Accountable in One Direction
Rot and Renewal. Twenty years in this sector, and a question nobody at the table wanted.
The table was the first thing I noticed. One slab of wood, beautifully made, longer than my office. The chairs were hydraulic, with a lever under the seat so you could raise or lower yourself, and I remember thinking I would like one of those for my desk. Then I thought the table had probably cost more than I earn in a year. Then I decided to stop thinking about the table.
This was a sector coordination meeting on livelihoods and social stability. Thirty or so project coordinators, sector leads, a few technical advisers. Everyone spoke English. Not because English was anyone's first language, but because it was the only way to be certain that no international colleague present was excluded from the conversation. I have sat in dozens of these meetings over the years. I have never once heard the reverse consideration raised.
When my turn came, I said something I thought was ordinary. I said that my organization does not pay transportation costs to the people it trains, that I had argued this position inside my own office more than once, and that I believe paying it is corrupting the work.
I have rarely seen a group of professionals look so surprised. Not hostile. Surprised. The faces around that table belonged to people who were good at their jobs, and their jobs had been handed to them as a framework with targets attached. What I was saying was not a controversial position in social work. It was a first-year position in social work. And it landed as though I had started speaking a language nobody in the building had been hired to understand.
That meeting is the reason I am writing this.
Where the principle came from
My organization holds an old rule that communities contribute at least thirty percent of a project's value. Not necessarily money. Labour, space, materials, tools, time, their own hands.
I did not invent it. I inherited it from a colleague who spent a working life doing economic development in villages and camps, a man who never wrote a framework in his life and understood more about this work than most people I have met with three degrees. He also gave me the vocabulary I still use. We do not say beneficiaries. We say right holders. A beneficiary receives something. A right holder is owed something. The second word puts the organization on the correct side of the transaction, and once you have heard the difference you cannot unhear it.
From that principle, the transportation question follows directly. If a community has no stake in a project, the project is something being done to it. So I held the line, and I was often the only person in the meeting holding it.
The argument against me
Now the part I have to put in full, because a piece that only argues my own side is not worth publishing. The argument against me is strong, and it is not made by cynics. It is made by people who care:
If a woman in a refugee tented settlement in the Bekaa has no fare, my principle does not test her commitment. It tests the four dollars a day her entire family lives on. I end up training the least poor of the poor, reporting it as community ownership, and congratulating myself on values while the people who most needed the training stayed home. Selection bias dressed as ethics.
There is a second point, less flattering to me. Refusing to pay transportation saves money. Any principle that happens to reduce your budget deserves a hard second look, and I have given this one several. I cannot prove to you that the values came first. I can only tell you that I have argued for the principle in years when we had the money and it would have cost us nothing to abandon it.
Yet I still hold the line, and not only for the nobility of the values. The stronger reason is socially pragmatic.
Once you pay a person to attend, you no longer know why they attended. That is a practical objection before it is a moral one. Attendance is the only free instrument any of us has for finding out whether people actually want what we are offering. The moment you attach a payment to it, you have broken your own instrument, and you will never again be able to tell demand from compensation.
If nobody will spend the fare and forty minutes to reach your training, the correct conclusion is not that they are too poor to come. It is that your training is not worth the fare and forty minutes to them, and the useful next step is to go and find out what would be.
There is probably a defensible middle here, where the real cost is covered in a form that cannot be mistaken for an incentive. I have not always found it. But the sector did not look for it either. The sector just paid.
One hundred and forty-seven thousand
In a single year, the sector reported that its organizations had collectively trained around one hundred and forty-seven thousand young people in this country.
Documented. Disaggregated by age, sex and nationality. Verified. Reported upward, on time, in the correct template.
I have never been able to find out what it did to the economy.
Some of it worked. I am certain of that, because I have met the people it worked for. But nobody can tell you which part worked, or how much, or whether the same money spent differently would have done more, because that was never the question the system was built to answer. The system was built to answer a different question, and it answers that one beautifully.
Accountable in one direction
Trust died here. That part is true, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Money went into institutions in this country and did not arrive where it was promised, often enough and publicly enough that suspicion became the reasonable default.
So the sector rebuilt accountability. Vetting. Due diligence. Compliance frameworks. Audit trails. Log frames. Results matrices. Verification visits. I have built a good deal of this machinery myself and I am not against any of it in principle.
But look at the direction it points.
Every instrument we built points upward. Toward the donor, the capital city, the headquarters, the board that approved the grant. Not one of those instruments points downward, toward the people the money was for. We can now prove to an office in Brussels or Washington or Geneva that every dollar was spent exactly as promised. We cannot tell you whether it was the right dollar to spend, because no part of the apparatus was designed to ask.
