NGO Finance Secrets: CARE’s $900M Strategy

Megan - 00:00:14: Today, my guest is Ranil DeSilva, a distinguished chief financial and operating officer renowned for delivering exceptional results. With a robust background, he holds a certified practicing accountant designation, along with an executive MBA and executive leadership certifications from prestigious institutions such as Oxford University, Saïd Business School, and MIT Sloan School of Management. Currently, he serves as a chief financial and operating officer at CARE USA, where he oversees a substantial $900 million finance and operational portfolio, ensuring optimal performance and efficiency. Prior to his tenure at CARE, he held pivotal roles at Save the Children International. Notably, he served as the interim CFO for SC Norway membership and global director of financial analysis and business partnering. In these capacities, he managed a multi-billion dollar operational and reporting portfolio within a complex, globally federated entity spanning over 30 member organizations and 60 country operations. His career journey also led him to Africa, where he spent three impactful years as the regional finance and support services director for East and South Africa. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, he oversaw operations across 14 different countries, leveraging his expertise to drive organizational success. His professional journey commenced with roles at Deloitte and Colonial First State Global Asset Management, providing him with a strong foundation in finance operations. Additionally, he is an accomplished board member actively serving in various trustee and board committee roles with organizations in the U.S., UK, and Australia. Drawing on his international development experience and strategic leadership skills. He has played a pivotal role in supporting organizations to achieve their missions. His expertise spans a wide range of functions, including finance operations, support services, supply chain, HR, digital legal risk, digital legal risk management, and project/change management. He excels in leading transformative initiatives, driving change, and fostering high-performance cultures within teams. His leadership style is characterized by inspiration and engagement, earning respect and results from his colleagues and stakeholders alike. He is deeply committed to developing and empowering team members and thrives in dynamic environments, responding adeptly to challenges and complexities. Ranil, thank you very much for being my guest on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Ranil - 00:03:18: Thanks Megan, great to be here.

Megan - 00:03:19: Yeah, today we're going to be talking about various topics, including financial sustainability, NGO finance, business partnering, supply chain, and digital transformation. And I'm excited to learn about you and your experiences. So let's jump right in.

Ranil - 00:03:34: Sounds good. Let's go.

Megan - 00:03:36: First, just so that we have some idea of what you've done and where you've been, can you just walk us through your career at a high level?

Ranil - 00:03:43: Great, thank you. As most accountants do, I started my finance career actually in public practice back in Australia now, going back probably about 26 years ago. So I started off in public practice. I was in as an auditor and then a business services accountant for about five years or so in my early career. Then I had the opportunity to move into funds management, asset management, investment banking, and set up working for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Melbourne as part of their subsidiary, Colonial Perth State. And after about 15 years or so in the commercial world, I had a change of heart and decided to have a bit of a change in direction. And I was lucky enough to join Save the Children, a large INGO, the Australian branch, as the deputy CFO, financial control there, and that's how I got into the sector. So I've been in the sector now close to about 12 years. And most recently, I'm the chief financial and operating officer for INGO called CARE. And we're headquartered here in the U.S., and are based in Atlanta at the moment. So I've managed to get all the way from the other side of the world, from Melbourne, Australia, all the way to North America and the U.S., in my 26-year career, halfway through working in Africa, Europe, and in the UK.

Megan - 00:05:02: And what has been one of the most rewarding aspects of working in the global nonprofit space for you? And how does that shape your leadership philosophy today?

Ranil - 00:05:10: I would say it's very different to working in a commercial environment. I think your values need to align with the organization's mission. So I think that is one of the key things that we think about as we come into the sector. I think my main purpose or main drive moving into the sector was to really make an impact, transform the sector and make sure that we are impacting communities across globally. I think I get to do that in my job, both in the finance space and the operational space, being the chief financial officer and the operating officer. But I think the biggest difference is actually making an impact in our communities and beneficiaries versus maximizing profits. I think that's the main difference in the sector, I find.

Megan - 00:05:53: Yeah. And how do you balance mission-driven goals with financial prudence?

