The 80/20 Rule of Health Spending

If you had to pick one factor that predicts how much a government spends on health, the research points in the same direction almost every time: domestic fiscal capacity. In plain terms, that means how much tax a country can collect.

The logic is almost too simple to feel like an insight. Health spending is recurrent. Doctors need salaries every month. Drug shelves need restocking every quarter. Facilities need maintenance every year. You cannot sustain these with volatile donor aid or one-off windfalls. You need predictable, domestic, recurring money. And the main source of that is taxation.

I find it useful to think of it as a plumbing problem. Tax revenue is the tap. Budget allocations, the Abuja Declaration targets, donor pledges – those are the buckets. You can arrange the buckets however you like, but if the tap is barely running, they won’t fill.

Countries at similar income levels but with different tax effort show very different health spending trajectories. Long-run increases in government health expenditure track tax revenue growth, not aid flows. When you apply an 80/20 lens to the factors behind government health spending, fiscal capacity accounts for the bulk. Everything else – institutions, aid, debt, election cycles, demographics – mostly operates through, around, or in the shadow of that one constraint.

Uganda’s Anemic Tap

So how is Uganda’s tap running? Barely.

Uganda’s tax-to-GDP ratio has been stuck at around 12–13% for years, below the sub-Saharan African average and well short of the government’s own targets. For every shilling of economic activity in this country, the government collects roughly 13 cents. The rest stays in the informal economy, slips through exemptions, or simply isn’t captured.

The downstream numbers are predictable. Uganda’s government health spending sits at roughly $23 per person per year (per UNICEF budget analysis; the WHO estimates domestic government health spending at approximately $10 per capita), against a benchmark target of $86. The health budget hovers around 7.7% of the national budget – half of the 15% we committed to under the Abuja Declaration in 2001. As I wrote in my first article in this series, government health spending per person has barely moved in a decade, while Kenya and Rwanda have pulled further and further ahead.

And here’s the detail that should stop us all. According to UNICEF’s budget analysis, Uganda foregoes an estimated UGX 2.881 trillion in tax revenue every single year through exemptions, allowances, rate reliefs, and deferrals. The government is choosing not to collect this money. For context, the entire approved health budget for FY 2024/25 was UGX 2.946 trillion. We are leaving almost an entire year’s health budget on the table, uncollected.

Pile on the fact that atleast 54% of Uganda’s economy operates informally – largely outside the tax net – and the picture becomes clearer. The tap is barely open.

An African Giant Turns the Tap?

While Uganda has been standing still on this, Nigeria has started moving.

In June 2025, President Bola Tinubu signed four tax reform bills into law: the Nigeria Tax Act, the Nigeria Tax Administration Act, the Nigeria Revenue Service Act, and the Joint Revenue Board Act. The ambition is to push Nigeria’s tax-to-GDP ratio to 18% over the medium term – a big jump for a country that, like us, has historically collected far too little.

What makes the Nigerian reforms interesting is how they try to protect the poor while expanding the base. Small businesses below a certain turnover threshold are exempt from corporate income tax, VAT, and withholding tax. Essential goods – food, healthcare, education – are exempt from VAT. And the share of VAT revenue going to states rose from 50% to 55%, which matters because states are where most health services actually get delivered.

Nigeria Health Watch pointed out that this expanded fiscal space gives state governments a real opportunity to invest in publicly funded health coverage. They also added a warning: “the fiscal space created by these tax reforms will not remain open forever.” Debt obligations and shifting political priorities will compete for every new naira.

Nigeria’s reforms have problems of their own, and implementation will be messy. But the underlying principle is sound: widen the tax base, shield the vulnerable, and deliberately channel new revenue toward social services.

The lesson for Uganda is that this lever exists, and other countries are pulling it. El Salvador offers an even more dramatic example. Between the 1990s and 2015, the country doubled its tax-to-GDP ratio from 8% to 16% and deliberately pushed the new revenue into health. Out-of-pocket health spending fell from 60% to below 30%. Under-five mortality dropped from 53 to 10 per 1,000 live births. That is what happens when you actually open the tap.

What Can We Do?

If tax revenue is the dominant driver of health spending, then this is where the effort has to concentrate. Three things come to mind:

The Root of the Root

Over these past months, I’ve been writing about why Uganda and much of Africa underinvests in health. Donor displacement. Debt. Corruption. Inequality. Elections. Each piece of the puzzle is real, and each one matters.

