Donors

On an international level, Diakonia mainly aim its fundraising efforts towards larger institutional donors, global trust funds and private foundations. Grants are normally acquired either under competitive call for proposals, through invited proposals to private foundations, or through continuous dialogue with bilateral donors.

Approximately one third of Diakonia’s annual turnover is constituted by contributions from the Swedish appropriation for civil society organisations (the CSO frame), managed by Sida (the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency). Another two fifths of our annual turnover constitutes of grant agreements with a number of Swedish embassies in the field.

Except for grant agreements with Sida and the Swedish embassies, Diakonia implement contracts with EU delegations, UN agencies, private foundations, international CSOs, and other bilateral donors.

Our aspiration when striving to raise more diversified funds on the international level is that no donor will provide more than 50 percent of our annual turnover.

One objective of our international fundraising is to maximize success in mobilising resources for our southern partner organizations and Diakonia’s programmes by being efficient and transparent in our efforts. Another objective is to contribute to Diakonia’s long-term organizational and financial sustainability of our program activities with local partners.

While aiming for these objectives, we believe that it is of utmost importance to collaborate with other agencies and partners in applications, program development and policy advocacy on global development funding instruments.

We strive to coordinate in such a way as to build the local resource mobilisation capacity of our southern partners and to achieve higher efficiency our awareness raising efforts, fundraising and campaigning work in the north.

When we raise funds on the international level our work is guided by our framework for global fundraising, internal guidelines, as well as our regional and country level strategy plans.

We work closely with like-minded organisations and other strategic partners on capacity building and experience-sharing on institutional fundraising and program development.

Through our networks, we aim to inform and influence the European Commission, EU delegations as well as the UN agencies about the need for further simplification and harmonization of donor rules and regulations, as well as for the ongoing struggle to secure democratic and political space for local CSOs to take active part in local development work.