Why collective efforts falter — and how to make them work better

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‍Collaboration is emerging as a strategic imperative in India’s development sector — but translating that intent into practice is anything but simple. Despite shared visions and aligned goals, many partnerships stumble over the same hurdles: unclear roles, power imbalances, fragmented accountability, and the emotional labour of "holding it all together."

The inaugural session of the “Collab Matters” webinar series, titled When Good Intentions Collide: The Hidden Challenges of Collaboration in India, convened thought leaders and practitioners from across India’s development ecosystem to examine why collective efforts often falter and identify practical strategies to make them more effective. Hosted by the Saamuhika Shakti Collective Impact (CI) Initiative, with Sattva Consulting as the backbone organization, this webinar was designed to surface candid insights on the nuanced barriers to scale, alignment, and sustainability that funders, NGOs, governments, and business partners face when working together.

On July 30, 2025, attendees tuned in from philanthropic foundations, social enterprises, academic institutions, networks and grassroots organisations. This session was moderated by Aarti Mohan, Co-Founder and Partner, Sattva Consulting. The panel featured:

• Anushree Parekh, Associate Director, Social Finance, British Asian Trust 
• Namrata Agarwal, Director - Partnerships, Quest Alliance 
• VK Madhavan, Chief Executive, WaterAid India 
• Ashif Shaikh, Co-Founder, Jan Sahas

The discussion unfolded around three rounds of questions, moving from unpacking challenges multi-stakeholder partnerships face around specific themes, to placing these within the Indian context, and finally concluding with actionable insights for the audience from each panelist. 

Watch the video on YouTube:

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Notes from the Webinar

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Unpacking challenges of collaborations: Panelists explored the hidden hurdles that often arise in collaborative efforts, handicapping initiatives and undoing much of the goodwill, intent, and momentum that bring diverse actors together, and offered practical ways to overcome these challenges and sustain the collaborative effort.

• The challenge of misalignment: Anushree Parekh (British Asian Trust) identified three key challenges that cause collaboration to derail, primarily surrounding misalignment. The first issue is the clash of organizational priorities. While good intent brings partners together, each group arrives with different objectives, constraints (like funding or time), and expectations. Finding a common solution that satisfies everyone's individual needs for the problem, solution, and outcomes is rarely simple.
  
  Secondly, the regulatory landscape adds complexity. Rules governing CSR compliance and nonprofit governance often impose limitations that force collaborators into constraints that do not fully align with their shared mission.
  
  Finally, even when facing the same issue, partners often have a diversity of understanding. For example, in education, one partner may focus on access while another focuses on equity or learning outcomes. Though these varied perspectives can enrich the solution, they significantly slow alignment, requiring substantial time and effort to negotiate a shared definition of the problem and the most meaningful path forward.
  
  BAT works towards tackling alignment challenges upfront by investing six to nine months in co-creating a governance charter. This charter lays out shared values and outcomes, sets partner-specific targets, and clarifies decision-making authority—ensuring clarity from the start and avoiding endless debates over metrics.
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  • When discussing the funder's role and trust-based funding in collaboratives, Anushree stressed that outcome clarity must be the priority. Funders need to spend time upfront defining precise outcomes, beyond just purpose. She exemplified this by asking whether the goal is youth merely entering jobs, staying in jobs, or accessing better-quality jobs.
  • To get there, she suggested using frameworks like collective impact or outcomes-based financing, which offer a structured blueprint for alignment on roles, decision-making, and conflict resolution. Partnerships, she said, are both art and science — the art of human connection and the science of systems.‍
  • Trust, in her view, doesn’t emerge in a vacuum; it requires “scaffolding.” This scaffolding rests on three pillars: governance (clear rules of decision-making and representation), contracts (well-documented agreements on roles and responsibilities), and data (transparent sharing of information, used to build trust, not police partners).
  • She cautioned against rushing into collaboratives. Time invested in alignment and building these structures pays off in the long run—as demonstrated in the Skill Impact Bond, which took nine months to set up but has since seen smooth execution over four years.
  • Finally, she underlined the crucial role of a backbone organization, one accountable to outcomes and community benefit rather than to individual stakeholders or power dynamics. This combination — outcome clarity, structured scaffolding, patience, and a principled backbone — is what allows collaboratives to grow into truly trust-based partnerships.