But the more I dig into this, the more I see that they are all branches of the same tree. And the root of that tree is fiscal capacity – how much money the government can actually raise from its own citizens and its own economy. If the tap is dry, it doesn’t much matter how cleverly you arrange the buckets.

If we get taxation right – broaden the base, protect the poor, direct revenue to health, and give citizens a reason to trust the system – we lay the foundation for everything else. If we don’t, we will keep circling the same problems, decade after decade, with slightly different labels.

The woman who sells me fruit every week doesn’t need a lecture on fiscal policy. She needs a deal that makes sense: you put something in, and something comes back. A clinic that has medicine. A nurse who shows up. A road without a crater.

Until we can offer her that deal, the tap stays dry, and the buckets stay empty.

Notes & References

1. World Bank, 2025. Uganda Economic Update: Increasing Uganda’s Fiscal Space through Improved Revenue Mobilization. Available at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/uganda/publication/increasing-uganda-s-fiscal-space-through-improved-revenue-mobilization-and-enhanced-efficiency-of-spending-and-service-d
2. UNICEF, 2024. Uganda Health Sector Budget Brief 2024/25. Available at: https://www.unicef.org/esa/media/13261/file/UNICEF-Uganda-Health-Budget-Brief-2023-2024.pdf
3. UNICEF, 2025. Health Sector Financing: Analysis and Strategic Recommendations (FY2025/26). Available at: https://www.unicef.org/uganda/media/20426/file/2025-2026%20Health%20Sector%20Budget%20Brief.pdf
4. United Nations Uganda, 2025. Leveraging Domestic Resource Mobilization as a Cornerstone of Uganda’s Sustainable Development Path. Available at: https://uganda.un.org/en/296986-leveraging-domestic-resource-mobilization-cornerstone-ugandas-sustainable-development-path
5. Nigeria Health Watch, 2025. Will the 2025 Tax Reform Deliver for Nigeria’s Health System? Available at: https://articles.nigeriahealthwatch.com/will-the-2025-tax-reform-deliver-for-nigerias-health-system-it-depends-on-how-governments-and-the-rest-of-us-respond/
6. PwC Nigeria, 2025. The Nigerian Tax Reform Acts. Available at: https://www.pwc.com/ng/en/publications/the-nigerian-tax-reform-acts.html
7. WHO, 2024. Global Health Expenditure Database. Available at: https://apps.who.int/nha/database
8. WHO, 2023. Health Financing Progress Matrix Assessment: Uganda. Available at: https://library.health.go.ug/sites/default/files/resources/WHO%20HFPM%20Uganda%20FINAL.pdf

Elections as public health events

If you zoom out from PNG and Uganda and look at the wider literature, a pattern starts to appear. Whenever there is serious political unrest or conflict, routine health services tend to suffer. This is the underlying thesis for this article, which is backed by systematic reviews of conflict settings that show drops in vaccination coverage and increases in vaccine preventable disease outbreaks when insecurity disrupts outreach and facility services.

Uganda is not in a civil war, but our elections bring their own version of instability. The 2021 elections were described by Human Rights Watch as marred by killings, beatings of opposition supporters, arbitrary arrests and an internet shutdown. Even the Afrobarometer 2025 survey reports that close to half of Ugandans fear intimidation or violence during elections, and many worry about the role of security forces.

Our neighbors have similar stories. The post election crisis in Kenya in 2007 and 2008 left around 1,133 people dead and orders of magnitude more displaced from their homes. The more recent election violence in Tanzania, also saw a reported 500 people killed. Elections can be scheduled on a calendar, but the human consequences spill out for years.

With that backdrop, let me unpack three ways elections show up as a public health issue: in lives lost, in disrupted care and in frozen policy.

1. Lives lost and mental health scars

The most visible cost is the people who never come back home.

In Uganda, at least 54 people were killed in November 2020 when security forces cracked down on protests after the arrest of opposition politician Bobi Wine. Those numbers are not abstract to families who buried loved ones. Add on other incidents around campaigns and polling days, and elections start to look like a recurring risk factor for young men in particular.

What we rarely talk about is the mental health side. Exposure to political violence, even if you are not physically injured, is linked in many studies to higher rates of anxiety, depression and post traumatic stress symptoms. Children who see their parents beaten or arrested do not simply “move on”. Their sense of safety in the world shrinks.

Uganda already has a large unmet need for mental health care, with few specialists and limited services outside a handful of facilities. Election related violence adds one more layer to that backlog.

