Humberto has a background in law, coupled with years of experience in drug policy reform nonprofits. He works as HR Manager at Youth RISE, a youth-led network promoting evidence-based drug policies and harm reduction strategies, and as Fundraising Director at Proyecto Soma, a Peruvian risk/harm reduction and communications NGO.

Besides drug-related issues stemming from prohibition, one of the main problems that the Latin American Region and the wider Global South faces is the prevalence of informal economies. The International Labour Organization defines it as "all economic activities by workers and economic units that are – in law or in practice – not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements.".
Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) from the Global South are not exempt from this phenomenon, especially those related to harm reduction and drug policy reform. Youth RISE, a CSO that mobilizes youth to be engaged in full-spectrum harm reduction and drug policy reform to promote health and human rights, has been able to attest this through its Annual Small Grants Program, which distributes funds amongst its volunteer International Working Group Members and their organizations/initiatives from all over the world.

The proposed presentation will anonymously share findings and common trends among Youth RISE's small grantee CSOs from 2020 to 2024, with an emphasis on analyzing the difficulties these organizations had to go through at the stages of fund reception, execution and reporting, when facing both the complete lack of or deficient legal frameworks for receiving and implementing grants in the Global South.

The presentation will end with recommendations on how to start tackling the issue of the difficulties of grant reception and implementation due to informality and of how to ease the inherently imbalanced relationship between grantor and grantee. All of these issues are exacerbated by working in stigmatized topics.

Even though the presentation will only analyze the experience of a single grant distributor, the difficulties found in it will without a doubt resonate with many emergent organizations from the Global South, as well as with grant distributors from the Global North, both having to deal with the transactional costs of informality.