The price of a gift

A donated patrol boat, a fleet of vehicles or a set of scanners can transform an organisation that could never have bought them. The handover ceremony is worth having. Hands are shaken, photographs are taken, and everyone goes home pleased.

The trouble starts later. The first service falls due, a part fails, and any funding that came with the gift for maintenance and training has long since been spent.

What you are actually given

The donor pays for the kit. Everything after that is yours: maintenance, spares, fuel, insurance, the technicians who fix it, the training that keeps operators current and, in the end, a replacement. None of it is a one-off. All of it lands in a budget that was not adjusted to take it.

The purchase price makes the press release. The running costs are left to an organisation that was rarely asked what it wanted in the first place.

So the conversation about who pays in year two, year five and year ten has to happen before handover, not after the boat is tied up waiting for a part.

The training that comes with it

Most gifts include a training package. It is usually short, and it is usually the trainers’ own course: their tactics, their procedures, their way of doing things. That is understandable. People teach what they know.

But it is not the same as training built around what the recipient needs, the kit they already operate and the people they actually have. Operators come away certified in someone else’s way of working. Within a year or two, as people move on and nobody is left to train the next intake, most of it has gone.

Good training starts with the recipient’s requirement and ends with them able to train themselves. Anything less is a demonstration.

The small print

Most gifts come with conditions. They are usually sensible. They are also usually not read closely by the people who will have to live with them.

• Where and how it can be used. End-use terms can restrict where the kit goes, against whom and alongside whom. Sometimes that rules out the very job you wanted it for.
• Who can operate it. There may be rules on vetting, on who may use it, and occasionally a requirement for donor staff to be present. That is a constraint on your own people.
• Reporting. You may have to account for its use for years, sometimes to the same body deciding whether you get the next tranche.
• Spares. Parts may come from a single supplier in the donor country, sometimes with an export licence needed for every order. A boat waiting on a licensed part is not a boat.
• Data. Modern radios, sensors and management systems generate data, and often send it somewhere. Find out where it is held, who can see it, and whether your patrol pattern is visible to anyone else.
• Withdrawal. Support depends on a relationship, and relationships change. When they do, you can be left with kit you cannot keep running and cannot easily get rid of.

Whose problem does it solve?

All of that can be managed. The harder question is whose problem the gift was designed to solve.

Donors fund what matters to their own public: drugs, migration, terrorism, maritime security. Those are fair priorities, but they are the donor’s. If your most pressing problem is domestic violence, vehicle crime or a backlog in the courts, a donated maritime radar does nothing for it. Worse, the time and people spent absorbing the radar are not spent on the problem you actually have.

Kit also shapes the organisation. Give an institution a tool and it will find a use for it, write procedures around it, post people to it and, before long, call it a core capability. Ten years on, the organisation reflects a series of other people’s priorities. Nobody decided that. It just happened.

Why buying is different

Buying is not cheaper. Its advantage is that you keep the decisions.

• You write the requirement, based on your own gaps and your own priorities.
• You compete the contract, which keeps price and specification honest.
• You agree spares, training and support up front, rather than finding the gaps later.
• You set the terms for your data.
• You make sure it works with what you already own, instead of collecting three radio systems from three donors that cannot talk to each other.
• You know the whole-life cost before you commit, and you can walk away if you cannot afford it.
• It stays yours when the politics change.

None of that is free, and many organisations simply cannot buy at the scale they need. That is a real constraint, and we are not pretending otherwise.

The real test

The question is not really gift or purchase. It is whether the requirement was written by the people who have to live with the result.

A gift that meets your own written, prioritised requirement is a good outcome. Take it. A purchase made from a supplier’s brochure is a bad one, and you have paid for the privilege. In both cases the failure is the same: someone else decided what you needed. The only difference is who sent the invoice.

So the work that matters comes first. Know your gaps, rank them, and be clear what happens if each one is left unfilled. Then a conversation with a donor becomes a negotiation rather than a polite yes, because you can say what you would rather have, with a document to back it up.

Eight questions Marchward would advise you to ask before you accept

It is usually better to have a few vehicles working for years than lots working for only a short time. Before signing for donated equipment, you should be able to answer these.

1. Which of our own gaps does this fill, and how high did it rank?
2. What will it cost to run each year, and whose budget pays for it from year one?
3. Where do the spares come from, how long do they take, and does any of it need a licence?
4. Who can operate it, who vets them, and can we train new operators ourselves?
5. What conditions come with it, and do any of them stop us using it for the job we wanted?
6. What data does it produce, where does it go, and who else can see it?
7. Does it work with what we already have, or will it sit on its own?
8. If support stopped tomorrow, how long would it keep working?

If the answers are good, accept it and be grateful. If several are unknown, the gift is a liability with a delay on it. The answer is not to refuse, but to go back to the donor and talk about a different gift.

Our interest

Marchward advises on requirements and can source equipment, so we have a commercial interest here, and you should weigh our advice with that in mind.

For what it’s worth, the advice we give most often is not to buy anything. It is to write down the gaps and rank them. That costs nothing, and it is what makes both a purchase and a gift work.

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