2. Disrupted access and broken supply chains

Even when bullets are not flying, fear changes behavior. In the run up to tense elections, people often stay home more. They avoid being out at night. They delay any trip that feels optional. In health terms, that matters.

I sometimes imagine an expectant mother in the more rural parts of my home district of Wakiso. She has been advised to deliver at a facility, but her due date is close to the election and there are rumors of roadblocks and protests on her road. She weighs the risk of travelling while there might be protests or tear gas against the risk of staying home. That is a public health decision shaped almost entirely by politics.

We know from other settings that insecurity is associated with reduced facility visits, lower vaccination uptake and interruptions in chronic disease treatment. Uganda saw similar dynamics when Covid related enforcement operations turned violent, including beatings and shootings by security forces. The message many people heard was simple: being outside can be dangerous.

On top of that, staff may struggle to reach facilities when transport is disrupted or when they themselves fear being caught in violence. Supply trucks can be delayed if major roads are blocked or if security operations intensify. A two week delay in ARVs or TB drugs can have lifelong consequences for patients.

3. Policy paralysis and budget drift

The third impact feels more technical, but it is very real.

Big health reforms and campaigns rely on long, boring, bureaucratic work: drafting guidelines, costing plans, pushing procurement, negotiating budget lines. Election seasons interrupt that slow grind. Officials become cautious. Difficult decisions get postponed. New initiatives are quietly shifted to “after elections”.

You can see this in PNG, where planners worry that a national HPV rollout will not be feasible in the same year as general elections. Modelling suggests that delaying HPV vaccination by several years can significantly reduce the number of cervical cancer deaths averted by 2070 and beyond. That is what a policy pause looks like in health terms: a flatter line on the “deaths prevented” graph.

Budgets can also drift. Election years often see more money and attention move toward security and highly visible infrastructure. Analyses of electoral violence in Uganda describe it as a recurring threat to human security that shapes how the state deploys its resources. Each shilling moved away from essential medicines or health workers is a choice, even if it is never debated in public.

Why “Being Apolitical” is hard when you care about public health

So what does this mean for someone like my niece, or for you reading this?

You do not have to attend rallies or wear party colors to be involved in politics. If you care about whether an ambulance can reach your home during unrest, or whether your child gets a vaccine on time, you are already in the political conversation, whether you like it or not.

Elections influence:

• How safe it feels to move to a health facility.
• Whether critical campaigns, like HPV or polio, go ahead on schedule.
• How budgets are divided between treating disease and controlling dissent.

Being “apolitical” in that context often just means being silent about decisions that still shape your health.

That does not mean everyone must turn into a full time activist. It can simply mean asking different questions. When parties and candidates come to your community, you can ask how they plan to keep health workers and patients safe during campaigns. You can ask what safeguards exist to prevent budget cuts to health in election years. You can insist that peaceful elections are part of a healthy society, not an optional extra.

My hope for Uganda in January 2026 is simple. I want an election where hospitals remain functional, where health centers stay open without fear, and where children can look at a red roof and see only paint, not a threat.

Happy holidays everyone and stay safe.

Notes & References

• https://hpvcentre.net/statistics/reports/PNG.pdf
• https://www.cfr.org/report/electoral-violence-kenya
• https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/01/21/uganda-elections-marred-violence
• https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz0x8vdvkjgo

Cumulative Advantage

One of the best books I’ve read on this is “Capital in the 21st Century” by French economist Thomas Piketty. His core thesis, backed by extensive historical data, reveals two key points:

1. The Rate of Return on Capital (R) - the money generated by owning assets like stocks in companies, government bonds/T-bills, and real estate - has consistently outpaced…

2. …the Rate of Economic Growth (g) - the growth of the wider economy, which dictates wage increases for most people.

In short, Piketty’s famous formula is R > g.

This simple inequality equation is the engine driving the widening wealth gap.

Like many in my network, you are probably on the “have” side of this equation. You likely possess assets, forms of “Capital”, such as a university education, real estate, investment portfolios, or even strong professional connections. These assets tend to grow, accumulate, and compound over time, steadily increasing your wealth.

However, for those who do not own such capital, their primary path to a better income is through wages, which are tied to economic growth (g). When ‘g’ stagnates at 3-5% per year while ‘R’ compounds at a higher rate (e.g. 10+%), you can visualize the widening gap.

