EXPERIMENTERS
Snapshot description
Organisations that do not operate entirely as flexible funders, but which have succeeded in creating discrete flexible funding channels – either through direct funding, like Direct Champions, or indirectly, like Connectors. Through these channels, Experimenters can enable more flexible funding to flow within an otherwise traditional funding environment.
Sub-categories
Global North INGO funds
Many Global North INGOs also operate as funders, whether as fund managers, regranters, or something else. While most use traditional top-down funding mechanisms, INGO Experimenters succeed in creating specific instruments that adopt elements of flexible funding. One example is the Oxfam Partners’ Investment Fund (PIF), created to provide flexible funding to partner organisations in the Global South.30 The PIF provided a total of £1.5 million in funding over a three year period, later extending to four. PIF’s main ethos is said to be that it is trust- based programming – assuming that everyone is there to do the best job they can – and trying to do away with as many checks and balances as is safe.
Bilateral donor support for women’s funds
Bilateral donors have a track record of mobilising resources to support women’s funds, in recognition of the funding gap on gender equality in foreign aid. A prominent example is the Equality Fund, which channels long-term, core and flexible funding to underfunded global grassroots women’s organisations and movements in the Global South. The Government of Canada contributed CAD $300 million in August 2019 to establish the initiative. There were several funding streams, including direct funding to women’s rights and feminist organisations, as well as to feminist funds that subgrant to local and grassroots organisations. The Equality Fund also provided funding to networks, coalitions and consortia.31 Another prominent example, funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Dutch Policy on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality32 and the Policy Framework ‘Dialogue and Dissent,33 is the aforementioned LFS programme.34 Following sustained lobbying efforts by a broad coalition of feminists and women’s rights funds and advocates, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided initial funding of 42 million euros in 2017 over four years, scaled up to 80 million euros funding over five years (with support from Fondation Chanel in the second phase). The women’s funds provide flexible grants to women’s organisations and change agents in the Global South, invest in capacity strengthening, promote advocacy and build partnerships across regional and global alliances.
Bilateral donor programme funding
In some cases, bilateral Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors 35 create specific programmes to channel funding that is more flexible than is possible in their usual bilateral programming. In 2020, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) partnered with Comic
Relief, a UK-based foundation, to invest up to £60 million over ten years to support the capacity and sustainability of locally led civil society organisations in Ghana, Zambia and Malawi through four ‘Anchor Partners’ (similar to the Connector approach): Star Ghana Foundation, Tilitonse Foundation, the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI) and the Zambian Governance Foundation. Named ‘Shifting the Power – Strengthening African Civil Society’, the programme aimed “to challenge the status quo in philanthropy and development by fundamentally centring locally- led, participatory, co-created, democratic and distributed ways of working.”36 Another example is the ‘Resourcing Change: supporting women’s rights organisations in fragile and conflict-affected states’ programme, which provided core, flexible and accessible funding – in recognition of women’s rights organisations’ greater knowledge and experience of their contexts. Funded by the UK’s Integrated Security Fund, the project was delivered between July 2021 and March 2025 through a consortium partnership between Saferworld, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), WILPF Nigeria, and Women for Women International. These organisations provided women’s rights organisations and hubs with flexible core funding, aiming to strengthen their individual and collective roles in leading programmes and advocacy on women, peace and security.37 In total, the project distributed £2.74 million to 24 women’s rights organisations and hubs in Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen, with an average of £28,572 per organisation.38 In many cases, the consortium members already had partners across the three countries, which they were able to support with flexible funding through Resourcing Change. In addition, £607,631 was used to support movement building, self-identified capacity strengthening and mentoring activities across all countries, while £164,815 was allocated to convening cross-learning spaces for partner organisations.
