I always knew I was privileged, that I was in the position to help others and pursue whatever I wanted (in this case, all the work that I did for many years) without the pressure of desperately needing money for my basic needs.
Even though I got decent pay over the years, I was spending so much time in the field that I had nothing to spend my money on. When you are in the desert, there’s literally nothing to spend your money on.
On my final assignments, I had 150k units of money to spend on a project that invested in five communities, so each would get roughly 30k. We tried not to tell them but someone from the donor’s foundation told them and their expectations increased, even though I told them that I would do the investments as needed.
And then I moved to a rich country, a place where my little intersection of entrepreneurship and livelihoods doesn’t really exist, so I got to learn about both.
I volunteer as a project evaluator for a federation of small NGO’s, which get funding from the state. They don’t get much, but in comparison, they get around 200k (considering the exchange rates) in funding for very little effort. However, they complain and say that it is too much work for very little money. The per capita funding they get is more than seven times higher than what I used to get, and still their perception is one of lack instead of abundance. For someone who used to deal with the private sector and a never-ending list of requirements, my feeling is that they get everything too easily. Most (>80%) projects I read wouldn’t be approved by my donors. This is only a matter of perspective, it seems.
A while back I participated in an event in a “kitchen hub”, a social innovation project which supported small entrepreneurs who worked with food: small farmholders, small individual enterprises, etc. They did not yet know how to turn their project into something lucrative, and because salaries are much higher, the cost of labor is the biggest piece of the puzzle: how to compete with anything that comes from anywhere, if it comes for 15% of the price? Well, the state gave them over 2.5 million moneys to figure it out over the course of two years.
I have a really hard time understanding this logic, and I feel jealous, in a certain way, thinking about everything that I could have accomplished if I just had ten percent of the funding they get. Worse, they complain about not having enough support, either financial or administrative. This is probably the hardest thing to translate between cultures, because it is not related to knowledge: the NGOs, at least, know the field very well, but they just have higher expectations. It seems to me that it doesn’t matter if the funding they get is quite significant for that particular community where they work, usually in very poor, isolated places very similar to those where I have worked; because they are used to living around more money.
And that, well, is something I couldn’t quite figure out yet.