That is the Matthew Effect in action: wealth breeding more wealth for a few.

Like I’ve shared with many friends and family, this growing inequality isn’t just an inconvenient trend; it’s a ticking time bomb of civil unrest that, if not rebalanced, threatens everyone’s wellbeing.

The Reverse Matthew Effect

But there’s a second, more devastating part to that verse: “…from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

This is the reverse effect, and it describes the profound vulnerability of those on the “have-not” side of the equation.

I’m reminded of the tragedy that occurred at the Kiteezi landfill here in Kampala, last year, where a collapse of the waste dump tragically killed over 30 people.

Let’s think about this in the context of the Matthew Effect. These individuals were the definition of “him who has not.” They possessed almost no financial capital. What little they “had” was their physical presence, their proximity to a meager livelihood (scavenging recyclable materials), and, in the most basic sense, their lives.

The system they existed in was not only failing to provide them with opportunities (the ‘g’ in Piketty’s formula) but was actively dangerous. When the landfill collapsed, the system didn’t just fail them; it took away everything - even the little they had.

This is a cumulative dis-advantage. It’s not just that the poor get left behind; it’s that they are disproportionately exposed to systemic shocks like environmental disasters, health crises, and economic downturns. They have no “capital” to buffer them from catastrophe. When a crisis hits, it doesn’t just halt their progress; it erases it, sending them tumbling backward, often irretrievably.

Rebalancing the Equation

This brings me back to why I write these articles. Our current system, as described by the Matthew Effect (R > g), excels at creating and compounding private wealth. It is, by its very design, incapable of solving the problems of the “have-nots” or protecting them from the “Reverse Matthew Effect.”

Waiting for economic growth (g) to “trickle down” is not a solution; it’s a passive acceptance of the gap.

This is where the social sector and impact investing become critical. They are not charity in the old-fashioned sense. They are a tool for rebalancing.

Directing capital to social enterprises, non-profits, and community initiatives is a conscious choice to build buffers for the vulnerable. It’s about investing in resilience, creating opportunity where the market tends to see none, and building systems (like better housing, better education, and access to healthcare) that can potentially prevent tragedies like Kiteezi from re-occuring.

Governments must also adopt a more progressive tax policy to curb extreme wealth concentration and increase revenues to allocate more domestic investment into the social sector.

We, “the haves,” cannot insulate ourselves from the consequences of a world defined by this stark divide. Rebalancing the system isn’t just an act of compassion, it’s really an act of collective survival. It is the only way to defuse the ticking time bomb and build an economy and systems that offers true abundance, not just for a few, but for all.

“…to whom much is given, much is expected.” — Luke 12:48.

Notes & References

• Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Belknap Press, 2017.
• https://www.dw.com/en/uganda-learns-hard-lessons-from-fatal-garbage-landslide/a-69995224
• https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/ — a fascinating visual essay describing the same idea
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century
• It’s not lost on me, as I wrote this piece, that my name is “Matthew”, so maybe I have to provide a disclaimer, haha — I have no direct relation to this Effect…

What is Game Theory?

At its core, Game Theory is the study of strategic decision-making. Think of it like a game of chess. Your best move depends entirely on the move you expect your opponent to make. It’s a framework for analyzing situations where the outcome of your choices depends on the choices of others.

In any “game,” players want to maximize their payoffs, whether that payoff is money, power, or simply winning. Game Theory helps us understand why a rational person might make a seemingly irrational or immoral choice, simply because the rules and the other players’ expected actions make it the most logical move for them personally.

One of the most famous concepts in Game Theory is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and it perfectly illustrates the political trap Agnes Nandutu and others find themselves in.

Misaligned Incentives

At the core of this “displacement effect” is something very common in society - misaligned incentives. Because at the end of the day, governments are run by humans not robots. And humans respond to incentives.

Hence, when our leaders know that donors will keep funding public health, they will move that previously earmarked domestic funding for health, elsewhere e.g. To areas that that will win them votes in the next election cycle and secure their power.

So what can we do to align incentives?

Obviously the fix isn’t to just get rid of donors, which is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Instead, we need to change how donors give in 3 key ways:

1. Tie external donor funding to domestic co-financing efforts

2. Avoid siloed funding and prioritize system-wide support

3. Country ownership through a single-plan that donors plug into

1 Tie external donor funding to domestic co-financing efforts

Essentially, donors need to say, “We’ll give you $1, but only if you spend $1 too”.