• Growing and scaling challenges: Ashif Shaikh (Jan Sahas) explained how the Migrant Resilience Collaborative (MRC) was born in the aftermath of the first COVID-19 wave. With over 200 million migrant workers in the country, Jan Sahas and partners realized that no single organization could address the scale of need. MRC therefore set up a large-scale, multi-stakeholder platform—engaging nonprofits, worker unions, private sector companies, government bodies, and community institutions—to ensure comprehensive support both at source (home) and destination (working place).

• Identity dilution and equity: Namrata Agarwal (Quest Alliance) drawing from her dual experience as both an anchor and participant, provided key insights into the challenges of power, identity, and equity within collaboratives. An early struggle involved organizational identity: staff sometimes identified more with the project than their parent organization, leading to the realization that successful collaboration requires adopting a neutral, collective identity. Furthermore, language proved crucial for inclusion; in states like Bihar and Jharkhand, the deliberate shift to bilingual communication (Hindi alongside English) helped local organizations feel equally valued and dismantled subtle signals of power imbalance, despite the added effort.
  
  Another important theme she highlighted was equity among funders and partners, noting that hierarchies can creep in even among donors. In one collaborative, this was actively countered by treating all donors equally, listing them alphabetically regardless of funding size to reinforce collective ownership. She also stressed that power dynamics exist among NGOs themselves (large vs. local). To ensure smaller groups could contribute and that the collaborative didn't just become a donor agenda, facilitators played a vital role in balancing these internal dynamics.
  
  Finally, Namrata highlighted an ongoing tension: the battle over roles, visibility, and value. Questions frequently arise concerning access to negotiation tables, resource allocation, and whether ground-level implementation is valued equally to policy advocacy. For a truly equitable collaborative to function, she argued, all roles must be recognized as equally important. This necessitates constant negotiation, sensitivity, and a willingness to revisit norms as new challenges arise.

• Growth pains and avoiding fatigue: VK Madhavan (WaterAid India) underlined that the foundation of any collaboration lies in absolute clarity of purpose — clarity on *whose lives are being changed, why, and how*. He stressed that this understanding cannot remain confined to organizational heads; it must percolate down to every level, including frontline teams, because collaboration only works when everyone shares the same intent.
  
  Equally important, he said, in a collaborative is a constant reminder that collective action will lead to better outcomes than any one organization working in isolation. Drawing from Saamuhika Shakti experience, he noted how single-issue scale models often fell short, while integrated, multi-partner efforts addressing different dimensions of community life hold far greater potential for transformative change.
  
  To sustain the belief in the collaborative, Madhavan emphasized the need for robust systems to track and share outcomes. Evidence and data, he argued, provide the reassurance that collaborative work is yielding real, meaningful change — keeping momentum alive.
  
  Finally, he highlighted the necessity of appreciating the unique contributions each partner brings. Recognizing and valuing diverse strengths, coupled with regular reinforcement of clarity, purpose, and progress, helps reduce fatigue and keeps the collaborative strong and united for the long haul.

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‍Contextualising for India: Reflecting on the Indian context, Aarti asked Ashif to share insights on what the Indian model of effective collaborative action looks like, and experiences from taking these learnings beyond the border.  

• Ashif highlighted that navigating complex regulatory compliance among diverse Indian partners makes a traditional donor-led model unworkable. Consequently, the Migrant Resilience Collaborative (MRC) was deliberately co-created and co-implemented by partners, with donors providing only funding and technical support. This shift reduced dependency by attracting 15–18 philanthropies and private sector funding. These successful principles—rooted in India's long history of grassroots collectives—proved effective regionally, informing work on migration in Nepal and social protection in Indonesia and the Philippines, where Jan Sahas shared its technology. Ultimately, Ashif emphasized that success rests on the principle that people with lived experience and grassroots organizations must be in the driving seat of decision-making, with others serving in a supportive role.