Ranil - 00:05:57: I think it needs to go hand in hand. I think I'm really advocating. I've been in two large INGOs, Save the Children, and now at CARE, in my 12 years span in the sector. It's really important to balance out that we are a business in either saving lives and providing support and making an impact, not just an INGO. So I think we get to think about balancing out the commercial aspects of running an organization and really making an impact through our mission. So I think that's really important. As I speak to the teams, I'm bringing in a lot of our programming teams to think about the commercial aspects of running an organization. We have to be financially sustainable in the longer term. And then also we need to make sure that we are recovering our cost really well from our programs to be sustainable in the longer term. And that's how you make a bigger impact and have a broader, I would say, broader impact across the operations that we're doing globally. Bringing in a business and commercial acumen into the program impacting space is something that we are driving for across the organization.

Megan - 00:07:04: And talk to us for a moment about CARE USA. What is their mission and where does the funding come from?

Ranil - 00:07:10: So CARE USA has now celebrated our 80th year in 2025. So it's been established for a long time and initially started with a thing called a CARE package back in World War II. What we did was the U.S. communities got together and decided to send these CARE packages with basic food and basic need items to Europe, to people who were displaced from their countries in World War II. I think when that happened, that's where I think CARE originated, providing these CARE packages. Now we've actually grown into quite a large organization. We are about 1.3 billion globally. What we do is we play in the health education, food, water, sanitation, and climate change, and also in the humanitarian space, really making an impact across multiple countries. CARE USA has a footprint of roughly about close to 50 country offices that we operate. Our main mission is to make sure that we are helping communities both in the humanitarian and development space and also making sure that we are fighting for people's rights and making sure that we are providing basic needs and support to the communities.

Megan - 00:08:23: And how do you manage and optimize financial resources across such diverse and often complex global operations while ensuring that the organization remains agile and still focused on its humanitarian goals?

Ranil - 00:08:38: I think the biggest thing that comes into my mind, we are always required to do more with less. It's like if you come from a corporate environment or a commercial enterprise, I think sometimes you do have a little bit of additional resources to deliver results. So if you want to really drive your profit margin, you do have a lot of funds and resources to investment on systems, processes and operations. But I think the biggest challenge in the sector, we have very limited resources and very limited opportunities when it comes to improving our systems and platforms to make a bigger impact. I think finding, making sure that we have the right level of resources and making sure that we are focusing on efficiencies, using technology to drive efficiencies, to really expand our reach and really make an impactful operations across the country. We usually spend a bit of time on getting the right resources, right capabilities, the technical expertise. We invest on our people. But we also think about investing in our systems to make sure that we are getting the bank of our back. So, really looking at efficiencies to drive operations is one of the key things that we focus on as an INGO. Especially in the programmatic sense, we try and make sure our donor funds or the funds that we get from the outside communities and our supporters is actually maximized into really making an impact at the programmatic and the community level. So we are trying to minimize our operating costs or overhead costs, but really to maximize. The dollars going into making an impact on the programmatic space. So to do that, we need to be a quite effective, efficient organization and really making sure that we are using technology and really strong capable staff to really deliver those activities.

Megan - 00:10:29: And how do you maintain transparency amongst your stakeholders and donors? How do you make sure that people know where their money is going?

Ranil - 00:10:39: I think transparency is a key requirement in the sector. We have about. 40 to 50% of U.S. Government or institutional funding across globally. We have institutional funding from the European Union, the FCDO from the UK and many other European governments. So that comes with a lot of compliance and reporting requirements. So we need to make sure that all taxpayer dollars are very well spent and making sure that we are minimizing any opportunities for fraud and losing funds over mismanagement. So transparency and making sure that we have a. Robust control platform and a system in place is quite critical. As you know, we publish our annual reports. We do our financial statements and tax reporting or 990 reporting in the U.S., to make sure that we are transparent about our operations, but also making sure that every donor and every institutional fund, every dollar is accounted for. And we are very clear how much of that is actually going into the administration space versus what's going into the programmatic space. So transparency is a very important part, and it's an important part of the sector, but also important identity for organizations like CARE to make sure that we are maximizing our dollars going into making an impact to our beneficiaries.

Megan - 00:11:56: And you must be a very good financial storyteller to be a CFO at an NGO and have so many stakeholders. How have you honed your storytelling skills over the years?