Bilateral donor embassy-level funding
Some bilateral DAC donors are able to mobilise more flexible funding through embassies in partner countries, as opposed to centrally managed bilateral programmes. In 2023, the OECD reported that:
A specific example is a programme managed out of the Norwegian Embassy in Brazil, aiming to channel 90% of its funding as direct grants to organisations run by indigenous people. The Norwegian Indigenous Peoples Programme has been running in Brazil since 1982, and managed through the embassy since 2022, and has always provided direct support to CSOs. Over the last three years, the programme has disbursed roughly $9 million a year, and since 2017 has been fully integrated into Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative, which is administered jointly by the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and the Environment in collaboration with Norad, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.40
Donor pooled funds
Generally speaking, a pooled fund is a mechanism that allows multiple donors – often bilateral governments – to contribute un-earmarked financial resources to a single fund designed to support a common set of programmes or projects. Pooled funds are most common in the humanitarian sector and are often set up by United Nations donors.41,42
Origins/reason for existing
Highly ‘traditional’ or mainstream funders, especially bilateral donors, are generally unable to transition their entire organisations in a way that fully aligns with the philosophy and principles of flexible funding and local leadership to take place. However, sometimes opportunistic moments arise, when a traditional organisation has a pot of funding outside of its mainstream funds that needs to be spent, and there happens to be capacity, progressive thinking and leadership that allows for the funding to be channeled flexibly. In at least one case, a visionary senior person inside the organisation was able to obtain Board sign off on the understanding that the pot of money approved was experimental and learning-focused.
Structural features of Experimenters
There are no standard structural features across all Experimenters, given that each funder generally takes advantage of specific opportunities as they arise at a given moment. Some examples of features include:
Consultations with experts
In conceptualising LFS, various women’s funds took part in a consultation process that succeeded in influencing a Dutch minister and members of the Gender Task Force team, who pushed internally for allocating flexible funds to Southern-based feminist movements. As mentioned previously, Mama Cash, Women’s Fund Asia, AWDF and many other women’s funds then successfully brokered the creation of the programme, demonstrating how an entire ecosystem was able to come together in partnership with a traditional bilateral funder.43
Openness to negotiation and changes
Under LFS, the women’s funds implementing the programme were able to provide larger grants – $90,000 for three years, and $200,000 for regional organisations focused on advocacy, influencing and capacity building. At the beginning, the funds could only be used for project work, but thanks to negotiation by the women’s funds, organisations were able to spend 30% of the budget on core costs and 40% for grassroots movements. The women’s funds involved described how LFS was a learning process for the Dutch government, and demonstrated using clear evidence on how to resource and bring about change in a feminist way across the Global South.
Pushing the boundaries of adaptability
Experimenters can sometimes be among the most flexible of funders, enabling grantee partners to spend the money in whichever way they choose. At least one has ensured that once the flexible funding has been disbursed, there is no set timeframe within which to spend the funds. An evaluation of the Equality Fund found that grantees appreciated the trust-based, feminist partnerships formed with the fund and its key partners (which included the African Women’s Development Fund), noting that they did not impose thematic priorities, activities or project funding. The Equality Fund also adopted flexible reporting approaches that emphasised narratives of change, and adopted simplified due diligence approaches to minimise burden on applicants and grantees.44
Role modelling for other traditional funders
As a result of funding received through LFS, Women’s Fund Asia was able to access funding from another bilateral donor, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Australia. Another fund partner, AWDF, has been able to use the LFS model and its successes to raise resources from other government donors and private philanthropy.
Internal effects of funding flexibly
As noted above, it is harder for Experimenters to be truly transformed at an organisational level through flexible funding practices. However, being an Experimenter can create an organisational opening or entrypoint for change. This sentiment was echoed by one Global North INGO noting that flexible funding requires taking a principled position that this is what you want to do, and accepting that there will be mistakes and lessons. The cost of those mistakes, however, should not fall on the Experimenter’s country office and local partners. Disallowances would, in effect, become impossible, because partners spend the money however they choose. This Experimenter went on to note that it is important to be in solidarity with partners – especially those that are guided by the principle of ‘decolonising partnerships’45 – by dismantling internal barriers that exist more from habit than necessity. There is very little evidence from bilateral donors on the ways funding flexibly has affected their internal structures, policies or practices. Dedicated research is needed to better understand the range, mechanics and impact of flexible funding by Experimenters.