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‍Nonprofit experiences within collaboratives: Aarti noted that while collective outcomes are often the focus, nonprofits sometimes feel less fulfilled within these structures. She asked Namrata what might help rebalance this, and how being part of a collaborative shapes individual organizations, not just the collective.

• Namrata reflected both on Quest Alliance’s own journey and on sectoral insights, including a Bridgespan study that found high satisfaction levels among funders and backbone organizations, but much lower satisfaction—around 40%—among implementing partners. She pointed to three main reasons behind this: slowness of process, time and capacity demands (often resourced) and loss of visibility or spotlight compared to working solo.
  
  ‍She also pointed to cultural and operational factors, including the difficulty of managing interdependence among partners and the need for funders to properly balance engagement. Quest Alliance learned that collaborative work must be intentionally resourced with the right people, not treated as a side task. Ultimately, Namrata affirmed that while dissatisfaction is real, it can be overcome with maturity, capacity planning, and mental rewiring, but acknowledged that sometimes, not joining a collaborative is the right choice for an organization's mission or pace.

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‍Competition for resources: On the challenge of competition within collaboratives, Aarti asked Madhavan how funders and implementers could work towards shared ownership when nonprofits often find themselves competing for limited resources. Once trust and transparency are built, she wondered, what practical steps can help negotiate explicit and implicit conflicts that arise in such setups?

• Madhavan began by framing the competition challenge, distinguishing between three types of collaboratives: purely voluntary mission-driven groups (no funding tie), multi-sector partnerships (implementers, private sector, philanthropy), and those led by a single donor (like Saamuhika Shakti). Each type introduces unique competitive nuances.
  
  Drawing from the Saamuhika Shakti experience, he shared how competition for resources was minimized when each organization’s unique contribution was clearly defined, and resources were allocated accordingly—rather than divided equally. This transparent approach ensured every partner felt valued and adequately supported.
  
  Madhavan also highlighted three enabling factors: 
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  • ‍A neutral backbone: Beyond being outcome-focused, the backbone must also be perceived as neutral, acting as a trusted “sherpa” for the group. ‍
  • Decision-making platforms at multiple levels: Creating forums for leaders, project managers, and community-level teams reinforced collaboration, enabled conflict resolution, and built solidarity. ‍
  • Constant reminders of the strategic and moral imperatives of collaboration: Strategically, collective action yields stronger outcomes; morally, nonprofits must embody the very principle of working together that they advocate for communities.

He concluded that while human insecurities may always exist, institutional design—clarity of roles, transparent resourcing, neutral facilitation, and continuous reinforcement of purpose—can keep competition in check and strengthen collaboratives over time.

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Bringing stakeholders back to shared purpose: On the question of stakeholders’ incentives pulling partners in different directions, Aarti requested Namrata to share insights on how to bring them back to a shared purpose

• Namrata stressed the importance of courage — first, to call out when the collaborative is drifting, despite power dynamics that often silence such conversations. Having a  designated facilitator - a key role that needs to be essayed by the Backbone - to help sense hidden undercurrents early and bring them to the surface, preventing small drifts from spiraling into bigger disagreements, and keeping dialogue alive is crucial. Namrata also underlined the need for non-negotiables that must be held sacred, even if it means saying no to donors or walking away from a collaborative that no longer serves the shared vision. 

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To conclude, Aarti asked each panelist to comment on what worked for them in building a collaborative ethos within their own teams and organizations, so that it grows and is shared more widely

• Anushree shared within her organization, the strongest motivator for building a collaborative ethos was concrete proof — years of experience have shown that despite the challenges and tensions, collaboration leads to better outcomes. Especially in outcomes-based financing programs, the intellectual capital, dialogue, and rigor of working together have consistently delivered stronger results.

• Madhavan stressed that the scale and complexity of the problem make it impossible for any single organization to solve alone — leaving collaboration not as a choice, but as the only logical path forward.

• Namrata explained that Quest Alliance has made collective action a core and aspirational part of its organizational DNA—not a side activity. By creating team spaces to share learnings and celebrate collaborations, they’ve built motivation and interest across the organization, making people actively want to be part of such efforts.

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