You are about to fund a civil society organisation that three other donors already support. Before the first disbursement, your teams ask it for its statutes, its procedures manual, its latest audited accounts, its risk map and its governance structure — the very documents it submitted, six weeks earlier, to another funder. On one side, a grants officer rebuilds a capacity assessment that someone, somewhere, has already produced. On the other, a competent partner spends several person-days re-entering the same information into yet another template. Nobody learns anything new; everyone pays for the control twice.

This duplication is not inevitable. Mutual reliance on due diligence — the principle whereby one donor formally relies on an assessment conducted by a peer instead of redoing it — is one of the most concrete levers for reducing your portfolio supervision cost without weakening your assurance. This article explains what mutual reliance covers, why duplication persists despite long-standing commitments, and how shared tooling on the partner side — the kind we build at Abvius — turns a throwaway assessment into a reusable asset.

Mutual reliance on partner due diligence: ending duplicated assessments

Reading time: ~12 min

1. The hidden cost of duplicated due diligence
2. Mutual reliance: what are we talking about?
3. Why duplication persists despite commitments
4. What mutual reliance changes for your portfolio
5. Equipping the partner once: the role of shared tooling
6. Putting mutual reliance in place: five steps
7. Mini FAQ
8. Summary

The hidden cost of duplicated due diligence

Take a portfolio of thirty grant agreements. Some of your partners work with you alone; but the strongest ones, the ones funding converges towards, are supported by four, five, sometimes eight different donors. Each of those funders runs its own entry due diligence, then its own capacity assessment, its own spot checks, its own assurance plan. Multiply it out: the same partner answers, every year, a stack of enquiries that ask, in essence, the same questions.

The cost of this redundancy is borne on both sides of the agreement. On your side, instruction mobilises experienced officers to rebuild a picture of the partner that others already hold. The gap between selection and first disbursement widens. And your portfolio supervision cost swells without your actual level of assurance rising to match. On the partner side, the burden is heavier still: gathering documents, translating, filling in grids in incompatible formats, mobilising a finance function that is often thinly staffed. That is time taken away from delivering the very programmes you are funding.

One point deserves to be stated plainly: this burden is not the fault of local organisations. Faced with a smaller, less-equipped structure, it is tempting to conclude that it "is not ready". That is an instruction error. A tooling weakness can be funded and fixed; it does not justify mechanically excluding a relevant actor. The real problem is not the partner: it is a process that redoes, at every point of entry, work already done elsewhere. Excluding small organisations because they cannot absorb five due diligences a year penalises a flaw in the system, not a flaw in the actor. We return to this in our article on the localisation of aid and funding local NGOs.

This accumulation has a name in the sector: "assessment fatigue". It describes the exhaustion of partners subjected to disproportionate compliance and risk-reduction demands, to the point where those very requirements end up obstructing the partnership they were meant to secure.

Mutual reliance: what are we talking about?

Mutual reliance is the principle whereby a funder agrees to rely on an assessment conducted by another funder, rather than reproducing it. In practice, if a credible donor has already carried out a serious due diligence on a partner, you draw on its conclusions instead of starting from scratch — completing only what is missing against your own requirements.

We have already covered due diligence from the seat of the assessed NGO, in our partner-side due diligence guide. Here we deliberately take the other seat: that of the funder who conducts — and sometimes needlessly redoes — these assessments, and who holds a lever the partner does not: the decision to recognise a peer''s work.

Three degrees of cooperation between donors

Mutual reliance sits on a continuum worth distinguishing:

• Information sharing: donors exchange assessment reports and findings, but each keeps and redoes its own process. Useful, yet the duplication remains.
• Reliance: one donor formally accepts another''s assessment as sufficient for all or part of its own requirements. This is the heart of the matter.
• Delegation: donors appoint a lead assessor to conduct the assessment on behalf of all, on the basis of a common baseline.

These approaches are not theoretical. The Mutual Reliance Initiative, led by France''s AFD, Germany''s KfW and the European Investment Bank, establishes shared due-diligence standards and assigns lead roles, with each institution formally relying on the others'' procedures when co-financing. In the humanitarian field, the HACT approach (micro-assessment and assurance plan) organises the sharing of micro-assessments across UN agencies. Country-based pooled funds and the central emergency response fund have introduced simplified capacity assessments. The Grand Bargain, finally, made "harmonised due diligence and equitable risk sharing" an explicit workstream. The conceptual building block already exists; the challenge is applying it to your portfolio.

Why duplication persists despite commitments

If mutual reliance is so rational, why does it remain the exception? Ten years after the Grand Bargain was launched, the commitment to channel 25% of humanitarian aid to local actors remains largely unmet, and duplicated controls are not unrelated to that. Several concrete obstacles explain the inertia.

Accountability cannot be delegated with a stroke of the pen. You remain answerable to your own hierarchy, and often to an upstream donor, for the use of funds. Relying on a peer''s assessment means trusting a process you did not run — a hard step to take without guarantees about the quality and traceability of that assessment.

Formats are heterogeneous. One donor''s grid is not another''s; scopes, thresholds and definitions diverge. Without a common baseline, an external assessment is hard to reuse as-is. It is the same problem as harmonising partner reporting: without a shared language, everyone starts over.

Internal incentives push towards redundant control. A grants officer is almost never penalised for redoing a superfluous assessment; they are if they relied on a peer''s and something goes wrong. The asymmetry of professional risk mechanically favours duplication.

