The Reporting Gap: Is the "Good Work" Enough to Keep Your Donor..?

It goes without saying, something has shifted in the donor landscape and public institutions across Kenya and East Africa are feeling it without always being able to name it.

The programmes are running, the communities are being served, and yet, renewal conversations are harder. Disbursements are slower because partners who seemed committed are suddenly difficult to reach. In some cases, funding that looked secure simply does not come back.

The problem, more often than not, is the proof and how to present it.

The Old Reporting Contract Is Broken

For decades, the relationship between public institutions and development partners operated on a relatively straightforward reporting model. You submitted a narrative report, a financial statement, and a list of outputs, ie number of people trained, kilometres of road built, clinics supplied. The donor reviewed it, filed it, and the relationship continued.

That model is changing, faster than most institutions realise.

The shift is being driven by several converging pressures. Donor governments and foundations are under their own scrutiny. Parliaments, boards, and taxpayers in donor countries are demanding proof of impactas per just activity. International accountability frameworks like the Grand Bargain, the OECD DAC principles, and the Sustainable Development Goals have raised the bar for what "demonstrating results" actually means. And in an environment of shrinking aid budgets and increasing competition for a smaller pool of funding, donors are making harder choices, making them based on evidence.

A 2023 survey by Publish What You Fund found that a majority of major bilateral donors now require grantees to submit structured results data instead of narrative updates, as a condition of continued funding. The World Bank, the European Union, USAID, and bilateral partners including Germany, Sweden, and the UK have all updated their results frameworks in the last five years, placing significantly greater emphasis on outcome-level accountability rather than output tracking alone.

For public institutions in Kenya and across East Africa, this is a structural challenge amd not a capacity one.

The Structural Gap We Aren't Talking About

Most public institutions in Kenya are failing to report effectively because the systems that should connect resource mobilisation, programme delivery, finance, and monitoring functions were never built to talk to each other.

Finance produces one set of numbers. Programmes produces another. M&E produces a third. Legal manages compliance in isolation. And when a donor asks for a unified accountability report, one document that ties funding inputs to programme outcomes, tracks pipeline health, and demonstrates institutional governance, nobody owns that document. It falls to whoever has the most time, is assembled under pressure, and almost never tells the story the institution actually deserves to tell.

This is the reporting gap that is costing institutions funding they legitimately earned.

The Kenya National Audit Office has flagged fragmented institutional reporting as a recurring governance risk in successive audit reports. Development partners operating in Kenya including the World Bank, UN agencies, and bilateral partners have increasingly cited weak accountability frameworks as a factor in funding decisions, particularly at the point of grant renewal.

Across the broader East African region, the picture is similar. A 2024 analysis by the East Africa Philanthropy Network noted that many locally led organisations and public institutions are producing work of genuine quality but are unable to communicate it in ways that satisfy modern donor accountability standards, hence creating a credibility gap that affects renewal rates and limits access to new funding relationships.

Donors Are Looking For..?

Understanding what has changed requires understanding how donors now think about accountability.

Modern institutional donors are not simply asking: did you spend the money correctly? They are asking a more layered set of questions. "Did the funding achieve what it was designed to achieve..?" and "can you prove that with structured data? Is your institution building the internal systems to sustain this work beyond our grant period? Is your governance credible enough that we can defend our investment to our own oversight bodies?" And critically, "if we invest more, are we confident the systems exist to manage it?"

These questions demand a different kind of reporting infrastructure, the kind of integrated systems that track resource mobilisation performance in real time, dashboards that give leadership a clear picture of pipeline health and conversion rates, cross-departmental reporting workflows that eliminate duplication and close compliance gaps, and the capacity to translate raw data into strategic communication outputs that speak to development partners simultaneously.

For many public institutions, building this infrastructure has felt like something for the next strategic plan cycle, or after the current grant is delivered. The evidence increasingly suggests it is not a luxury. It is the entry cost for sustained funding relationships in the current environment.

The Localisation Agenda Adds a New Layer

There is an additional dimension worth naming one that is particularly relevant for the East African context.

Donors committed to localisation have made meaningful progress like direct funding to local organisations, which has increased across several major bilateral programmes, and frameworks like USAID's Local Capacity Strengthening Policy and the EU's Team Europe approach, which have created new entry points for African public institutions.

But localisation has also raised the accountability bar in a specific way. When a bilateral donor directs funding to a local public institution rather than routing it through an international NGO, they need to be able to demonstrate to their own oversight bodies that the accountability systems are in place. The implicit expectation that is often not stated directly is that the receiving institution must be able to report with the same rigour as the international implementing partner it is replacing.

For Kenyan and East African public institutions, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is legit because the funding is there, the political will exists, and the demand for locally led solutions has never been higher. The challenge is that winning the funding is no longer the hardest part. Keeping it by demonstrating results in the language donors need is where many of us might be struggling.

Close the Gap!!

The institutions that are navigating this well share a few common characteristics.

They treat resource mobilisation as an institutional function and not a departmental one. Finance, Programmes, Legal, and M&E are all part of the RM conversation from the beginning of a programme cycle.

They invest in monitoring frameworks that are built around their RM function specifically, tracking pipeline health, conversion rates, partnership sustainability, and grant utilisation metrics that give leadership a real-time picture of institutional performance.

They have developed the internal capacity to translate data into strategic communication which produces reports that speak simultaneously to the accountability requirements of a Board presentation, a National Treasury briefing, and a donor's technical review team.

And they approach donor relationships as long-term partnerships, with the understanding that the quality of the accountability conversation in itself is a form of resource mobilisation. Every credible report is an argument for the next grant.

None of this happens automatically. It is built deliberately, institutionally, and with the right frameworks in place.

Conversations we Must Have.

KAFP's work in the public sector resource mobilisation space has consistently surfaced one finding above all others: the institutions that struggle most with donor retention are not only the ones doing the weakest work. Often its the ones doing genuinely strong work but they lack the systems to prove it in the way the current funding environment demands.

This is a solvable problem but solving it requires moving the conversation to a more structural territory of accountability systems, integrated reporting frameworks, and the communication strategies that translate institutional performance into sustained funding relationships.

That is the conversation the sector needs to be having, and it is the one Kenya's public institutions can afford to delay no longer.

The Kenya Association of Fundraising Professionals (KAFP) is the professional membership body for resource mobilisation and fundraising practitioners in Kenya. KAFP hosts the Annual Public Sector workshops, and professional development programmes for fundraising professionals across East Africa and beyond.

The 2nd Public Sector Resource Mobilisation Workshop | "Communicating and Monitoring Your Resource Mobilisation Success," takes place 24th to 28th August 2026 at Kyaka Hotel, Machakos.

Registration is open at REGISTRATION LINK.

For membership and upcoming events: www.fundraisingkenya.org