Five Days in Machakos Looked Like This..

We had fourteen sessions across all the days. Public Sector Institutions and Private Organizations sent representatives and by Friday afternoon, 92.9% of participants voted that the workshop met their expectations.

That number, as interesting as is, what happened inside the sessions is the part of the week that we want to bring you in on.

And the workshop began,

Dr. Edwin Wanyonyi the Universities Fund CEO opened our Keynote session on Tuesday morning. His converstion was from three questions he said every fundraiser in the public sector must be able to answer without hesitation..

Why would someone invest in us?

What difference will that investment make?

And why are we best placed to deliver results?

These "simple questions" are some that others cannot answer all three with confidence and that gap is right where funding relationships begin to break down.

His keynote set the tone for everything that followed: the future public institution is financially resilient, technology-enabled, partnership-driven, and working from diversified revenue streams. The current reality for most is the opposite, that is, high public debt, limited fiscal space, growing service delivery pressures, and shrinking donor support.

This entire week was about closing that gap practically.

The Art of Getting Money and Proving It Worked

We spent the rest of Tuesday with the National Treasury, walking participants through resource mobilisation as a professional discipline. This was ataken from an institutional mandate perspective that requires structured planning, a clear project pipeline, and a monitoring framework built around the specific KPIs of public sector work.

One conclusion we kept returning to: funding follows alignment. Institutions that don't speak the language of national development priorities, SDGs, and donor compliance frameworks are the ones are getting overlooked, regardless of the quality of their work, while others are getting funded.

The session on Performance Monitoring Frameworks made something explicit that we had not fully disected in our previous June workshop. Most institutions track project outputs. Very few track resource mobilisation performance. The pipeline, the conversion rates, the quality of donor relationships over time..... one participant put it in their feedback: "I realised that we focus so much on project monitoring but forget that resource mobilisation monitoring is equally important."

Building the Infrastructure

Wednesday had wisdom packed from PPRA, and the conversation shifted from what to monitor to how to build the systems that make monitoring possible.

Fundraising is about clarity, relationships, credibility and consistent impact. The organisations that attract funding repeatedly are the ones that have built the internal infrastructure to support all four; governance structures, integrated reporting mechanisms, RM policies, and the ability to negotiate with development partners from a position of knowledge rather than desperation to bag the funds.

We went through the RM cycle = Plan, Act, Reflect... and the six-step engagement process from identification to communication of results. 

Dr. Wanyonyi returned in the afternoon to tackle one of the most undervalued skills in the sector: translating raw RM data into something a Board, a National Treasury official, or a donor can actually read and act on. Data without narrative is just numbers. The session focused on how to build the narrative using evidence frameworks and storytelling approaches that build donor confidence without obscuring the truth.

The Compliance Reality

Thursday was not expected to bring on heat the way it did. Timothy Odipo from the National Treasury spent the morning on cross-departmental coordination and compliance and he was not gentle about the risks. Manual systems, parallel spreadsheets, unregistered donor accounts, and delayed reporting are not just administrative inconveniences. Under the PFM Act, they are statutory violations with real consequences.

His framing stuck: "If your metrics are not automated, your compliance parameters are inherently exposed."

The afternoon hands-on clinic on accountability dashboards brought the concept to life. Participants worked through how to build a dashboard that tracks pipeline health, conversion rates, and partnership value and how to connect those outputs to Board presentations and donor briefings in a way that demonstrates institutional credibility rather than just reporting compliance.

A few things the session made non-negotiable: IFMIS reconciliation at 100%, bi-annual pre-audits of all donor-funded project files, and live dashboards reviewed monthly by senior leadership not static PDFs sent to a committee once a year.

The Friday Lab

The final morning was structured around this question to oneself: what will you actually do differently?

We were led through an institutional RM strategy and monitoring lab working session. Each participant built a one-page RM dashboard for their own institution, identifying three institutional priorities, the resource gap for each, potential financing sources, five priority RM actions, and a 90-day action plan with named responsible officers.

The closing principle from that session is still with us even right now; that "The ultimate measure of RM is not how much an institution raises. It is how effectively the resources mobilised advance the institutional mandate and create public value."

What Participants Said They Were Taking Home

"The RM diagnosis I applied for my institution showed there is so much I need to do and that is the place and point to start."

"I realised RM is for all staff and not just the partnerships team."

"Having a dashboard, building my pipeline, these are the things I am going back to implement."

"Institutionalise resource mobilisation through key policy documents."

The sessions voted best by most participants were the 30-60-90 day action planning, the RM diagnosis exercise, & the dashboard clinic that came up consistently. The practical, hands-on work that gave people alot to carry back for practice the following Monday.

Average rating of the workshop was 4.86 out of 5.

What Comes Next

The 32nd Eastern Africa Resource Mobilisation Workshop 2026 is coming to Mombasa 30th November to 4th December 2026 at PrideInn Paradise Beach Resort, Shanzu.

The theme: Unlocking African Agency: Owning the Future of Resource Mobilisation.

Five days on the Kenyan coast for the Continent's Resource Mobilisation Community to read the new funding landscape, rebuild strategy in bespoke masterclasses, and take practical hold of AI, climate finance, blended finance, and the fast-rising worlds of high-net-worth, diaspora, and next-generation giving.

EARLY BIRD TICKETS ARE OPEN ONLY FOR SEPTEMBER!! 

🎟 KAFP Members: KES 76,000 | Non-Members: KES 86,000

After september rates revert to regular price;

KAFP Members: KES 86,000 | Non-Members: KES 96,000

Group Discounts are Available. For inquries kindly reach-out to  0718 041 665 / 0790 213 130 / +254 143 031 925 or info@fundraisingkenya.org.