I worked in both the political and the NGO worlds. And everywhere I worked, almost everyone agreed that we should fund less projects and do them right, instead of funding so many projects that struggle to create the impact they need to.

But somehow the system was unchangeable.

The result is that there are hundreds of thousands of organisations that get a small amount of support; rarely enough to do really impactful work, but just enough to keep them ticking over.

And that means that so many NGOs are forced to try to be all things to all donors; to mold their areas of focus for funding eligibility. It becomes impossible for them to specialise and get really good at creating actual social impact on whatever problem it is they’re supposed to be solving.

An example I saw recently was a big grant for what could have been a really innovative project on disinformation. But instead of the money going to where it would actually create impact, it was used to plug funding gaps for struggling partners. The project was almost guaranteed to fail before it began.

It comes down to strategy.

The intentions are always really nice – that we can create the maximum amount of impact by supporting the maximum amount of projects.

But funding could be used so much more effectively if we supported fewer projects, but ones that were underpinned by real data.

That would take enormous courage to do. The chances of failure are bigger and more embarrassing.

But right now, democracy and human rights are declining the whole world over.

If we stopped being so busy and started being bolder, we’d be so much more effective in turning that around.