Ranil - 00:12:08: Yeah, that's a very good question, actually. I was quite an introvert when I was growing up when I was little. I used to be quite an introvert. And then public speaking and really being able to tell stories started in my university days when I had the opportunity to be part of various different presentations and discussions. But really, I honed these capabilities working in the financial advisory consulting space in my early career, being able to actually work with clients and being able to kind of explain the analytics, the numbers, the tax figures. I think that helped me to kind of broadly communicate or translate numbers into a good story. And then I had the opportunity to work as an analyst and a business partner for a long time in the banking space. I think that also gave me the opportunity to kind of look at certain sort of financials or analytics, and be able to translate that into layman's terms to really discuss things, especially the impacts with our operational teams. I think that really helped to really grow my storytelling capabilities. And coming into this sector, it's very important to be able to kind of sell our story about what we do, what impacts we make as an organization. So I am actually putting also a lot of rigor to ensure my teams, especially the finance teams and the operational support teams are very capable in this business partnering and storytelling space, because that is the critical part to making sure the operational teams, programmatic teams understand the impact of focusing on financial numbers and business analytics. So I think there's a strong focus on coaching and training our staff members to become good storytellers, but also being able to kind of understand the organization, what we do, and being able to translate that into a good story using numbers is important thing in the sector.

Megan - 00:13:57: And you've been instrumental in leading financial functions in a federated multi-country setup at Save the Children and now at CARE USA. So how do you approach business partnering when you're working within decentralized organizations?

Ranil - 00:14:11: Yeah, and that's a really good question. I think it's really challenging working in a federated, Confederation type of structure. You have many leaders, many organizations that have many different priorities and expectations. The important thing is how do you bring all of that together and making sure that we have a common vision, common drive and common set of goals to achieve and deliver. So I think one of the key things is to make sure that you are a good negotiator and a good influence in that space. And I think to be part of a Confederation, to be part of a federation, I think it's important that you can make an impact through looking at your data, looking at your analytics, looking at being able to kind of tell a good story. But using real robust, accurate data to kind of tell that story is quite critical to make sure that you're getting the buy-in of this. Whether it's a group of CEOs, whether it's a group of CFOs, whether it's a group of CEOs, you need to make sure that, we can capture what's actually happening in the current environment and being able to kind of think about our strategy and mission. How do you kind of align those things looking at the current context? So I think building relationships, having a strong network within the Confederation or the federation, also making sure that you're a good influencer and a negotiator when driving leadership decisions is quite critical to kind of navigate through the challenges that a Confederation or a federation model brings in the business context.

Megan - 00:15:42: And as organizations like CARE USA scale their global operations, how can CFOs ensure that the supply chain is managed effectively, particularly in challenging regions with limited infrastructure?

Ranil - 00:15:55: Yeah, that's another great question because I think quite often I find talking to many other organizations, there's a big disconnection between the CFO function and operational supply chain function. I mean, I'm one of the lucky ones that I had the opportunity to kind of both lead not only the finance function, but also end-to-end supply chain and operational support functions. That puts me in a really good position to kind of think about what are our needs, what are our beneficiary needs, what are our customer needs, what are our needs of our country office operations. And being able to prioritize those supply chain activities with the financial goals and deliverables has been quite an important space for me. And for example, at CARE, we have not been with CARE now just over three and a half years. And when I first came into the organization, we've talked a lot about the challenges we've had in our supply chain process. And one of the first things was for me to really convince the Board of Directors and our executives leadership team around how do we really improve efficiency and quality of output at the country office level. To do that, we need to have an effective and efficient supply chain system in place. So we're not only looking at it from a platform perspective, but really how do we improve really the speed of delivery? How do we become first responders in countries when you're having a humanitarian crisis? Do we have the right end-to-end framework agreements that supplies? To really get the goods to a place that's needed very quickly and fast in a reasonable price. So I think really being able to kind of drive the importance of having a strong supply chain, it was quite an important step for us to really transform our end-to-end supply chain at CARE. So currently we're actually implementing quite a large transformation project focusing on end-to-end supply chain. That means really from source to pay, end-to-end procurement and logistics, looking at also our fleet management, but also looking at our cash transferring capabilities. So we are looking at a very large transformation project that will, in the next couple of years, have a game-changing or best-in-class supply chain set up for CARE that makes us quite efficient and effective at the country office level to deliver our programs.

