Yes, ‘passports’ can give local partners a holiday from red tape: but real partnership demands much more

Nowhere was the deadening effect of traditional NGO due diligence approaches more evident than at the start of the Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Although huge resources were raised after the Russian invasion, they took far too long to reach Ukrainian civil society because of inefficient and duplicating compliance processes. And that compliance burden became an obstacle, which ended up excluding many volunteer organisations.

One solution? An independent due diligence platform that enables civil society organisations to demonstrate their compliance, rather than waiting for and going through a separate process for every new donor and INGO.

Liubov Rainchuk, who co-founded the Philanthropy in Ukraine online platform, calls it Ukraine’s “first independent due diligence platform for non-profits”. The platform verifies Ukrainian civil society organisations, allowing them to bypass bureaucratic bottlenecks. It was, she says, developed in close collaboration with international donors, to set “new standards of transparency and accountability.”

Independent verification offers grant makers a kind of certification. They can partner with a pool of organisations with the assurance that all have gone through common due diligence processes. The approach has been so successful that the German government is now making access to its €11m Help Localisation Facility in Ukraine conditional on organisations joining the platform.

The platform is a good real-life example of what has become known as passporting: where INGOs or donors recognise each other’s processes to reduce duplication and complexity.

One donor that has taken big steps in trialling due diligence passporting is the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), which made the groundbreaking decision to recognise organisations certified under the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS) by HQAI (the Humanitarian Quality Assurance Initiative).

These organisations, which meet rigorous quality and accountability criteria under the standard, now benefit from a light-touch due diligence process when seeking FCDO funding, considerably reducing their paperwork and speeding up their access to grants.

At a recent BOND meeting, the FCDO joined donors, civil society organisations and INGOs to discuss how passporting might work, and what gaps will be left after passporting becomes the norm.

Linda Sloan, Senior Due Diligence Advisor at FCDO, described several advantages over existing assessment processes for quality and accountability. The CHS passporting provides:

• greater levels of assurance with assessment by trained auditors
• being able to test evidence through interviews with employees and supported populations
• continuous review and follow-up.

The move provides value for money as it saves duplication, and it helps FCDO meet its Grand Bargain Commitments on localisation. The FCDO’s next challenge is to expand this approach, including with multilateral organisations.

Another pioneering scheme was cited by Gerhard Buttner, Partnership and Civil Society Engagement Advisor at Christian Aid and Co-Chair for the Charter for Change group. The group has developed and piloted a Due Diligence Passporting Tool.

Working with Humentum, 7 INGOs piloted this tool with over 40 partners in 9 countries. The INGOs agreed to honour each other’s processes and tested a flexible, compatible tool to reduce the burden of compliance on partners, and increase simplicity, collaboration and trust.

In the pilot, they found the tool works best with partners engaging with more than one INGO and it provides space for joint assessment and capacity planning. It did take INGOs additional time to complete the tool particularly if transferring data from previous assessments but overall they found it could help reduce the compliance burden on partners if more widely adopted.

Increasingly, agencies are adapting to the tool. Gerhard called for more agencies to get involved and to try and avoid the irony of “more duplication of efforts aiming to avoid duplication"!

So far, so good. But meeting participants also stressed how passporting alone will not create the genuine equity and dialogue necessary for successful partnerships.

Jan Bouwman, Partnership Broker for Oxfam GB described how Oxfam is looking to create deep and tailored partnerships – and indeed, such work will still be needed even if passporting becomes the norm. In fact, real partnership in the future will demand INGOs and funders do more, not less.

Traditional approaches to partnerships are often top-down, one-size-fits-all, centred on risk, and require accountability in one direction only: from partners to INGOs and donors.

To counter this, Jan has helped to create CAPAS, Oxfam’s Collaborative and Adaptive Partnering approach, which seeks to be collaborative and co-created, aware of power, context specific, and adaptable, and focuses on the opportunity of partnership, building trust and mutual accountability.

Initiatives like CAPAS change the way we think about assessing a partner: rather than assessing them alone, we should be assessing the partnership as a whole. For instance, we should ask how the collaboration between the INGO and the partner in this context is going to keep people safe rather than just asking a partner for its safeguarding policy.

This challenges the idea that due diligence passporting is enough for a partnership. The skills and needs that this particular INGO and partner are bringing to the table together are a unique mix and cannot readily be passported to a different INGO and a different piece of work.

The key is to use passporting to save duplication as a first step to partnership assessment. What due diligence passporting looks like for Jan is an iron commitment for INGOs to read every partner policy or available assessment before beginning any conversation about assessing the partnership.

Similarly, for Linda Sloan at the FCDO, CHS verification passporting does not remove the need for colleagues to ask specific questions related to the particular piece of work the partner is contemplating. As she explains it, “Colleagues use the HQAI report to ask the right questions to understand the context and risks of a particular programme and what we can do about them together”.

Linda argues we should reframe due diligence as much more than a checkbox and as a way of measuring positive potential. “Due diligence is often thought about in negative terms. In fact, it is also about recognising all the benefits of working with that partner in terms of what that partner can bring to the community.”

It seems passports will be vital in reducing repetitive assessments – but they are not a rubber stamp: the work of deep conversation and trust building between partner and INGO will be just as important and necessary as ever.

Dominic Vickers is UK Partnerships Advisor for Oxfam GB