal requirements.

It is also important to acknowledge a more fundamental constraint of scarcity, as the pool of available funding is limited, while the number of worthy projects is vast. Even in a perfectly functioning system, not all good ideas can be supported. This introduces an element of competition that is not purely based on merit. Projects must not only be good, but must also be timely, visible, and strategically positioned. In such an environment, marginal differences in presentation, alignment, or relationships can determine outcomes, leaving many strong proposals unfunded.

Projects that are technically sound but insufficiently rooted in community realities often struggle to convince donors of their sustainability. Funders have been increasingly looking for evidence of participation, co-creation, and local ownership. However, these elements are difficult to demonstrate within conventional proposal formats, leading to a gap between genuine engagement and its representation. Good projects that are deeply participatory may still fall short if they cannot adequately convey this dimension to donors.

These dynamics suggest that the funding ecosystem does not necessarily reward the intrinsic quality of projects. Instead, it rewards alignment, clarity, measurability, and perceived reliability. This does not mean that donors are acting in bad faith; rather, they are responding to their own constraints and accountability structures. The system, in many ways, is functioning as designed. However, the consequences are significant, as innovative, context-specific, and potentially transformative projects often remain unfunded, while safer, more conventional interventions dominate.If we are serious about tackling poverty, inequality, and climate injustice, we must start by rethinking how funding itself operates. It is not enough to design good projects, but one must also learn to translate them into the language of donors without diluting their essence. This requires strategic proposal architecture, effective communication, and relationship-building. For donors, the challenge is more profound as it involves rethinking risk, expanding definitions of impact, and creating funding mechanisms that are flexible, inclusive, and long-term. Without such shifts, the sector will continue to produce good ideas that never see the light of day, not because they are unworthy, but because they do not fit the system that is meant to support them.

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(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others.)

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Confessions of a Fundraiser

February 2, 2026 1 Comment

By a Head of Development, who has been there, done that. 

I have spent a good part of my career raising funds for livelihoods and entrepreneurship, environmental sustainability, and digital inclusion. These are kinds of work that everyone agrees are deeply important, and expects to be delivered at miraculous speed, near-zero overheads, and with measurable transformation visible by the next board meeting! Over the years, I have learned that in India’s funding universe, March is not just a month but a mood, where phone calls are returned with unprecedented urgency, proposals are rediscovered with fresh enthusiasm, and sustainability plans are requested even before the first grant tranche has cleared. I have learnt to speak fluently about empowerment while explaining, with equal conviction, why empowerment requires trainers, coordinators, field activities, local transport, and a field office. I have learnt that pilots can run for a decade and still be called pilots, that social impact is expected to be both transformative and inexpensive, and that the most common expression of donor admiration is, ‘This is excellent work. Can you replicate in two districts with 20% less budget?’ And yet, I have also learnt that when trust is built patiently, and partnerships are approached as shared responsibility rather than transactional funding, the system does work, unevenly, imperfectly, but often just in time.

If you ever want to test your emotional resilience, professional patience, and metaphysical belief in destiny, try becoming a fundraiser for social impact in India. Not as a hobby or a phase in life, but as a full-time, salaried, KPI-driven profession where your success is measured in crores raised, relationships sustained, and hopes renewed, often all before lunch. Fundraising in India is not a job; it is a personality type. It is a slow-burning spiritual practice. It is also, on some days, a contact sport.

Most fundraisers do not grow up dreaming of this life. No child has ever said, ‘When I grow up, I want to write concept notes, follow up politely seven times, and still be told the CSR budget has already been exhausted for this year.’ Fundraisers are usually people who joined the development sector with good intentions and then stayed because they discovered a rare combination of optimism, masochism, and an above-average tolerance for ambiguity. In India, fundraising also requires fluency in multiple dialects, not linguistic ones, but donor dialects. You must speak CSR, philanthropy, family office, multilateral, HNI, trust, and the particularly tricky language known as ‘let’s take this offline.’

Every fundraising journey begins with a proposal that is equal parts strategy and speculative fiction. A document that must be simultaneously visionary and realistic, innovative yet ‘scalable,’ rooted in community voice and at the same time aligned to the donor’s thematic priorities for the current financial year. The proposal must do many things at once: ‘Solve poverty + empower women + be sustainable by the third year + align with SDGs (preferably all of them) + cost exactly the amount the funder has available + have low overheads but world-class MEL.’ You will spend weeks refining language, perfecting logframes, and polishing budgets, only to be asked in the first meeting, ‘Can you explain this in two lines?’ You will smile, compress your knowledge of years of community work into a sentence, and remind yourself that clarity is a virtue, even when it hurts.

