Project by Projects

This month, an organization I’ve admired, CBA Foundation, quietly marked ten years of walking alongside widows in Nigeria.

No stadium event.
No TED-style countdown.
Just a decade-long record of showing up, case after case, woman after woman.

In that time, they’ve provided direct support to thousands of widows and their children – from economic empowerment and health interventions, to food support, basic education and self-employment schemes.

At first glance, it looks like it might just be another NGO milestone story.

But the timing is important. Nigeria has now designated 2026 as the Year of Social Development and Families, framing women and families as the backbone of national development and social stability. Globally, the World Day of Social Justice is calling for renewed commitment to inclusion and systems that actually deliver dignity in people’s daily lives.

In the middle of all that rhetoric, CBA Foundation’s quiet decade shows us what real justice infrastructure and and should look like. And what global development might learn about delivering true sustainable impact.

Justice Happens in Duration, not Disruption

The boring work is not glamorous. The boring work is necessary. 

CBA Foundation’s model of support is to sit with widows as they navigate hostile in-laws, predatory landlords, opaque court systems and the economic freefall that follows the loss of a spouse. Over the years they have managed to combine legal support, economic empowerment, education, food and health interventions. Doing all this while growing into a semi-formal network that now reaches thousands of women and children across multiple states.

None of this can be built within a 24-month logframe.

Trust like this is not a project output; it’s a relationship outcome. It forms slowly, through repeated presence:

• The same faces returning after the media cameras have moved on
• The same organisation picking up the phone when a widow calls at midnight
• The same team understanding the unspoken codes of a community because they’ve lived inside it, not just surveyed it
  

By contrast, a lot of our social-justice funding is still structured around 2–3 year project cycles. We go through the cycles (Pilot, showcase, scale, and exit) The assumption is that once a model is proven, someone else will naturally pick it up.

But organisations like CBA Foundation show us something else: justice work doesn’t scale neatly. It roots.

The real change is in the long memory of a community that learns, over ten years, that there is somewhere they can go when the law fails them in practice.

The Substitution Economy: When Civil Society Becomes the Service Provider of Last Resort

Look closely and you’ll find that CBA is not doing something exotic. They are doing the work the state already promised.

Widows’ rights and protections are not new concepts. Nigeria has constitutional guarantees of equality and state-level laws that should protect women from harmful traditional practices and economic deprivation.

On paper, the system says:

• Women should not be stripped of their homes and property when their husbands die
• Children should not drop out of school because their primary breadwinner is gone
• Families should not be left without access to basic healthcare or legal recourse

In reality, organisations like CBA are substituting for absent systems:

• They pay school fees where bursaries should exist
• They provide legal representation where public legal aid is weak or inaccessible
• They deliver food and basic health support where social protection schemes are patchy or non-existent

This is not innovation; it is substitution.

Citizens have already “paid” for these services in taxes, yet they must rely on donor-funded intermediaries to receive them. The global development system often praises this as nimble, agile, community-led work. But the deeper truth is uncomfortable:

We are celebrating organisations for patching holes in a ship that was never properly built.

Gender as Infrastructure, Not an Add-on

Another thing I find helpful about CBA’s model is what they might even take for granted. This is that gender is not a side-project.

Widowhood in Nigeria is not just a private tragedy. It is a public fault line where patriarchal norms, land rights, inheritance law, and social stigma collide.

CBA’s programmes are built from that reality:

• Economic empowerment that recognises how widows are pushed to the edge of markets
• Legal support that understands how customary practices override statutory rights
• Health and counselling that address not just physical needs but the emotional trauma of social exclusion

In other words, gender is their operating system, not a thematic lens added at the end of a proposal.

This is what I dream of a justice infrastructure looking like. I.e. not a separate women’s project, or gender focus, but a full delivery system that makes rights real for women whose lives are structurally constrained. And delivering with dignity for the recipient. 

The Information and Data for Our Funding Logic

This might be a bit uncomfortable to admit—especially for funders and large INGOs.

Most funding frameworks are still built on three assumptions:

1. Good projects have exit strategies
2. Success is replicability
3. Innovation looks like something new

Technically, what we might draw from CBA, pushes against all three.

• Their work has no neat exit strategy, because patriarchy does not.
• Their “success” is not easily replicable, because it is rooted in relationships, not just toolkits.
• Their innovation is not newness, but staying power.

Fortunately, we do see that some nooks within philanthropy are beginning to recognise that long-term, flexible support actually works. Ford Foundation’s BUILD initiative, for example, provides five years of general operating support plus organisational strengthening to help social-justice organisations become more resilient over time. They understand that systems change needs patient, multi-year investment.

CBA’s story is a local illustration of this same truth:

Justice is not an event. It is infrastructure, and infrastructure needs time. So perhaps funders need a new category altogether:

Not “projects”.
Not even “programmes”.
But Essential Justice Infrastructure. That is organisations whose very existence holds systems accountable.

From Exit Strategies to Staying Strategies

Consider this….

What if, in social justice work, the real mark of success is not how easily an organisation can exit, but how irreplaceable it becomes to the communities it serves?

That doesn’t mean building empires or dependencies. It means accepting that some roles are foundational:

• The community-based group that knows every widow by name
• The legal clinic that has seen enough cases to spot patterns and push for reform
• The organisation that can pick up the phone and convene both traditional leaders and government officials because they’ve built trust with both

You don’t phase that out in three years. . . . You anchor it.

Suggestion: Three Shifts Funders Can Make – Starting Today

If we take organisations like CBA seriously as justice infrastructure, then three practical shifts become obvious:

1. Fund for 7–10 years, not 2–3.
   Long-term grants with flexible funding allow organisations to plan, grow, and adapt – instead of constantly contorting themselves to fit new project cycles.
2. Weight community trust as heavily as metrics.
   Site visits, testimonies from widows, and feedback from local leaders should carry as much weight as logframe indicators. These are the “social audits” that tell you whether justice is actually landing.
3. Create a dedicated “Essential Infrastructure” portfolio.
   Not flashy innovations, but the boring, necessary work: case management systems, paralegal networks, data collection, long-term accompaniment. The things that make it impossible for institutions to pretend “we didn’t know”.

None of this is glamorous. All of it is necessary.

Beyond 2026: Matching Declarations With Durability

Nigeria’s Year of Social Development and Families positions women and families as national infrastructure, not charity.

That framing is powerful. But it will only matter if energy, funding, and political will shift from short campaign moments to long, sustained commitments – the kind of commitment CBA Foundation has practised for a decade without waiting for a national declaration.

As global development actors mark the World Day of Social Justice and celebrate big themes about “bridging gaps” and “renewed commitment,” we would do well to ask:

• Who has been quietly holding the line for ten years?
• Which organisations already function as justice infrastructure in their communities?
• And what would it take to fund them not as side projects, but as core pillars of the systems we claim to be strengthening?

Because in the end, justice truly lives in the quiet, persistent work of organisations like CBA Foundation. Those who stay long enough for the law on paper to become protection in a widow’s actual life.

If you are a funder, policymaker, or practitioner shaping what Nigeria’s “Year of Social Development” – or global social justice – will really mean, perhaps this is the moment to look beyond the next grant cycle and ask:

Whose staying power am I willing to invest in?

That answer will tell us more about our commitment to justice than any slogan ever could.

Yop Rwang Pam