I founded Orpesi Collective because I have lived this problem, not because I read about it.
Four years ago, I worked with two donors who made a choice that remains less common than it should be. They did not arrive with a predetermined answer. They funded a process with enough trust to allow learning, and enough discipline to demand a serious outcome. The mandate was clear: go into the market, understand what was actually needed, engage the full ecosystem, and build a sustainable model from what emerged.
My team and I took that seriously. Over two years, we engaged funders, government actors, private sector partners, young people, health practitioners, researchers, evaluators, and organizations working close to the realities we were trying to understand. We used a human-centered design approach to listen carefully, test assumptions, and gather what stakeholders actually needed, rather than what the sector assumed they needed.
That process produced an investment case, a three-year strategy, and four viable business model options. The approach was unusual, and it worked. It worked because the donors were willing to fund the conditions for learning, not only the outputs. They trusted the process long enough to let it produce something real.
That experience stayed with me. It shaped how I think about funding, institutional resilience, and the distance between good intentions and decisions that change the trajectory of an organization. It also shaped what Orpesi is now being built to do.
The reason I am writing this now is that recent conversations about financing, localization, and sustainable development have made it difficult to stay quiet. Across conferences, published reflections, and sector convenings, the language has shifted in the right direction. The intent, in many rooms, feels genuine. Local leadership is no longer being treated as a side conversation. Equitable partnership is now part of the mainstream vocabulary. There is growing recognition that development architecture cannot remain sustainable if the organizations closest to the work remain structurally underfunded.
The distance between that intent and a decision that changes the trajectory of a local institution, however, remains significant. Naming that distance honestly is what this piece is about.
Across this series, I have tried to name what is still too often left unsaid. The money exists, but the path to it does not. The back-office burden is structural, not incidental. Outcomes-based financing has the right theory but often the wrong design. The old architecture has fractured and rebuilding it along the same lines will produce the same results.
The series has been building toward a simple and uncomfortable truth: the tools exist, the models exist, and the locally led organizations exist. What remains missing is not innovation. It is the willingness, from every actor in the ecosystem, to take responsibility for closing the gap between what is said and what is funded.
There are two sides to this coin, and both matter.
Funders who are serious about locally led development need to stop designing systems that make it structurally difficult to achieve. Due diligence processes built for large international actors, grant cycles that leave little room for organizational learning, and reporting requirements that consume the capacity they claim to be strengthening are not neutral features of the system. They are design choices, and they can be changed.
Flexibility and trust are not soft virtues. They are strategic decisions. The donors in my own experience made those decisions deliberately. They did not abandon accountability. They created the conditions for better accountability by allowing the work to be shaped by evidence, engagement, and learning before locking it into a fixed model. That is not charity. It is strategy.
Locally led organizations also have work to do, although that work must be understood within the reality of unequal power and constrained resources. The strongest case for a different funding architecture is not only a well-worded proposal or a powerful critique of the current system. It is also an organization that has built its own systems, documented its own outcomes, understood its cost structure, and arrived at the table with evidence that makes the argument difficult to ignore.
Advocating for a fairer system is legitimate and necessary. Building the institutional discipline to absorb and manage direct investment is equally important. One cannot replace the other. The sector needs more funders willing to change how they invest, and more local organizations supported to build the systems, evidence, and confidence required to receive and shape that investment on their own terms.
Evaluators, learning partners, and storytellers also carry a responsibility that is rarely named directly. The evidence of what works in locally led development exists. The stories of organizations that have built something durable exist. What remains thin is rigorous, accessible, and emotionally resonant documentation of those lessons at the scale needed to shift funder behaviour. Evidence does not always move people on its own. Evidence told well can. That is a craft, and it deserves investment.
Orpesi sits in the middle of this deliberately. Our work is not about helping locally led organizations fit into a system that was not built for them. It is about supporting the redesign of how strategy, institutional strength, learning, and financing come together so that these organizations can deliver, grow, and be trusted at scale. The conviction behind that work is clear: locally led organizations should not have to choose between doing the work and becoming fundable. Those two things should be the same project.
We are still in the early stages of building this, but the direction is not in question.
The donors in my story chose flexibility over control. The organization inside that process did not squander it. Something was built that the ecosystem valued enough to absorb and sustain. That outcome was not accidental. It required a certain kind of funder, a certain kind of team, and a process that took the question seriously before reaching for an answer.
None of those conditions are impossible. They are choices. The question this series has been asking, from the first piece to this final one, is who is willing to make them.
—————————————————————–
This is the final piece in Orpesi’s series on institutional resilience, locally led development, and the financing architecture that either enables or prevents both. To continue this conversation, reach Orpesi at info@orpesicollective.org