Both ends of this behave rationally. A donor burned by a porous system builds controls. An organization that wants to survive builds whatever the donor will fund. And the result of two rational parties optimizing is a sector that is fully accountable and partly useless.
The donors are not villains in this. Most of the individuals are serious people. But the institutional posture has hardened into something I find hard to describe politely: a settled confidence that the priorities were well studied, well reasoned, and correct, and that consultation means explaining them more clearly. I have sat in a great many design conversations over twenty years. I can count on my hands the ones that opened with a question instead of a priority.
The machine that needs feeding
Somewhere in the last fifteen years, organizations in this country stopped being institutions with missions and became machines that require feeding.
You can see it in the documents. Mission statements get redrafted to match whatever the funding environment rewards this cycle. Strategies get reverse engineered from open calls. Organizations bid for work they have never done, in sectors they have no capacity in, for populations they have never served, because the call was open and the overhead was needed to cover the salaries of the people who wrote the bid.
I use the word despise, and I mean it at that strength. This is not what I signed up for.
I want to be precise about what I am not saying. I am not disputing that social workers are entitled to a good and fulfilling life. Salaries, offices, pensions, the reasonable expectation of a future. I make a decent living from this work and I am not going to apologize for it. What I object to is selling the values as the point of attraction and then taking whatever money happens to be available, with no serious accounting for whether it serves the community whose name is on the proposal.
Fundraising has never been my job. It has been the thing attached to my job, which is probably why I am suspicious of people for whom it is the whole job. Over the last five years I have raised somewhere in the region of two and a half million dollars. That is not an impressive number in this sector and I am not offering it as one. What matters is the part that usually goes unsaid: I also ran the operations of every dollar of it. The proposal, the contract, the procurement, the reporting, the audit, the staff. There was never any prospect of expanding, because there was nobody to expand into.
Now set that beside how the other half of this sector is built. An international organization puts six or seven people on fundraising, proposal development and donor relations, at salary levels a national organization cannot approach. Add the travel and the lobbying and the cost of a unit like that is jaw dropping. It can exceed the entire annual budgets of ten or twenty small Lebanese organizations put together, and it delivers no service to anybody. It produces documents.
Then both of us are invited to compete on the same call, against the same page limit, on the same deadline, and the outcome is described as an open and competitive process.
That is not a complaint. It is a description of the market. But here is the part the localization conversation keeps stepping over. The compliance apparatus that allows an organization to prove it is trustworthy is precisely the apparatus a small local organization cannot afford to build. The solution to the trust problem is also the mechanism of exclusion. We have built a system in which the organizations closest to the community are the least able to demonstrate that they deserve to be funded.
Three days, only three days!
In the autumn of 2020, in the weeks after the Beirut explosion, a donor came looking for us. Not the other way round. They had money that had to move, and move quickly, and we had a delivery record and systems that worked. They asked us to apply, and they encouraged it more than once.
We did not need it.
The programme was already covered for the year. Everyone it served was already being served. There was no gap. There was no unserved person waiting on this grant.
I wrote it anyway.
That is the first half of this story and I am not going to soften it. Money was available, somebody asked us to take it, and I could not find the sentence that says no. It is the same failure I have spent this article describing in other people, committed with better paperwork than most. The call came first. The justification was written afterwards, using true figures about real people, for a purpose that was already met. I did not invent a need. I simply did not write down that it was already covered, and nothing in the system I was reporting into was built to notice.
The line I should have used is short. We do not need this, and here are three organizations that do.
Now the second half.
The grant covered medication for chronic conditions. Not training, not awareness, not capacity building. Medicine that people take every day, and without which they deteriorate, and some of them die. I want that in the reader's mind for what follows.
We claimed no administrative recovery on the grant. Not a percentage, not a coordination cost, nothing. The position taken internally was that we already had what we needed to run the operation, so we would not charge for running it.
Some months later, in the course of the reporting, it emerged that one invoice had been issued three days outside the contract period. The medicine had been ordered, bought, delivered and taken. The expenditure was real, documented, and had gone exactly where the proposal said it would.
We could have amended the date. One phone call, a reissued invoice, and nobody would ever have known. I want to be clear that this option existed and that we discussed it.
We reported it instead. And we returned the money, from our own reserves, for medicine that had already been dispensed to people who had already swallowed it.
So the accounting, when you lay it out, reads like this. We took money we did not need. We charged nothing for administering it. We bought medicine with it. We told the truth about a filing date. And we paid for part of that medicine ourselves.
Here is what I want you to notice, because it is not the unfairness. At no point in that entire process did anyone ask whether the medicine had reached the people who most needed it. The apparatus was sensitive enough to detect a three-day discrepancy in the date on one document, and had no instrument at all for the question of whether we should have received the grant in the first place.
The system could not tell that we did not need the money when it gave it to us, and could not tell that we had done the work when it took some of it back.
