Articles by Rajat Ray
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Guest Articles
Monday
August 3
2026Learning from the Corporate Playbook: Why NGOs Must Claim a Niche to Survive the Aid Recession
Global aid funding has dropped dramatically in recent years, while private sector funding in low-and middle-income countries has risen sharply. According to social innovations advisor Rajat Ray, this is not a temporary shift but a fundamental restructuring of how global development will be financed. He explores what this new reality means for NGOs and other grant-seeking organizations, arguing that unlocking private capital will require them to adopt the corporate principles of strategic positioning and niche specialization, shifting from broad thematic focus areas to high-impact, technical interventions that target specific needs.
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Guest Articles
Monday
June 1
2026Grant Dependency is Undermining Global Development: Here’s a Fundamentally New Architecture for Funding NGOs
Across the Global South, NGOs often function as the default conduits for addressing key development challenges in remote and marginalized populations. But as long-time development sector advisor Rajat Ray argues, these systemic problems cannot be solved by organizations that are perpetually teetering on the edge of financial suffocation, propped up by short-term, project-based grants. He explains how the survival tactics NGOs adopt to navigate this funding dilemma end up warping their operations and perpetuating some of the sector's biggest shortcomings. In response, he proposes an entirely new funding model — the “Diminishing Grant Framework” — that treats self-reliance not as an aspiration, but as a mandatory financial milestone.
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