Page 10 - SCAT Rural Voice II - 35 Stories for 35 Years

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RuRal Voice ii: 35 stories for 35 years
The focus described above took some years to crystallise, and I suppose it will always be evolving. Alongside this process, SCAT came to develop a very specific way of working. Local Development Agencies, while remaining autonomous, did have to comply with some governance requirements. They needed to produce audited financial statements every year (for which SCAT provided the funding supplemental to the main budget); they needed to account to their communities at an annual general meeting, and submit themselves to re-election; they had to have an annual plan; and they did have to be willing to endure field visits from SCAT’s fieldworkers, which were not always comfortable experiences. A recipient of SCAT’s funds does have to show how they are spending it.
We learnt too that, while SCAT is fundamentally a grantmaker at the “retail” level, shortage of money is probably not a poor community’s biggest problem. Showering money upon such a community could be a recipe for strife, not progress. We saw other funders experience very great disappointments when they dropped cash upon poorly organised communities, sometimes making any useful interventions in that area impossible for years to come. We found that the less money we gave, and the more intensive organisational support that came from SCAT’s fieldworkers, the better the outcome. In time we came to define SCAT as a “developmental grantmaker” and if you need a two-word description of SCAT - those are the two words.
Minerva’s owl, in the words of the proverb, takes flight only in the gathering dusk (Minerva being the goddess of wisdom). We understood what we were doing long after we had begun doing it. SCAT was building institutions! The Local Development Agencies were to become stable centres of activity; they were to outlive their founders; they were to become financially more sustainable through diversification of funding sources; and they were to bring tangible developmental benefits to their community over many years. In some cases, the organisations supported by SCAT have not achieved this stability, but in many cases they have evolved into resilient institutions. Careful fieldwork and, what Di Oliver called by the Afrikaans word, “begeleiding”, over many years, were the key ingredients.
Finally, SCAT was responsible for some interesting innovations. During the 1980s, for example, the government of the day introduced a Fundraising Act which made the raising of foreign funds illegal without ministerial permission, which would never have been granted. We devised a scheme to evade this: SCAT entered into contracts with the foreign funders, and back-to-back contracts with the Local Development Agencies. We weren’t fundraising anymore, we were entering into binding commercial contracts! It worked. After 1990, the legislation was revoked, and SCAT could resume normal methods.
Then SCAT introduced the Fundraising Incentive Scheme (FRIS) to encourage Local Development Agencies to raise money in their own locales. SCAT pays a reward of up to R5.00 for every R1.00 raised. Tremendous ingenuity and hard work were ignited by this scheme, and much money was raised even in these poor communities, by way of beauty parades, raffles, disco evenings and the like. A favourite was to get a sheep donated, cut up and sold in pieces. Local fundraising activities are good for the Local Development Agency, since it re-inforces their autonomy and binds them closer to their communities. This scheme continues to this day.