The money they did not want returned
Some years earlier, a different donor. A multilateral, serious institution, serious money, and a youth environmental leadership programme I project managed from start to finish. Young people were trained, connected to ministries, and then given sub-grants to launch initiatives in their own communities. The sub-grant was the point of the whole design. Everything before it was preparation.
When we reached the end, a number of the participants had not produced anything that meant much to anybody. Not all of it was their fault. Some were not ready, some had been recruited into a programme that was not right for them, and some handed in a proposal that was a form filled in correctly.
I refused to disburse those particular sub-grants. Then I contacted the donor and told them I would be returning the money.
I expected a dull administrative conversation. What I got was astonishment, and it was not the pleasant kind. The reaction, as clearly as I can describe it, was the reaction you get when you have said something slow in a meeting of clever people. There was a pause, and then the sense that somebody would have to explain something to me.
What eventually surfaced was this. Returning funds is administratively painful at their end. Their internal process for unspent money is difficult, slow, and raises a question upward that nobody in the chain wants raised. They would have been comfortable with that money being spent on very nearly anything. They were not comfortable with it coming back.
Sit with that for a moment, because it is not a small thing. An institution whose entire compliance architecture exists to guarantee that money is spent as intended found the return of unspent money more threatening than its weak expenditure.
And to be fair to the people I was speaking to, none of them were corrupt and none of them were stupid. They were responding accurately to what their own institution measures. Disbursement rates are measured. Absorption is measured. Community impact is asserted, in a report, by the organization that received the grant.
One honest note about my own judgment in that episode. I was deciding, against my own standard, that certain young people's ideas did not deserve the money. That call deserves scrutiny, and I have given it some over the years. But at least it was a call about whether the work was worth funding. That is the question I could not get anybody else in the process to treat as serious.
In twenty years working in non-profit and non-governmental organizations, I have sat through audits that examined every receipt in a file. I have returned money over dates and contract periods. Not once has a donor asked me whether the person who received the goods was the person who needed them most.
The bucket
A friend of mine, a British fundraiser, has raised more than one hundred and fifty million dollars in his career. We were talking about Lebanon and he used an image I have not been able to shake. From the outside, he said, Lebanese organizations look like buckets with holes in them. Whatever you pour in disappears.
I asked him about donor fatigue, and I expected agreement. He told me fatigue is never the problem.
The money exists. In the United States alone, charitable giving passed six hundred billion dollars for the first time in 2025, with individuals alone giving close to four hundred billion of it, in a year nobody would describe as economically calm. The money is not tired. The money is looking for somewhere to go.
His condition was simple, and it was not a fundraising technique. The mission comes first, and it has to be real, and it has to be aligned with what your community actually needs rather than with what is fundable this quarter. Get that right and finding donors becomes the easy part. Get it wrong and no amount of proposal craft will save you.
He added one more thing. It has to be a vocation, not a season. You cannot fundraise in panic every time a grant ends.
Adaptation or drift
The fair challenge to everything I have written is this: organizations have to change. Lebanon in 2026 is not Lebanon in 2006. An organization that refuses to change what it does while its country collapses around it is exactly the organization on cruise control I wrote about earlier in this series. Some of what I am calling drift is legitimate adaptation, and every director who ever chased a call believed that is what they were doing.
So where is the line? I think it is sequence, and I think it is testable.
It is adaptation when the need was identified first, documented before the call existed, and the funding was then found to meet it.
It is drift when the call came first and the need was written backwards to fit it.
The test is not what you do. It is what came first in your reasoning. And you cannot lie to yourself about it, because the dates are in your own files.
Before you chase the call
Seven questions. If your organization cannot answer them in writing, the money is not worth what it will cost you.
- Can we show this need existed before this call did? Where, in writing, and dated.
- Who asked for this? Name a person in the community. Not a sector priority, not a strategy document. A person.
- Can we deliver this today, with the people we have? Or are we planning to learn on our right holders.
- What are we contributing? If the answer is only our name and our registration, we are not a partner. We are a subcontractor with a mission statement.
- What happens when the money stops? If the answer is that the activity stops, write that in the proposal and see whether anyone objects.
- What will we have to stop doing to do this? There is always something, and it is usually the thing nobody funds.
- Is there any amount of money for which we would refuse this? An organization that cannot name a number has already answered the question.
The bottom of the bucket
I did not change anyone's mind at that table. The meeting broke for coffee, my point went into no minutes, and the transportation money kept moving. The chairs still go up and down.
My friend was not wrong about the bucket. The holes are real, and twenty years in this sector have shown me where most of them are.
But you do not fix a bucket by measuring what you pour into it more carefully. You fix it by turning it over and looking at the bottom.
That is the one direction nobody is looking.
Tony El Mir writes weekly on how institutions fail and how they come back.
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