Defining Clear Objectives

A strategy used by several development initiatives to become more self-sustainable is defining clear objectives.

Many projects increase their self-sustainability by clearly defining their mission and objectives because this allows their participants to better distribute their roles and responsibilities, communicate with each other, and carry out their tasks more effectively. Internally, clarity of objectives helps all participants support each other without duplicating efforts. In addition, having clear goals helps initiatives better choose the role they want to adopt to address a specific development problem (such as network orchestrators, incubators, etc.), make better use of their resources and identify the strategies they can use to plan and build their self-sustainability. 

Many initiatives have found it useful to clearly define their mission and objectives in order to systematize their projects and evaluate them more effectively. Others have focused on clearly explaining why their proposal is worthwhile to potential donors, how they can contribute and what the impact of each contribution would be –all of which has helped them attract more donations, collaborations, voluntary contributions and resources of all kinds that allow them to diversify their support so as not to depend on a single source. In addition, having clear objectives helps some initiatives promote themselves and differentiate their model from other projects’, so that potential collaborators better understand what they are trying to do and why the initiative is original and worth supporting. When an initiative’s mission and direction are not clear, their work runs the risk of not bearing fruit, participation can become difficult to organize and the project as a whole becomes less transparent. 

To achieve clarity of objectives, some initiatives design spaces or mechanisms that help them better systematize their model and define objectives accordingly (annual plans, focus meetings, evaluations, etc.). Still others decide to organize diagnostic and participatory activities or dynamics with their different stakeholders to clearly and publicly define objectives with the help of a diversity of opinions and points of view.