Editor’s Note: This project brought together the perspectives of two experts from Africa to amplify the perspectives of local underrepresented civil society actors with respect to U.S. international aid.
Nadia Nata (Benin) is an Africa peace and security specialist with experience working in Africa in regional organizations, INGOs, and local civil society groups.
Seydina Ndiaye is a social entrepreneur and the cofounder of a Senegalese civil society organization that seeks to empower community-level agents of change. They are uniquely qualified to comment on the complexities of international aid and grassroots-level development.
By Aude Darnal, Research Analyst, Reimagining US Grand Strategy
Introduction
During the past two decades, the U.S. government has dedicated several hundred billion dollars to U.S. international aid to fund programs aimed at fostering peace and addressing development and humanitarian challenges in target countries. Yet, many of these countries continue to lag behind in human development indexes.
In West Africa, local actors often decry their marginalization in the design and implementation of aid programs, as well as the lack of sustainability and adequacy of such programs to address local needs. Indeed, in 2023, less than 10% of U.S. aid reached local organizations, despite a commitment of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to channel 25% directly to these organizations by 2025. This imbalance between local and foreign actors’ roles severely undermines local civil society organizations’ (CSOs’) participation in addressing community needs. Practically, top-down funding models perpetuate inefficiencies, reinforce the dependency of communities on foreign intervention, and marginalize those targeted by aid from decision-making processes.
To achieve sustainable development, aid governance should be refocused by directing international assistance to local actors and reframing funding mechanisms in line with grassroots priorities. Of course, challenges exist in terms of local capacities and the bureaucracies of donor organizations. However, the U.S. government should adopt a differentiated approach to the contexts in which it intervenes in order to leverage existing competencies, help develop them when necessary, and address U.S. aid actors’ own limitations. This would ensure that U.S. international assistance is used to build on existing initiatives at the local level and help champions of change to become self-sufficient, breaking from a dependence on foreign aid.
This policy brief highlights opportunities for U.S. aid to be redesigned to better support CSOs through more inclusive community-driven strategies.
Empowering Local Voices: Strengthening Civil Society in West Africa
Nadia Nata, Senior Research Associate, Amani Africa Associates, shares perspectives from Benin.
West African countries face challenges both internally — inadequate institutions, ineffective governance, high unemployment, and climate change — and externally, including geopolitical dynamics, the global economy, and transborder crime. In recent years, these difficulties have led to setbacks in democratic governance, as well as insecurity, political instability, persistent poverty, violent extremism, coups, and armed conflicts. For example, several West African countries — such as Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Niger — are in the bottom 20 of the 2023-24 United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index and the 2024 Global Social Progress Index.
Only a few West African countries, such as Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, have recently been able to raise sovereign capital owing to their economic performance. Given the scarcity of most West African governments’ budgets, aid remains crucial for the region to address development challenges. Local CSOs can play a pivotal role in ensuring programs have a lasting impact.
The United States has channeled significant resources through international assistance to support these countries because it recognizes that instability in West Africa is not in the United States’ or its European allies’ interests, whether owing to illegal immigration or the impact of instability on economic partnerships.
But limited funding reaches local CSOs, which are crucial actors for supporting efforts to promote good governance, citizen engagement, and government accountability. Indeed, many countries experience the shrinking of the political and civic space, a weakening of checks and balances of local institutions, and the use of the judicial system for political gains.
The United States should take pragmatic actions to amplify local CSOs’ participation in internationally funded aid programs.
- USAID should develop a special fund aimed at building CSOs’ capacities to directly access U.S. aid — such as grant-making and reporting skills.
- USAID should also focus on building local CSO capacities and strategies to operate in challenging environments, such as in countries where governments implement repressive policies against civil society.
- To ensure that aid is aligned with local needs, CSOs should be integrated into aid-related decision-making processes, including during the setting of regional priorities for U.S. aid institutions.
The United States should increase the flexibility of its aid mechanisms to enhance the impact of aid and the efficiency of its distribution.
- To support the development of a funding model that allows local CSOs to compete for and directly receive funding, USAID should, in the short-to-midterm, prioritize partnership-building, such as consortiums between International NGOS (INGOs) and local CSOs to apply for joint funding. Â
- Grant requirements should ensure that at least 50% of the allocated resources go to local communities, even if via INGOs. Similarly, this model should ensure that new funding commitments do not inadvertently lead to the funding of northern CSOs with local offices in southern countries.