Megan - 00:18:11: And talk to us for a moment about your budgeting and forecasting process at an NGO, because I mean, in any given year, you don't really know what's going to arise and where you're going to be needed. So just talk us through how that's done.

Ranil - 00:18:28: Yeah, I think I would say it's no different to a commercial environment. I mean, I've had the opportunity to really build very large budgets in large organizations, but the tricky part in an INGO space, sometimes the funding is limited to a timeframe. For example, humanitarian funding usually gets allocated on a year-on-year basis. So it's hard to really predict what's going to happen in the next three to five years, right? And so it's really important that we have quite a robust budgeting and forecasting process set up. For example, at CARE, we have quite a detailed budgeting process that's aligned with our strategy period. It has a five-year strategy period that gets reviewed on the third year to make sure that to realign. What we do is we align our strategic planning process with our budgeting process once a year. We also have multiple-year grants and funding coming through. So that's probably the easier part to navigate around the budgeting space. But also, our budgeting is kind of really focused on three separate areas. What is our secured funding? So what's available in the next 12 months or the next 12 months to three years? What are our pipelines? So for example, our business development or proposal that's kind of in flight. So that makes our pipeline. And then we also have our aspiration goals where we want to really focus on certain areas in the next 12 months to three years. And what are those opportunities? So we break our budgeting, financial budgeting into three components when we're actually developing our revenue pipeline. And then we also have multiple channels. For example, we have government funding, institutional funding. We have private foundation funding. We have corporate funding. We have mass market and private fundraising. And then we also have other grants and like working with the UN or the World Bank. So we have multiple revenue channels. So being able to kind of forecast that on a regular basis and bringing that into our budgeting process is quite critical. So we developed a three-year budget, but really focused on the first year. And then we revisit in a mid-year forecast to see how we are tracking against our budgets. Quite often. The numbers change quite significantly as we head into a physical year. So really updating that in the forecasting process and then also revisiting how the outline years look at, looks like as part of that forecasting process. So it's a quite a robust budgeting and forecasting process at CAAT. And it's very similar to what we developed at Save the Children. So I would say in the NGO space, it's sometimes difficult to do budgeting and forecasting compared to the commercial environment, but the concept is no different.

Megan - 00:21:01: And switching gears a bit to technology. But digital transformation is reshaping the way businesses operate. So in the context of NGOs, how do you envision digital tools and technologies enhancing financial management, program execution and impact measurement in the next few years?

Ranil - 00:21:20: Yeah, this is a real hot topic at the moment, isn't it? I mean, especially with AI coming in. Yeah. So it's a really hot topic at the moment. And we've actually embarked on our digital strategy or the digital roadmap a few years ago. Now looking ahead on what's coming and what are the context changes. As you know, the digital environment changes in a rapid pace. Sometimes by the time you make a decision to adopt a platform, the technology has changed so much that it becomes irrelevant by the time you roll it out three years down the track. So we have a very strong CIO who we have brought in now into the organization just over three years ago in collaboration with the CIO. Obviously, the digital team sits under my responsibilities. At the moment, it's easy to have that strong partnership with the CFO and the CIO being part of the same team. So what we do develop based on our strategy, overall organizational strategy, a digital strategy that kind of runs parallel to that. So our digital strategy is made out of, I would say, three pillars. The first one's around looking at our functional support, basic infrastructure, digital strategy, looking at areas like our ERP system, in Office 365 system. So we have a strong foundational pillar. The second one is actually the programmatic pillar. How can we use digital to really improve and enhance our programming activities at the country level? So, for example, we are using a lot of predictions generated through our AI capabilities, AI models to predict humanitarian context changes, for example, in the country. So we use a lot of digital capabilities to really enhance our programming activities. And then the third pillar is around what's changing, what's our innovation pillar. And quite a lot of activities happen in the digital space in a short timeframe. For example, we just spoke about generative AI. How do we adopt using AI to develop our marketing and brand strategies? How do we use AI to develop proposals and write proposals for us. To minimize the human resources, but really increase, pace and effectiveness of getting a proposal out into the donor marketplace? So really, really, when you think about digital, we look at those three big strategic pillars. But the biggest challenge for us is the investment and the funds available to invest in the digital space. So I think one of the big challenges is how do we carve out a set of funds so that we can invest in our digital strategy that eventually impacts on our organization's efficiency and effectiveness to deliver programs at the country level.