Relationships and funding dependencies
Experimenters are semi-autonomous units within larger, traditionally structured organisations. They are hence built upon the resourcing infrastructures, legitimacy and pre-existing networks of their institutions, and remain tethered to them throughout their development. This means that the relationships they spend most of their efforts navigating are internal ones. Although Experimenters may be designed to operate flexibly, with lighter application and reporting processes, implementation is often still subject to internal legal and compliance frameworks. Unsurprisingly, therefore, their success is heavily tied to internal champions, top-down leadership, and their ability to secure buy-in across the wider organisation. To stand a chance of survival, Experimenters often operate under the radar, deliberately framing themselves as experimental rather than drivers of structural shifts – a positioning that reduces perceived risk and avoids drastic disruption. As one Experimenter put it:
Challenges for Experimenters
While Experimenters offer a promising space for flexible funding within larger institutions, they often face an uphill climb. Many Experimenters described their experiences setting up flexible funding models as swimming against the tide, with new approaches often perceived as ‘scary’. One Experimenter explained that this was because “people are being asked to […] do things they are not used to and that’s not an easy thing to do in a big organisation.” They further note that to remedy this ‘shock’, there needs to be more time and intention in preparing the ground for people to acclimatise to the new thinking and approach. Expectedly, the process of introducing the model within an otherwise rigid way of operating creates friction, often feeding into the inherent competition in the sector. Such conditions are bound to counteract progress, making it difficult for the model to take root in the broader organisation.
As the model is dependent on individuals, they often have a small window for those ideas to root and spread through the rest of the organisation. As such, Experimenters, with a few exceptions,46 can be difficult to sustain or scale. Without top-down backing, Experimenters risk being quietly discontinued once key champions move on, are absorbed back into existing conventional frameworks, or frozen out by the very structures they aim to shift. If discontinued, this can be damaging to partnerships and relationships established at its formation, as Experimenters backtrack on some of their promises. It undermines trust with local actors and communities. As noted by the Resourcing Change programme funded by the UK government, it still “operates within the confines of the wider funding system,” and illustrates a deeper challenge:
The first months or years among Experimenters are not necessarily the hardest – sustaining the model is usually the challenge. It is therefore at the point of design that their focus and intention should be on sustainability.
Benefits of the model
Despite their relative fragility, Experimenters offer important spaces for innovation and mindset- shift within an otherwise rigid institutional environment. When successful they do not just affect local actors; they also seed internal learning and offer a starting point to shift the broader organisational culture and mindsets about flexible funding. Oxfam’s PIF, for instance, is:
Although these reflections and shifts will typically happen more at a country level than central level, it forces the organisation to question the need for their current rigid structures, and frees them to experiment with more trust-based ways of working with partners. Once the organisation experiences an alternative way of working, it is hopefully difficult for them to fully fall back into traditional ways of working. If anything, it emboldens individual champions in the organisation to intentionally seek out pockets of unrestricted funding in the broader organisation to sustain flexibility. The Shifting the Power programme explicitly acknowledges the benefits of providing long-term, core and flexible support:
For grantee partners, Experimenters afford them much needed control. Because the funds are unrestricted, many tend to channel the resources to typically underfunded areas such as advocacy, communication, safeguarding and wellbeing. In some cases, partners have gone to the length of using the funds to build reserves. Experimenters’ reputational capital also enables grantee partners to raise funds from other funders.
30 Oxfam GB (n.d.). Oxfam GB’s Decolonial Partnerships Strategy Putting Respect, Solidarity, and Accountability at the Heart of Our Relationship with Partners. [online] Available at: https://www.oxfam.org.uk/documents/774/Oxfam-GB-Decolonial-Partnerships-Strategy.pdf. p.9
31 OECD. (July 2024). Bridging the Funding Gap for Women’s Rights Organisations: Canada’s Support Through the Equality Fund. Case Study. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/development-co-operation-tips-tools-insights-practices_be69e0cf-en/bridging-the-funding-gap-for-women-s-rights-organisations-canada-s-support-through-the-equality-fund_6aa9a5d1-en.html#:~:text=Approach&text=Gender%20equality%20is%20at%20the,to%20networks%2C%20coalitions%20and%20consortia
32 Government of the Netherlands. Human Rights Worldwide: Equal Rights for Women and Girls. [Accessed 12 December 2025.] Available at: https://www.government.nl/topics/human-rights/human-rights-worldwide/equal-rights-for-women-and-girls#:~:text=Dutch%20efforts%20to%20strengthen%20the,of%20women%20and%20girls%20worldwide
33 Government of the Netherlands. (2016). Policy Framework: Dialogue and Dissent. Available at: https://www.government.nl/documents/regula-tions/2014/05/13/policy-framework-dialogue-and-dissent
34 As noted, LFS is a collaboration between four Global South women’s funds (all Direct Champions): African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), Fondode Mujeres del Sur (FMS), International Indigenous Women’s Forum (FIMI)/ AYNI Fund, and Women’s Fund Asia.
