Moving into the private space: preparing ICARDA for Gulf philanthropy
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ICARDA is the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas. It is one of the research centres in the CGIAR network, the global partnership working on food security and agriculture. Its scientists work on the crops, water and soil that hold food systems together in some of the hardest places on earth.
Two things pushed ICARDA to look at private philanthropy.
Why ICARDA went looking
The first reason is money. ICARDA has always depended on institutional funders — governments, development agencies and multilateral bodies. That income has tightened, and sharply. Restricted project funding has fallen. Unrestricted funding, the kind that lets a research body set its own scientific agenda rather than follow someone else’s, is scarcer still. Every centre in the CGIAR network faces a version of this problem. For ICARDA, diversifying income stopped being a good idea and became a necessity.
The second reason is geography, and it is the more interesting one. ICARDA is not an outsider knocking on Gulf doors. It works across the Gulf and the wider MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region already. Dryland agriculture, water scarcity, drought-tolerant crops, degraded soils — these are the problems Gulf and MENA governments have written into their own national strategies. ICARDA’s research stations, partnerships and beneficiaries sit in the region. Its work supports food security for the countries where the wealth is.
That is a far stronger starting position than most international NGOs enjoy. It made the question worth asking properly. It did not answer it.
We ran the work with our partners at Giving Insight. Here is what we did, and what we think others can take from it.
We built a short prospect list, not a long one
Prospect research in the Gulf and MENA is hard. Many family offices and foundations keep no meaningful public profile. Websites are thin, out of date or not in English. Giving is often deliberately discreet, because Islamic tradition prizes modesty in charity.
That difficulty tempts organisations into the wrong response. They build a long list of wealthy names and call it a pipeline. It feels like progress and delivers nothing.
We went the other way. With Giving Insight we researched the market, then qualified hard. We stripped the list to individuals and foundations with genuine agricultural, food security or climate affinity, and with a plausible route in. The result was a small number of serious prospects. Some of the strongest affinity clusters sat outside the GCC core, in Morocco, Turkey and Egypt. That surprised people, and it was useful.
A prospect no one can reach is not a prospect. We said so.
We ran an Islamic Fundraising Readiness Assessment
Before anyone approaches a donor, the organisation has to be ready. So we built a structured diagnostic covering seven areas — strategic clarity, board and leadership activation, cultural and religious literacy, proposition strength, governance and risk, relationship infrastructure and organisational mindset.
Senior colleagues completed it individually. We aggregated the results and fed them back.
Two findings mattered. First, the team’s knowledge of the market was its strongest suit and its access to the market was its weakest. Understanding a donor culture and being able to reach into it are different things, and organisations routinely confuse them. Second, individual scores varied enormously. People in the same organisation held very different views of how ready it was. That gap is itself a risk, and it needs resolving before anyone books a flight.
We were careful about one point. The diagnostic measures perceived readiness. A high score means people feel ready. It is not evidence that the capability exists. We told ICARDA to be sceptical of their high scores as well as their low ones.
We explained how Islamic giving actually works
Most Western fundraisers know the words. Zakat. Sadaqah. Waqf. Far fewer know what those categories permit.
Zakat is largely closed to an institutional research centre. The asnaf categories and the requirement of tamleek — transfer of ownership to an eligible individual — rule out most research funding. Fundraisers who pitch a zakat proposition without checking this damage their credibility in the first meeting.
The realistic route for ICARDA is sadaqah jariyah, continuing charity. A drought-tolerant seed line that keeps feeding families for generations is a strong fit with that idea. It is a genuinely good proposition, and it is the right one.
But here is the part organisations underestimate. That framing needs credible scholarly endorsement. Sharia validation of the proposition materially changes donor confidence, and it has to be sought by leadership rather than asserted by fundraisers. An organisation that claims Islamic legitimacy for itself has claimed nothing. An organisation whose case has been examined and endorsed by a respected scholar has something a donor can act on.
Getting Islamic references wrong does active harm. Getting them right, and having that confirmed by someone with standing, opens a door.
We trained the fundraising and communications teams
Strategy without capability goes nowhere. We worked with ICARDA’s fundraising and comms colleagues on two things.
The first was the case for support. Scientific institutions describe their work in the language of programmes and outputs. Major donors fund specific, comprehensible outcomes with a cost, a result and a time horizon. We helped the team translate the science into a small number of fundable propositions, and to drop the deficit framing. Gap-filling appeals read as unambitious to this audience.
The second was engagement. In this market the event is a relationship setting, not a gala. Recognition often needs to be discreet. Cultivation runs over 18 to 36 months, not one financial year. We worked through what that means for donor journeys, materials and stewardship.
We briefed the senior team on their own role
This was the hardest session and the most important.
Gulf philanthropy is peer to peer. The director general and board members open doors that no fundraiser can open. They make the ask credibly in a way that functional staff cannot. Until named leaders commit to named prospects, and until the organisation sanctions the time this takes, the rest of the preparation cannot convert.
We set that out plainly to ICARDA’s leadership, with a sequenced checklist of what has to happen first, what follows and what can wait. Some of it was uncomfortable. That was the point.
John Lindon, ICARDA’s Head of Partnerships and Resource Mobilization, put it this way:
"The insights Bernard provided were incredibly useful to help us to prepare for how we could diversify our income by accessing Gulf-based private fundraising"
What we would say to anyone looking at the Gulf
Do not start with the money. Start with three questions:
- Who in our leadership can genuinely reach these people?
- Is our proposition specific enough for someone to fund it?
- Are we prepared to spend two years before we see a gift?
If the answers are weak, the market is not the problem. Readiness is. That is fixable, and it is far cheaper to fix before the first approach than after it.
More about us
=mc consulting works with cultural, scientific and international organisations on fundraising strategy, major gifts and behavioural science.
If you are weighing up the Gulf and MENA, we are happy to give you an honest view. Get in touch with us through Bernard Ross at .