Defining the Project's Role

One strategy used by several development initiatives to become more self-sustainable is to define the appropriate role for their project.

The role that an initiative adopts to address the problem it is working on has very important implications on the way its project is designed and its funds are planned and managed, as well as the handling of other aspects that have to do with increasing its self-sustainability. For this reason, several initiatives reflect on and make decisions about what they want to do with the problem they are addressing. Some projects decide to lay the foundations for eradicating the problem in the future, while others prefer to grow and become major service providers, and still others aim to devise and experiment with solutions that others can replicate elsewhere. 

There are several roles an initiative can opt for:

• Creator of Demonstration Models. This role consists of designing, testing and adapting specific proposals to solve development problems. These initiatives then go on to demonstrate their proposal’s effectiveness and collaborate with actors with more capacity to scale or replicate it in other places or for the benefit of different populations.
• Network Orchestrator. This role is all about coordinating and facilitating the means for different projects, initiatives or actors to collaborate to meet specific objectives. 
• Local Capacity Builder. Projects that take on this role focus on strengthening and training beneficiary communities so that they can eventually take ownership and control of the initiatives themselves.
• Incubators. These seek to promote and support projects with social objectives similar or complementary to their own -educational, environmental, and so on– and provide resources or training to strengthen and solidify their proposals and broaden their impact.
• Fundraising and Crowdfunding Hub. These projects are focused on raising funds to financially support different initiatives with social causes similar or complementary to their own and, in some cases, offer mechanisms and training to help them obtain resources.

According to some initiatives’ experience when choosing a role, it may be useful to ask oneself who is responsible for solving the social problem at hand (the initiative, the State, the communities?), who has the greatest capacity to sustain the project effectively in the long term, and who has the capacity to scale it to reach other regions or populations.