When the Currency Only Works One Way

I heard a story yesterday, and it made me think of how we manage aspects of the NGO space down here.

Sometime in the 1970s, a father sends his son to the corner shop to buy a loaf of bread. The bread costs 19 cents. He gives the boy 20 cents.

The shopkeeper doesn’t have a cent change, so he gives the boy a sweet instead.

The boy gets home with the bread and the sweet. His father says nothing. He takes the sweet and puts it in a drawer.

The next time the boy buys bread, the same thing happens. Another sweet goes into the drawer. This carries on for a while.

Eventually there are 19 sweets in the drawer.

The father puts them in a bag, hands them to his son and sends him back to the shop.

“Go buy a loaf of bread.”

I laughed when I heard it. Then I thought about us, South African NGOs | Civil society. We keep accepting the sweet.

Not because the sweet has no value. That would be too easy. A sweet has value. The question is whether it has the value the shopkeeper says it does. And that feels uncomfortably familiar.

An organisation needs flexible funding to retain good people. It gets employee volunteer hours.

It needs operating capital. It gets a workshop.

It needs proper systems. It gets donated software.

It needs three years of certainty to build something properly. It gets a twelve-month project with a six-month reporting cycle.

It needs money. It gets mentoring, training, pro bono consulting, exposure, branded equipment, technical assistance and a very nice photograph for LinkedIn.

None of these things is necessarily useless. Neither was the sweet.

The problem starts when somebody else gets to decide that the sweet is equivalent to the cent.

We have built an impressive vocabulary around this. In-kind contribution. Shared value. Skills transfer. Capacity building. Strategic partnership. Leveraged support.

And NGOs have become remarkably sophisticated at accepting it.

We calculate the supposed monetary value of donated professional hours. We redesign programmes around restricted funding windows. We absorb reporting requirements nobody has properly costed.

We accept “capacity building” from institutions with considerably less experience of the communities in which we work. We politely thank people for giving us things we never asked for.

Then we call the whole thing partnership.

What I like about the father in the story is that he doesn’t complain about the arrangement.

He does something much smarter. He accepts the shopkeeper’s valuation.

You say the sweet is worth one cent?

Fine.

Here are nineteen.

Give me the bread.

That is a useful test for social investment.

If 100 hours of corporate volunteering are recorded as R100,000 of value delivered to an NGO, would the company accept 100 hours of NGO staff time against a R100,000 invoice?

If strategic advice forms part of the corporate contribution, can an NGO invoice for the strategic advice it routinely provides about communities, implementation and social risk?

If “exposure” carries a monetary value when offered to an NGO, can the NGO use exposure to settle its audit bill?

If a three-day capacity-building intervention is considered an investment in the organisation, would the company accept the same intervention instead of payment from one of its customers?

If donated software is recorded at full commercial value, would the company buy it back from the NGO at that value?

Probably not.

And that is where the sweet becomes interesting.

Because if something only retains its stated value while travelling in one direction, we may not be talking about value at all. We may be talking about who has the power to price the transaction.

That power sits overwhelmingly with capital.

The funder gets to decide what constitutes investment, which costs are legitimate, which outcomes matter, how quickly those outcomes must appear and, increasingly, what the recipient should regard as valuable.

Meanwhile, the organisation closest to the problem is expected to accommodate that definition.

This is not an argument against corporate social investment. Nor is it an argument against volunteering, pro bono work, training or in-kind support. There are organisations that need those things and companies that provide them exceptionally well.

It is an argument for being more serious about the word value. Because NGOs have helped sustain this arrangement too.

We needed the bread.

So we took the sweet.

Then another.

Then another.

One sweet is trivial. Nineteen sweets are an economic relationship.

And South African civil society may be sitting on a very full drawer.

It's time we took some of it back to the shop.

This is how we #GrowZA