There was no structure to inherit
What it takes to turn a donor-managed project into an institution that can carry its own weight.
When a donor-managed project becomes an independent institution, the org chart is the easy part.
When the Kosmos Innovation Center spun out of donor management, there was no operating structure to inherit. Projects run on someone else’s systems: their approvals, their procurement rules, their reporting calendar. Take that away and you discover how much of the institution was actually borrowed.
So we built one. Governance, processes, partnerships, reporting. I also contributed the proposal work that secured sixteen million dollars from the Mastercard Foundation, which mattered less as a number than as a deadline: money that size arrives with obligations you cannot meet on goodwill and shared drives.
The lesson I keep from it is that institutions are made of defaults. What happens when nobody is watching. Who can approve five thousand dollars and who cannot. Where a participant record lives, and who is allowed to change it. Write those down and you have an institution. Leave them to memory and you have a group of capable people improvising, which works right up until the people change.
The second lesson is that structure and software have to be designed together. We did not write processes and then find tools to hold them. We designed the operating system as we designed the operating model, so the approvals in the policy and the approvals in the system were the same approvals. That is the difference between a policy document and a working institution.
It is unglamorous work and it does not photograph well. It is also the reason the organization can now run programs, report to funders, and hire, without a donor’s back office underneath it.