Special Event
Questions and Answers
Who gets money from where and how do we do it.?
That is a very important question.
The Missing link in terms of funding so far has never applied for government funding. We are 7 years old as of today. We made a very conscious decision that we shall not do projects because the moment we start with that project then we are so busy with that project and to another project and that is why many NGOs become too busy doing projects, and not realizing where their vision or goal is and where to go ahead. And this is thanks to NGOs that went ahead of us and had experiences at their cost we learned. We thought we should not be focusing on projects. There are already many good projects happening in the region that we are in. Let's see who's doing what. Who needs what input and what are the interventions that we can come in as a linking institution. Bringing in two NGOs with the same objectives doing the same things. And one already having done a project that went wrong and another NGO doing the same project, which is going to go wrong, but if only they get in touch with this NGO they can probably do something new. That was the belief that we had in the beginning that we shall not try to do any projects. Try to do capacity building. And for capacity building to nobody is going to come to us until we give good training. But to give good training we are also not missionaries to be able to say that.
So basically we get our funding for our services. We sell our service to funding agencies and to donor agencies. What we do is, many of these big projects have certain budgets for capacity building of project staff, of the stakeholders. So we go back to the funders and tell them, "Hey, you are doing a project here? We see that you have so much amount of money for funding of trainings." We try to sell our argument to the funding agencies. For example JICA has a 10 million yen project somewhere. Often times, if you look at many of the funding agencies' budget breakdown, training is given very small priority. And this is very logical for them because they say why should we spend our money in training people. Our money is for rural development, our money is for EE and so many other things they give. They say, "We don't want to spend money on project staff." What they don't realize is that if you spend 10% of your money on training then that 90% can be spent in a much better way. So this is the type of arguments that we take to the donors and funding agencies. And so they fund us through the existing project budget. So they don't have to make a new budget for the training. So they try to break down the trainings and give it to us. So that is our main funding for our activities. We sell our services for training. We also do consulting in terms of research. We are no a research institute. So we cannot call ourselves real research people. We are more action research people. The latest research that we have done in some parts of India is on indigenous land management systems. EFAD is an international funding agency. IFAD (International fund for agricultural development) is a UN agency, based in Rome. They have a large project based in the eastern Himalayas. They have consultants from New Delhi that have no idea of the local situation. They have consultants from Rome and some other real good experts in that subject but when it comes down to doing projects with people, changing peoples lives, trying to meet people's expectations, they have no idea of who these local people are and who the people want. Often time the experts do come, yes. But the come as a mission. They spend a week. And they go back. They put one and one together, and two and two together, and say this is the report. When you go back to the local people, they either have no idea what those people came for or don't know what these people are planning for them. So we try to do research based on these consultants, we try to tell the consultants and the funding agencies, "You are sending a consultant, very good. We need his/her expertise. But we need to have a prior mission for the consultants to tie up what is on the ground and what is above. So that is another sort of funding we get.
Initially we were self-funded. Seven of us put in our own money and we started that. Now we get funding from training and the services we provide. So far have not done a single project as the Missing Link. We have never tried to do a project of our own. We are trying one now that is more at a policy level and not on the ground.
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