Organizations like Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and others have been doing this for decades, and it works because instead of displacing domestic health spending, you incentive more of it by rewarding shared funding commitments - as part of a co-financing model.

2 Avoid siloed funding and prioritize system-wide support

To date, most donor funding tends to go into targeted vertical programs i.e. disease or population - specific programs (think HIV, Malaria, Immunization, etc…) that are mostly easy to measure and market.

But the problem is: That’s how you end up with health centers which can test for HIV and Malaria, but have no Panadol and no toilets for patients.

Hence, its important to take an integrated and health system wide approach to funding - that thinks of the health sector as an ecosystem of interconnected parts, because if we only fund the “marketable and sexy” parts, the whole thing will eventually collapse - like a house of cards.

3 Country ownership through a single coordinated plan that donors plug into

You can have all the resources (both financial and otherwise) in the world, but if you cannot coordinate and direct them towards impactful goals, then they’re useless. That’s actually (come to think of it) a key African problem, even beyond public health.

That’s why countries like Rwanda, that have managed to successfully implement donor coordination mechanisms are great role models of best-in-class examples of how public health programs financing should be done in Africa. Fundamentally, their system works like this:

1. The Rwandan Ministry of Health develops and costs their National Health Sector Strategic Plan based on sector-wide stakeholder consultations - particularly from the lower administrative units and community/village networks

2. They then use this single strategic plan as a resource mobilization tool by sharing it with donors for alignment

3. Donors then plug-into this single plan to close any funding gaps, based on shared priorities with the government

That’s the definition of country ownership. The Rwanda case is unique, not because other African countries haven’t tried similar coordination models - its unique because Rwanda’s approach is bottom-up and includes intensive consultation from communities and local governments, before its taken-up for central government and donor funding

When our government partners-up financially with donors the logical expectation is that their combined investments should increase the overall pool of resources available to enhance the public good i.e. “1 + 1” should be equal to “2”

But for many years that has not been the case in many African countries because of the displacement effect and other factors (which I’ll touch on in subsequent posts).

Hence, its imperative that we change this dynamic , going forward, through some of the ways I’ve proposed above, if we ever want to see real and sustained impact on the ground. I’ll leave you with the words of Baroness Dambisa Moyo :

No country has ever achieved economic success by depending on aid to the degree that many African countries do

References

• Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, 2023. Co-financing policy. Available at: https://www.gavi.org/programmes-impact/programmatic-policies/co-financing-policy [Accessed 10 August 2025].

• World Health Organization, 2024. Global Health Expenditure Database (GHED). Geneva: WHO. Available at: https://apps.who.int/nha/database [Accessed 10 August 2025]

• IHME, 2013. Global Health Metrics & Evaluation Conference on Health Financing. Seattle, WA: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Available at: https://youtu.be/c1Jlz9_TbMc?si=eygh-5LBbO8wUa-u [Accessed 10 August 2025]

• Parfait Uwaliraye et al., 2024. Rwanda’s Single Project Implementation Unit: An Effective Donor Coordination Platform in the Journey to Achieving Universal Health Coverage. Health Systems and Reforms, Vol. 10. Issue 3. Perspectives on implementing objective-oriented health reforms. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23288604.2024.2403527#abstract [Accessed 10 August 2025]

When Health Systems Fail Us

Most people think of the healthcare system in terms of Infrastructure, Budget allocations and Medical Personnel. But its really about whether your mother gets to come home. It’s about whether your neighbor dies quietly because they couldn’t afford their medication. That’s the really impact of a failing system.

Between 2012 and 2022, Uganda’s government health spending per person barely changed and has hovered around USD 10 per person, while this same measure doubled for our neighbors in Kenya ($21 to $42 per person) and Rwanda ($15 to $27 per person).

That stagnation in government health spending doesn’t show up in newspaper headlines, but it shows up in empty drug shelves, exhausted health workers, and mothers praying their child’s fever breaks because they can’t afford to treat it. In Uganda, when illness comes, debt is usually not far behind, and if debt doesn’t come, death just might…

In more advanced economies,seeking healthcare feels like being on a conveyor belt of a well oiled mechanical system, that just works like clock-work. Here, it feels like a gamble, between life and death.

Systems Do Exactly What They’re Designed To Do.

Our innate tendency is to assume failure comes from chaos or neglect. However, most of the time, systems work the way they were built. If the healthcare system leaves people behind, it’s because that’s how we’ve chosen (passively or otherwise) for it to function.

