On 16 May 2023, the same day that the shocking PIRLS literacy results were released, IPASA kicked off its Collaboration in Philanthropy series with the aim of facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration to effectively drive dramatic change to the current reality we face.

The recently announced 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) finding that 81% of grade 4 learners in South Africa cannot read for meaning, is an educational crisis for our country’s children. Radical collaboration among all key stakeholders is essential to be able to address the literacy and many other disasters our country is currently facing. It is clearly evident though despite a handful of impactful collaborations, there is a dire lack of true collaboration in philanthropy. Why is this so?

The Independent Philanthropy Association of South Africa (IPASA) is tackling this question head-on by running a Collaboration in Philanthropy initiative this year to try to uncover and deal with the barriers to collaboration and ultimately equip philanthropy to be able to successfully collaborate for maximum impact. This initiative kicked off recently with an in-person workshop on collaboration in philanthropy in Cape Town. The workshop involved a group of funders and implementing partners working in education and literacy, and co-incidentally took place on the same morning that the PIRLS results were released.

The workshop presenters included The Learning Trust speaking of their Catch-up Coalition involving multiple funders and implementing organisations; Wordworks who has effectively collaborated with government and major funders to scale their Grade R literacy support initiative nationally, and the Nal’ibali Trust presenting on their collaborative project, the National Reading Barometer.

At this workshop the funders, implementing partners and organisations presenting, discussed in detail how they have navigated the complexities of collaboration. They shared how the process of collaboration is slow, time-consuming, involves on-going compromise and humility, and requires greater flexibility and open-mindedness. The learnings from their experience follows.

• Deep collaboration requires time, especially to change complex challenges on a deeper level. One needs sufficient time to build a proper partnership in particular time to build trust - an essential element for any strong successful collaborative partnership. It is important to have the long game in mind as collaboration takes a long time to become established. At the beginning you need to identify the measures of success: parameters, regularity, onboarding partners, contracting them, building trust and agreements. One must be aware though, that MOUs and agreements cannot replace trust and understanding.
  
  
• Clarity in collaboration is critical. Clarity of vision is needed to start and clear and shared goals are vital. A clear beginning and end timeframe helps as well as a clear theory of constraints to guide and direct the work.
  
  
• Collaboration needs a shared vision and plan. Competing agendas are one of the main barriers to collaboration. Partners in a collaboration need to let go of their own agendas and strategies to collectively create a shared vision and plan. Partners need to go in with a learning agenda, being willing to accept that their beliefs and ideas may be challenged.
  
  
• There can be no power imbalances with true collaboration. Power and egos need to be addressed. Partners need to be aware of their own power (organisational power) and personal positionality and put the need for power and control aside.
  
  
• Strong and decisive leadership is needed, backed by a strong secretariat to make sure that communication is transparent, and that the operations are effectively managed. Investment in a solid secretariat is critical to ensure that there is effective project management to coordinate a collaboration. The secretariat needs strong administrative and planning capacity and needs to be trusted by all the partners in the collaboration to carry out this role on behalf of all involved.
  
  
• The need for transparency and accountability and management of risk. In order for the partners in a collaboration to build trust there needs to full transparency between each other as well as an agreement to collectively manage the risk. Some partners may be more risk averse than others, so it needs to be consensus on how to balance this risk.

Despite the complexity and difficulty of all that is required to make these multi-stakeholder collaborations successful, working together in a cohesive and coordinated partnership is the only way we can truly create a future for our country where all children will thrive. We all need to work more collaboratively with urgency and with an understanding that the scale of the problems we are trying to tackle mean that we have to think about the big picture, and we can only impact at this level by collaborating.