How to overcome the fact when funding decisions depend on bureaucrats mostly with little or no knowledge about the cultural sector?

Unfortunately, this is a real problem that you will face in the cultural sector specially in the MENA region, fortunately some innovative solutions have been made and worked successfully, one of them is by relying and working good enough on the publicizing and the media part of the project you're working on, specially if this publicizing includes regional and international covering, this way you will overcome two major challenges the first is that you will gain the attention from your target group and their community, the second is that you will pull those bureaucrats to support you, where they will find that good amount of popularity and marketing for their selves in it, which is in fact is the only value that they usually look for.

I hope this helps,

Regards