35 OECD (n.d.). Development Assistance Committee. [online] OECD. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/en/about/committees/development-assis-tance-committee.html.
36 Comic Relief. (2025). Shifting the Power. Available at: https://www.comicrelief.com/funding/tackling-injustices/shifting-the-power/
37 Saferworld (2022). Resourcing Change: Supporting Women’s Rights Organisations in Fragile and Conflict-affected States. Available at:https://www.saferworld-global.org/resources/publications/1406-resourcing-change-supporting-womenas-rights-organisations-in-fragile-and-conflict-af-fected-states
38 Ahmed, F. (2025). Influencing Change Through Flexible Funding: Conversations with Women’s Rights Organisations in Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen. Learning paper. Saferworld, Women for Women International, WILPF. Available at:https://www.saferworld-global.org/resources/publications/1466-influ-encing-change-through-flexible-funding-conversations-with-womenas-rights-organisations-in-nigeria-south-sudan-and-yemen
39 OECD. (2023). Funding Civil Society in Partner Countries: Toolkit for Implementing the DAC Recommendation on Enabling Civil Society in Development Co-operation and Humanitarian Assistance. Best Practices in Development Co-operation. p.22. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2023/05/funding-civil-society-in-partner-countries_9462bbeb/9ea40a9c-en.pdf
40 Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative. (2024). 40 Years of Support to Indigenous Peoples – Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative. [online] Available at: https://www.nicfi.no/2024/02/09/40-years-of-nipp/ [Accessed: 11 August 2025].
41 ICVA Network. (2024). Guidance Note for Donors Promoting Inclusive and Locally-led Action Through Humanitarian Pooled Funds. Available at: https://www.icvanetwork.org/uploads/2024/11/Donor-Guidance-on-promoting-inclusive-and-locally-led-action-through-humanitarian-pooled-funds.pdf [Accessed: 14 July 2025].
42 Flexible Funding Report 2023. rep. UNHCR. 2014. Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/publications/flexible-funding-report-2023 [Accessed: 14 July 2025]
43 Moosa, Z., and Jessop, S. (2022). In Movement Together: Reflecting on a Decade with Mama Cash. Mama Cash. Available at: https://www.mamacash.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/221130_mc_farewell_letter_af-digital.pdf
44 Global Affairs Canada. (April 2024). Formative Evaluation of the Partnership for Gender Equality. Prepared by the Evaluation Division (PRA). Available at: https://www.international.gc.ca/transparency-transparence/assets/pdfs/audit-evaluation-verification/2024/pge-report-rapport-en.pdf
45 Peace Direct. (2021). Time to Decolonise Aid. [online] Peace Direct. Available at: https://www.peacedirect.org/time-to-decolonise-aid/ [Accessed: 11 Aug. 2025].
46 Usher, A.D. (2025) ‘The anomaly. How a cutting-edge scheme in Brasilia gives direct grants to indigenous funds’, Development Today, 12 June. Available at: https://www.development-today.com/archive/2025/dt-5–2025-1/the-anomaly [Accessed: 18 June 2025].
47 Ahmed, F. (2025). Influencing change through flexible funding: Conver-sations with women’s rights organisations in Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen. Learning paper. Saferworld, Women for Women International, WILPF p.17. Available at: https://www.saferworld-global.org/resources/publications/1466-influencing-change-through-flexible-funding-con-versations-with-womenas-rights-organisations-in-nigeria-south-su-dan-and-yemen
48 Comic Relief. (2025). Shifting the Power. Available at: https://www.comi-crelief.com/funding/tackling-injustices/shifting-the-power/