Sooner or later, every fundraiser in India faces the great philosophical question of our time: Why do you need staff to run a project? Recently, another question got added to my great list when a funder asked me, ‘Why do you need field offices to implement a community-based high-touch project?’ Mind you, I managed a straight-faced answer, without any smirk or sarcasm, even though I cursed the day I decided to be a fundraiser.

Admin costs are a suspicious category in the minds of Indian donors. They include dangerous items like salaries, rent, electricity, and internet, none of which, apparently, contribute to impact. As a fundraiser, you become adept at explaining that projects do not run on goodwill and sunlight alone. That field teams do not teleport. That data does not collect itself. You learn to say ‘lean but adequate,’ ‘efficient yet ethical,’ and ‘value for money’ with full sincerity. I have even attempted some humour at times on the negotiation tables, saying, ‘Without admin costs, the project will still exist, but just as an idea.’ Results vary post such statements.

What I have understood is that fundraising in India is less about money and more about relationships. Money is merely the by-product of trust built over years, conversations, coffees, conferences, and carefully worded WhatsApp messages. I have learnt that a ‘quick call’ can last an hour or more, a ‘small grant’ can require six levels of approvals and may take two years; silence doesn’t mean rejection (or acceptance); words from leadership are golden, but if you don’t have that in writing, you are screwed. The fundraiser’s greatest skill is not writing; it is patience. You patiently wait for responses, for board meetings, for the next quarter, for the funder who loved your work but is noncommittal. You wait with optimism, and dignified reminders, gentle ones every couple of weeks.

Then comes the project visit by the funder, usually by some of their board members and senior leadership. Often, they bring moments of high drama along with it. For the donor, it is a glimpse into our community-connect and implementation efficiency. For a fundraiser, it often turns into a logistical marathon involving vehicles, weather, community leaders, beneficiaries, translators, photographers, and a strong hope that nothing goes wrong. In all such visits, we fundraisers pray to some invisible power that the roads are navigable, community meetings start on time, funder’s visibility is primed, and no one asks an unplanned question about funding gaps. If all goes well, the funder says, ‘This is so impactful.’ You nod, beaming. You make a mental note to follow up in three days. At the beginning of my fundraising career in India two decades ago, I often ended up being shocked by the variety of demands by donor representatives visiting project sites. Thanks to the information age, the visiting representatives nowadays are well informed and often invested in social change.

Fundraisers also live at the intersection of data and dignity, translating lived experience into metrics without stripping it of meaning.Indian donors want data and stories, and at times, even at the cost of losing the bigger picture. You learn to convert human change into numbers without losing the soul of the work. You say things like, ‘4025 women trained’, and then you add, ‘Meet Sunita, who now earns independently and negotiates at home.’ You know that neither is sufficient alone, and the narrative together, they might just unlock the next tranche.

How can I forget the ultimate sword of big NO! Rejection is a constant companion of us fundraisers, like a dark shadow. Sometimes polite, sometimes vague, and sometimes dressed up as ‘great work, but not this year.’ You learn not to take it personally, mostly. You also learn that today’s rejection can be tomorrow’s opportunity, because India’s funding ecosystem is small, relational, and cyclical. The donor who said no last year may say yes next year, after changing jobs, priorities, or perspectives. So you keep the door open, always.

Fundraising is emotional labour. You hold hope for communities, for organisations, for teams whose salaries depend on your ability to convince someone that change is worth investing in. You are optimistic on behalf of others, even on days you feel tired. You absorb anxiety, translate urgency, and project confidence. You celebrate quietly when funds come through, and cushion disappointment when they don’t. You are expected to be resilient, persuasive, strategic, and endlessly positive. No one tells you this in job descriptions.

And yet, despite the follow-ups, the spreadsheets, the rejections, the ‘please reduce your budget by 15-20%,’ and often ending up becoming a football between the funder and the grantee management, we choose to stay. Because once in a while, a funder truly listens. Once in a while, a partnership feels equal. Once in a while, funding aligns perfectly with need, timing, and trust. And in those moments, you remember why fundraising matters. Because social impact does not scale on passion alone. It scales on resources, relationships, and people willing to ask again and again for something better.

So here’s to the fundraisers in India: The translators. The bridge-builders. The professional optimists. May your proposals be read, your follow-ups answered, and your impact always exceed your budgets. And may you never lose your sense of humour. Wishing you strong coffee, timely approvals, and generous funders, today and always.

May the force be with you! 

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organisation, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others. This is a humorous attempt, and not angst, and certainly no disrespect for donors and funders of social impact.)

(Cover image is generated using AI)

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