But its not all doom and gloom, here’s the hopeful part: Anything built by humans can be redesigned and rebuilt.

We could, for instance:

• Double down on prevention. High blood pressure and diabetes don’t need to be death sentences if we screen ourselves early and improve health education and sensitization. These are thought of as boring interventions, until they save someone you love.

• Align incentives. Since its human beings (specifically leaders) that make decisions about how resources are allocated, and these same leaders (politicians and industrialists) will only change if they are incentivized. We have to accept the simple fact that policy decisions and resource allocations are based more on political and economic incentives than social incentives, hence our focus should be on strategically aligning the three.

• Honor our promises. In 2001, Uganda and many other African countries committed to spending 15% of the national budget on health under the Abuja Declaration. We have never got close. To change the tide, that promise has to be kept because its an indicator of what we value and prioritize as a country: Health first, before everything else.

• Learn from Rwanda. Their national health insurance works. Ours doesn’t exist. Theirs proves it can be done. The only difference is values, priorities and execution.

What We’re Actually Talking About

This story isn’t about my mother. It’s not even about health.

It’s about about what the Ugandan Lawyer, David F.K. Mpanga, calls having a central nervous system to feel each others pain.

It’s about whether a nation believes that the poor deserve to live as much as the rich. It’s about the difference between life and death.

The poor in Uganda aren’t asking for miracles. They’re asking for the basics because in many cases, they’re paying for those basics out of pocket, at the exact moment they’re least able to afford them.

If we wait for a perfect solution, we’ll still be waiting for another ten years. However, small, clear, and immediate action could start rewriting this story tomorrow.

My mother lived because of $130. That number haunts me - not because it was expensive, but because, for too many people, it’s out of reach.

In the 21st Century, with modern medicine and science, that should never be the reason someone dies.

References

• https://apps.who.int/nha/database/Select/Indicators/en
• https://www.afro.who.int/publications/who-african-region-health-expenditure-atlas-2023-0
• https://x.com/dfkm1970/status/761468489206996993

References

1. https://www.bou.or.ug/bouwebsite/Statistics/index.html
2. https://x.com/mkainerugaba/status/1899204699208724671

Pre-Award

In the pre-award phase, an organisation should already be researching on or even asking the donor what their reporting requirements are like, and what expectations that particular donor has in terms of reporting and compliance. There are different kinds of donors ranging from multilateral, and bilateral institutions, private foundations and corporations, and each of these have very unique reporting and compliance requirements.

Project Team (HR) Mobilisation

The first thing for any organisation to have in place is the right people to deliver on the project supported by the grant funding. There should be clearly defined roles and responsibilities, including the reporting lines to ensure that every member of the team is aware of the role they play in project success.

Project Inception/Kick-off meeting

Once an organisation acquires new funding, it is imperative to organise an inception or kick-off meeting. This meeting should bring together staff from all the relevant departments, with the aim of familiarising with the grant agreement, discussing the expectations, dos and don’t with regards to the project. During this meeting, functions like programme, M&E, HR and finance are able to know what role they play for project success to be achieved. The compliance and reporting requirements should be adequately discussed to ensure understanding by all the different departments.

Reporting

It is important to develop a reporting schedule and share the reporting templates, both technical and financial with the programme, M&E and finance team members, so they can get an appreciation of them beforehand. In many cases, the templates are shared by the donor and they have clear guidance and description on what information is expected in certain sections, for instance key activities during the reporting period, achievements, challenges and lessons learnt. It is also important to take note of issues like word and character limits so as to keep the information within the donor’s requirements.

Communication

The organisation should have a clear line of communication with the donor. A focal point must be designated to make all relevant communication pertaining to the project and reporting with the donor. Regular communication and updates with the donor builds positive relationships and makes it easier to resolve any challenges you encounter in a timely manner. It is good for the donor to be kept abreast of key developments even before submission of reports.

Documentation

The keeping or storage of grant related materials and documents is a good practice that goes a long way to ease reporting and compliance. The important documentation pertaining to a project should be easily accessible by the project team members. An organisation can think of either having a centralised location or drive that can be used to store all relevant information pertaining to the project, right from grant agreements, reports, and communication or visibility materials.

The documentation of key activities as and when they happen, so that once a report is required, there is already something in draft state. This also makes it easier to recall events when they have just taken place and everything is fresh as opposed to waiting to burn the midnight oil many months down the road with pressing deadlines.