What makes a CSI commitment work past the first year

South African corporates settle most education commitments in the last quarter, and the conversations I have in October are different from the ones I have in March. A manager finalising a budget is deciding what she will still be defending in two years’ time, which is a harder question than which proposal reads best.

In my experience, four things separate a programme still running in year three from one that stopped without saying so.

The programme has to work without its founder in the room

An intervention that depends on a charismatic facilitator delivers well and doesn’t survive contact with scale. The test, for me, is whether a teacher can run the practice again on a Tuesday with a script and a page, without the organisation present. We design against that test because we can’t be in every classroom; a funder should ask for the answer rather than assume it.

The measurement has to exist before the money does

A programme that plans to work out its evaluation later tends to produce a year-two report full of activity counts. Numbers of workshops delivered and teachers reached describe effort, not effect. It’s worth agreeing at signature what will be measured, from what sample, and by what date, because retrofitting an evaluation onto a completed year is a way of proving nothing; I say that as someone who has had to learn it.

Somebody outside the programme has to check it

Self-evaluation is necessary, and it isn’t sufficient. kolab. is endorsed through internal moderation by JET Education Services, which means a serious institution has examined our content and our approach; it doesn’t mean an independent body has certified our outcomes. Knowing which of those two a partner has, and writing it into the agreement in accurate words, prevents an uncomfortable conversation in year two.

The relationship has to survive a bad quarter

Every multi-year programme has a term where engagement drops. Ours did. A pilot of ours, a project we conducted in KwaZulu-Natal, ran into connectivity limits and a mid-year fall in engagement, and we documented both in the report we sent to funders rather than raising them in a conversation afterwards. A partner who tells you about the bad quarter while it’s happening is a partner you can plan around; a partner who reports only the good terms is managing you rather than the programme.

None of these four is about the size of the commitment. A modest programme meeting all four outlasts a large one meeting none, and I know which of the two I’d rather sign.

If you are finalising an education budget this quarter and want to test a proposal against these, mine included, the questions work on any partner.