Strategic Responses by Farm Concern International to Declining Donor Funding

Abstract

Organizational strategy entails assessing where an organization is, where it supposed to go, and determining how it will get there. Strategic management is therefore concerned with the tactful response by Organisations to the ambiguity of expected and unexpected environmental changes. There is no one universal approach to strategic management. Since management is context specific, Organisations conduct strategic management as per requirement customization. NGOs operating within the developing countries, have faced turbulent environmental changes. They have been forced to constantly plan for strategic positioning especially due to the rate at which grants from donors are reducing. The objective of the study was to investigate the strategic response to the environmental change of declining donor funding by Farm Concern International. The specific objectives were to analyze donor funding patterns at Farm Concern International and the effects of the patterns on operations, and to understand the strategies adopted by F.C.I in response to the declining donor funding. This research took the form of a case study. The procedure for data collection was through interviews. The respondents were the Strategy and Innovations associate director and the senior programmes manager at Farm Concern International. An interview guide was utilized to collect data. Most questions were open ended and qualitative in nature. The right question structure was optimized response rate. Content analysis was used to decode the data into relevant information. This was done through systematic observation of texts with the intention of depicting meaningful patterns. In this study, valid inferences were made by interpretation and systematic evaluation of data. This method was best suited for the study because it allowed for direct interaction with the data collected and thereby give the central aspect of the phenomena in question. This study’s finding will go a long way in ensuring that the economic growth of low income earners in Kenya is taken into consideration during development of such strategies. Despite there being a general understanding of what strategic management practice is among FCI staff, there is still a need to enhance the understanding of strategic management process among the strategy formulators and implementers. This kind of capacity building will not only bring the expected deliverables to fruition ,but will also ensure that they are constantly aware of the possible environmental shifts that are likely to pose a risk to the organization’s relevance.