Partner data is not reusable. This is the most underestimated obstacle. When a partner keeps its budget, its spending and its supporting documents in scattered spreadsheets, no assessment produces a durable asset: everything has to be rebuilt each time. Mutual reliance presupposes reliable, structured raw material — which brings us to the next point.

What mutual reliance changes for your portfolio

Moving from a logic where everyone assesses in their corner to a logic of reliance changes the very economics of your supervision. The table below sums up the shift.

The gain is not to control less, but to control better: to redeploy instruction time where it genuinely creates assurance — the risks specific to your funding, your sector, your context — instead of reproducing a baseline already covered. Mutual reliance is thus a direct component of a portfolio-level partner risk management strategy.

Equipping the partner once: the role of shared tooling

Mutual reliance almost always runs into the same precondition: the quality and reusability of the partner''s data. You can only rely on a peer''s assessment if the material it rests on is reliable, structured and traceable. Yet as long as each partner keeps its project accounts in scattered files, every assessment remains a perishable snapshot: no one can reuse it, and everyone starts over.

This is exactly the shift we tool up at Abvius. Two features are worth describing from the funder''s point of view.

A monitoring dashboard for donors

Abvius gives the funder a consolidated, real-time view of its portfolio, while each funded CSO or partner works in its own space. There, the partner records its budget, its spending with supporting documents and its progress; you, meanwhile, read the aggregated picture without having to request, chase and re-key. Assessing a partner ceases to be a one-off exercise: it becomes the reading of a permanent state that other donors sharing the same partner can also consult, subject to the access rights granted. The material precondition for mutual reliance — reliable, single, up-to-date data — is thereby met.

Strengthening the capacity of supported partners

Abvius equips the partners, not just the funder. Your agreement''s eligibility rules — and, where relevant, those of the upstream donor — are configured once and then applied to the whole contractual cascade. Reporting flows up consolidated, with no re-keying, and the audit trail runs down to partner level. The direct consequence: supervision cost falls structurally, because control and capacity strengthening stop being two separate activities. By giving the partner a tool that natively produces auditable data, you fix in one move the tooling weakness that would otherwise have served as grounds for exclusion — and you make its assessment reusable by all of its funders. To go further, see our approach to the CSO support facility and managing cascading sub-grants, or explore the platform at abvius.org.

Putting mutual reliance in place: five steps

Mutual reliance is not improvised; it is built from the funder''s seat, methodically.

• 1. Map shared partners and existing assessments. Within your portfolio, identify the partners funded by several donors and take stock of the due diligences already conducted. You will immediately gauge the volume of duplication — and spot the recent assessments you could already rely on.
• 2. Agree with your peers on a common baseline of requirements. Reliance means speaking the same language: scopes, thresholds, definitions. Align with the donors who share your partners on a minimum standard, building on existing frameworks (HACT, pillar assessment, capacity assessment grids).
• 3. Delimit what is relied upon and what stays specific. Not all of your due diligence is meant to be mutualised. Distinguish the reusable baseline (legal status, governance, financial systems, internal control) from the requirements specific to your funding (sectoral risks, specific clauses). You then concentrate your work on that second perimeter.
• 4. Formalise the reliance. A written protocol — appointment of a lead assessor, conditions of validity, arrangements for sharing findings — secures the approach vis-à-vis your hierarchy and your upstream donor. Informal reliance does not hold up in an audit.
• 5. Invest in the partner''s tooling, not only in control. This is the step that makes everything else durable. An assessment is reusable only if the data underpinning it is too. By equipping your partners with a common system, you turn each assessment into a shared asset and, year after year, you reduce your supervision cost.

Mini FAQ

Does mutual reliance expose me to more risk?

No, provided it is formalised. Relying on a credible, traceable assessment does not lower your level of assurance; it simply avoids rebuilding it identically. Risk would rise if you relied on an assessment whose method and freshness you do not know — hence the importance of a common baseline and up-to-date data.

Can I rely on an assessment if I do not fully trust the donor who conducted it?

Reliance is not binary. You can rely on the baseline (legal existence, audited accounts, governance) while conducting the checks yourself on the points sensitive to your funding. You reduce duplication where it is safe, without giving up your judgement where it matters.

What about partners being assessed for the first time?

For a partner never assessed, there is nothing to rely on: you conduct the due diligence. But you can make it reusable from the outset, by basing it on a shared standard and on structured data. Your first assessment then becomes the asset that your peers — and you yourself the following year — will not have to redo.

Do I need a formal agreement between donors to start?

A protocol helps, but you can start more modestly: draw on the recent assessment reports your partners have already sent to other funders, and instruct only the remainder. That is a first degree of reliance, which already reduces the burden without requiring a multilateral agreement.

Summary

Duplicated due diligence is a cost funders long resigned themselves to paying, for lack of a credible alternative. Mutual reliance offers one: relying on a peer''s work rather than redoing it, focusing instruction on real added value, and easing a burden that falls first on the least-equipped partners — without ever confusing a tooling weakness with unreliability. The material precondition for this shift is reliable, structured, reusable partner data. That is what we build at Abvius, equipping the funder with a consolidated monitoring dashboard and the partner with a tool that natively produces auditable data. To go further: our partner-side due diligence guide, portfolio monitoring with a dashboard and harmonising partner reporting. To discuss your portfolio, get in touch.