Tell Me What You Actually Think

A moment captured by our team during a community meeting in Tamale, Northern Ghana (2026)

I discovered something slightly embarrassing recently.

We had someone take a proper look at the GrowZA website. We wanted to understand what people were actually finding, reading and responding to.

Turns out, it’s the writing.

Our articles are doing a surprising amount of the work. They are driving traffic, pulling people into the site and, apparently, making GrowZA something of an outlier in a sector where organisations don't seem to write very much.

My first thought was: good. The SEO is working.

My second thought was: hang on. That’s not actually the interesting part.

The interesting part is that people are finding us through what we think, not only through what we do.

And that got me wondering why NGOs don't write more.

Because, guys, we certainly talk enough. We have conferences. Summits. Roundtables. Dialogues. Webinars. Panels. Learning sessions. Communities of practice. Working groups. Steering committees. Advisory committees. Breakaway sessions from the steering committees.

We are not a quiet sector. But go to the average NGO website and something strange happens. Suddenly, nobody has much to say.

There will be an About Us page. A vision. A mission. Some photographs. Perhaps a theory of change with seventeen arrows pointing in different directions. There will be the obligatory assurance that the organisation is “passionate about empowering vulnerable communities”.

And then, quite often, silence. Which is odd. Because NGOs know things. Not theoretically. We know things because we have been there.

We know what happens when a beautifully designed government policy arrives in a place without the infrastructure required to implement it. We know which funding assumptions are nonsense. We know why the programme that looked magnificent in PowerPoint didn't quite survive a Tuesday morning in Mfuleni. We know that communities frequently understand their problems rather better than the people arriving to “capacitate” them. We know that sometimes the intervention works for reasons entirely different from those written in the proposal. We know which fashionable development ideas work, which don't, and which everybody privately suspects don't work but continues to put into funding applications because apparently nobody wants to be the first person to say so. That is knowledge.

And an astonishing amount of it ends up in a donor report. Which is a little like discovering oil and storing it in Tupperware.

We confuse reporting with writing. The development sector produces mountains of words. Annual reports. Monitoring reports. Evaluation reports. Close-out reports. Board reports. Funding proposals.

If you have worked with unemployed young people for fifteen years, we don't only want to know that you trained 4,327 of them. You must have learned something about unemployment. Tell us.

If you have run early childhood development programmes across fifty communities, surely you have developed an opinion about what South Africa gets wrong about ECD.

Write it down.

If you have spent twenty years working on gender-based violence, disability inclusion, water security, education or township enterprise development, there must be things you now understand that someone entering the field doesn't.

What are they? What surprised you? What did you get wrong? What does government misunderstand? What do funders misunderstand? What does your own sector misunderstand? What have communities taught you that the rest of us should know?

That is where credibility starts becoming interesting.

We have also developed a peculiar habit of declaring ourselves experts. “Leading youth development organisation.” “Thought leader in social innovation.” “Catalyst for systemic change.” “Leading voice in…”

We all know the language.

The problem with calling yourself a thought leader is that eventually somebody may ask to see the thoughts.

Twenty years of experience is impressive. Twenty years of experience with nothing much to say about what those twenty years taught you is less impressive.

Credibility accumulates. An article here. An argument there. A difficult lesson honestly described. A position taken before it became fashionable. A piece of field intelligence offered to everyone rather than locked inside a report commissioned by one funder.

Eventually, people begin to understand not only what your organisation does, but how your organisation sees the world. That is a very different kind of institutional asset.

Please don't turn this into a content strategy! Because somebody will read this and schedule a meeting. The meeting will establish a content committee. The content committee will develop a content calendar. The content calendar will decree that every second Thursday the organisation must publish 700 words about one of the Sustainable Development Goals.

I've been in meetings like this... The internet has suffered enough.

This is not an argument for NGOs to produce more content. It is an argument for NGOs to say more.

Write because something happened in the field that changed how you understand the problem. Write because you think the prevailing wisdom is wrong. Write because the policy makes no sense. Write because the programme failed. Write because the programme succeeded and everybody misunderstands why. Write because a community taught you something. Write because you've noticed something that somebody else working on the same problem shouldn't have to spend five years discovering again.

And guy, don't only let the CEO write. The programme manager knows things. The facilitator knows things. The person who has spent six years sitting in community meetings definitely knows things.

Your organisation is probably carrying around far more intelligence than appears anywhere on its website. Leave some intellectual footprints.

Perhaps that is what struck me most about the GrowZA assessment. Yes, the articles generate traffic. We're pleased about that. But traffic is almost incidental.

Over time, without quite designing it this way, the writing has created a record.

You can look through the articles and see what we have been wrestling with. What we think is broken. What we're learning. What irritates us. Where our thinking has changed. What we think the sector could do differently. Some of it will probably age badly. Excellent.

We would be worried if everything I believed five years ago remained perfectly intact. Institutions should learn in public occasionally. Because the alternative is a sector with enormous experience and remarkably little institutional memory.

People leave. Projects close. Funding cycles end. Organisations restructure. Strategies get replaced. And some very expensive knowledge disappears with them.

So NGOs should write more. Not for Google and not because the world is desperately waiting for another LinkedIn article about collaboration being the key to sustainable impact.

Write because you know things. Write because you might be wrong. Write because somebody should be able to argue with you. Write because experience should leave some intellectual footprints behind.

ALSO. Funders, donors and potential partners are looking for credibility. They are trying to work out who actually understands the terrain, who has merely learned the language, and who they can trust with increasingly scarce capital.

A polished proposal can tell them that you know how to write a polished proposal. A body of thinking tells them something much more useful: how you see problems, how deeply you understand them, whether you learn, whether you have a point of view, and whether there is substance behind the institutional pitch.

If your organisation has been working on one of South Africa’s hardest problems for twenty years, don’t just tell a prospective funder that you have twenty years of experience.

Let them find twenty years of thinking.

And speaking for the rest of us in the sector, if your organisation has been working on one of South Africa's hardest problems for twenty years, we deserve to know what you have actually learned so that we achieve the mission to GrowZA together.

This is how we #GrowZA