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A little more than a year ago, this Labour government announced that it will cut UK aid, despite a manifesto pledge to rebuild Britain’s already damaged reputation on international development. This decision, together with cuts by the US, France, Germany, Sweden and others, is creating real hardship for the world’s most marginalised communities: health centres are closing, family support systems are being scaled back, and girls’ education programmes are rapidly reducing.
With the brutal impacts of these cuts coming to the fore and increasing discussions about what the future of international development looks like, international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are not retreating into nostalgia. We're channelling this frustration into something different. We're looking forwards.
I was at an event recently where one of the speakers, development leader and practitioner, Keith Kibirango, said that “if the [aid] money comes back, it should come back on equal terms”. This pivotal moment is an opportunity for us to reshape how development has been done for decades: the top-down conditions imposed from donor governments, the bureaucratic hoops local organisations have been forced to jump through and the damaging assumptions baked into international development itself.
The minister for international development, Baroness Chapman, recently outlined one of the UK government’s key priorities as “a move away from international intervention towards local provision, where local partners drive their own solutions.” We welcome this direction wholeheartedly. But let me set the record straight: this isn't new terrain international NGOs are being asked to navigate.
The international development sector has been continually reckoning with this for more than a decade, piloting new approaches and generating fresh learnings to become more locally led – and work closely with global majority partners to shift power to local leaders and communities. We've already started this journey, and we're keen to share what we’ve learnt with the UK government and other partners, to agree a way forward together.
Across the sector, international NGOs, local organisations, global majority civil society and governments have been interrogating these questions for years: Who drives solutions? Whose knowledge counts? What does genuine partnership look like? With these questions in mind, international NGOs are actively considering what their role should be in the future.
While there is still a long way to go, initiatives like the Grand Bargain, Pledge for Change, CREED and Charter for Change signal a commitment by international NGOs to transform themselves, to shift decision making to local people and organisations operating in the heart of communities. Some NGOs are focusing on participatory grant making as an inclusive way to ensure that decision-making power about funding sits with the groups they aim to support.
Organisations like ADD International and Transform Trade are both implementing this approach. ADD International’s Disability Justice Fund for Women placed grant decisions in the hands of a panel of women with disabilities, reaching more than 1,000 applicants including informal and unregistered groups who had never before accessed funding. In Uganda, the grant reached Juliet's organisation BUDWA, which trains women with disabilities in everything from tailoring to welding, and runs a community savings group so that women never have to go to the street to beg for food. As Juliet puts it: “Teach me how, but don't do it for me”. Transform Trade found that by providing funding to local farmers who collectively decided to buy better quality seeds, farming productivity for many of these farmers increased by an average of 225 per cent.
Others are decentralising decision making, such as HelpAge International returning decision making back to national organisations they work with rather than it being concentrated within the UK head office. While some organisations are moving forward on the locally led agenda, there is still a lot of disparity within this space and much more to do. Governments, like the UK, and philanthropies who have historically funded international development also have a role to play.
It is welcome and encouraging that the government is prioritising strengthening local provision. The upcoming Global Partnerships Conference in May offers a chance to put words into action. There is a real opportunity here to move forward and redesign how development is done, ensuring it is rooted in fairness, equity and sustainability. Civil society has a lot of concrete ideas and recommendations developed in collaboration with partners around the world. We look forward to working with the UK government, and other attendees at the conference, to make them a reality.
Romilly Greenhill is CEO of Bond, the UK network for organisations working in international development and humanitarian assistance
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