Megan - 00:23:59: And with your experience in both the profit, both the for-profit and the non-profit sectors, how do the financial priorities differ when leading a global organization with a social mission?

Ranil - 00:24:12: I think the two main differentiators, the first one's around profitability versus impact. In the commercial world, we are really focused on profitability. In the NGO space, I'm looking at financial sustainability and how can we drive impact. So really, that's a big differentiator. So my approach to really minimize the cost to really increase profit, that concept is slightly different in the NGO space. So I want to reduce costs so that I can really increase my funds that goes into making an impact in the world, right? So it's a slightly different way. So looking at it, it's a different lens looking at it. The second piece is around, it's a highly volatile revenue or funding environment. And obviously, there's some big changes coming in the United States with the administration changes. I think they're driving a lot of efficiencies that will also have a big impact on how they will fund. The U.S. Government will fund it, our NGOs. So we need to think about the changing dynamics constantly, not only in the economic environment, but also in the political environment. So that's one of the big changes I see coming out for the commercial world into the NGO space.

Megan - 00:25:24: And last question, but looking forward, what do you believe will be the next wave of innovation in the NGO space? And how are you preparing yourselves and your team to stay ahead of the curve and drive greater impact?

Ranil - 00:25:39: I mean, that's a really important question, isn't it? I mean, if you're investing in technology and the rapid changes in the technological environment, it's going to make a huge impact on how we do things forward, looking ahead, and in the NGO space. I think the traditional NGO concepts are changing. For example, probably 10 years ago, even a lot of the NGOs had large country office operating models, operating through large regions. And then when COVID happened, everything had to change. A lot of the people moved into running our operations remotely. There was a few years ago, even, there were a lot of expatriates from the Global North being deployed into the Global South operations to run operations and lead operations. But that environment is also changing. We see a lot of local talent, especially in the Asia, Africa, and Latin America space. CARE is actively focused on really appointing local leadership, local capabilities, and buying things locally through our supply chain. So that is actually changing the way we do our operations or we run our operations. So technology is becoming more and more important because we are moving towards a more remote working environment. Now, I mean, as I mentioned in our brief introduction, we have a large shared services center that's based in Manila, over 200-plus people running operations, and they run everything remotely. So we're using a lot of technology and remote working capabilities that enhance through our digital systems, and our ERP systems really run our operations in 48-plus country offices.So I think you see a lot of people working remotely, even from technical programming roles that can be done remotely these days.So we see quite a lot of energy put on by CARE to remote working, digital enhancements and also digital activities in the programming space.  So traditional programming was really going to a community and doing the training, sport education remotely. But no, we can do most of them also digitally. So you see a lot of change in our strategy going forward using digital capabilities and technology. And one of the fundamental things that we focus on at CARE is rewarding good, innovative digital programming by our country office teams. We see a lot of good activities being developed using digital platforms in basic programming, like education, for example, food, water, systems, coaching, and development in the humanitarian space, in the livelihood space, and even looking at women's economic empowerment areas, like how do you make sure that you run a savings program that helps a female entrepreneur to really improve her profit margins in a small business? Those kinds of trainings can be done virtually now, and we do them mostly virtually and also through online and mobile platforms. So we see digital playing a key role going forward in the sector.

Megan - 00:28:32: Ranil, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Ranil - 00:28:35: It's a pleasure. It's always good to talk about what's happening in the sector and how we can make a positive impact across the globe.

Megan - 00:28:42: Yeah, absolutely. I really enjoyed speaking with you and thank you for finding the time to be here with us today to share your experience and knowledge. And I wish you and CARE all the best. Sounds like you're both doing amazing things.

Ranil - 00:28:54: Thank you so much. It's an absolute pleasure to be talking to you. And hopefully we can make a bigger impact by really having more strong CFOs and operational people coming into the sector.

Megan - 00:29:03: And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take CARE.