- Aid funding systems should take into consideration local environments to ensure more flexibility in procedures and notably reduce the size of the funding bureaucracy, while preserving due diligence and compliance processes.
- Long-term aid is needed to foster the sustainability and impact of programs.
- USAID should leverage technology and digitalization to promote the engagement of young and female individuals in governance.
Reimagining Aid: Empowering Senegal’s Grassroots for Sustainable Development
Seydina Ndiaye, Social Entrepreneur and Co-Founder, Collectif des Volontaires du Senegal, shares perspectives from Senegal.
The Stagnation of Senegal’s Human Development Index (HDI) and the Need for Change
Senegal’s Human Development Index remained stagnant from 2020 to 2023, with the country ranked 169th in human development indicators. In 2020, Senegal received $155 million from USAID for various development projects spanning sectors such as agriculture, local governance, youth development (supporting youth personal and professional growth), and economic entrepreneurship. Despite receiving international assistance from USAID and other international donors, expected advancements in the Human Development Index have not materialized, pointing to inherent inefficiencies in the allocation and management of aid.
The Misallocation of Development Aid: A Systemic Issue
In 2023, only a meagre 9.6% of USAID’s overall funding directly reached local actors and grassroots organizations. This funding model has been partly driven by a belief that local organizations lack the capacity to develop, implement, and manage large projects. This has led to the centralization of power and funding within INGOs, a dynamic that also exists in Senegal.
However, these large foreign organizations, although well-funded, fail to address local needs effectively and sustainably. As a result, a disconnect exists between international donors and the communities they aim to help, perpetuating inefficiency as well as stagnation in human and sustainable development indicators.
In addition, only a small pool of local organizations receive funding from international donors. Consequently, a few local stakeholders are often responsible for implementing different projects concurrently. Moreover, the stakeholders’ objectives often overlap, creating redundancy in programs.
Meanwhile, Senegal’s larger base of grassroots organizations struggles to gain access to USAID funding to implement local development initiatives.
The CODEVS Model: A Sustainable Approach to Grassroots Empowerment
In contrast to the dominant funding model whereby INGOs are the primary recipients of aid, the Collectif des Volontaires du Senegal (CODEVS) has developed an alternative model that empowers grassroots organizations.
The organization’s mandate is to empower local grassroots organizations in poor and rural areas in order to make them the main actors in addressing development challenges, while also giving them opportunities to prioritize their interventions.
From 2020 to 2024, CODEVS created a network of local grassroots organizations to provide them with technical assistance in governance, financial management, and strategic development. The organization also launched a Community Project Support Fund that aims to help grassroots actors use the skills they developed by enabling them to implement projects. CODEVS has also developed an online platform to display the activities of member organizations to increase visibility, accountability, and transparency.
Contrary to the usual development models, CODEVS acts as a support hub for small community-level organizations. It centralizes and manages fundraising and administration processes, while building the capacities of its members and mentoring them. This allows grassroots organizations to focus on developing, implementing and evaluating their projects, while building their capabilities, creating sustainability, and ensuring long-lasting impact.
Breaking the Cycle: The Need for Direct Funding to Local Actors
So far, CODEVS has not received international funding and has primarily relied on members’ and partners’ financial contributions and donations. The organization’s successes despite its limited financial resources make a strong case for allocating a larger portion of international assistance directly to grassroots organizations. Admittedly, in some contexts, the lack of administrative capacity to meet donors’ standards is an impediment to such partnerships. But using local hubs such as the model developed by CODEVS might help to solve such a conundrum. Moreover, this model also encourages donors to leverage local actors, as opposed to INGOs, to provide technical support in governance and financial management to grassroot partners.
This approach not only reduces inefficiencies but also fosters local ownership of projects, ensuring that initiatives are more sustainable and better aligned with community needs. The need for donors to deconstruct prevailing blanket statements and misconceptions about local organizations, skills, and knowledge and invest in local stakeholders is central to achieving long-term development goals.
To achieve progress and sustainability in human development in Senegal, USAID and other donors should modernize their approach to funding. Empowering local grassroots organizations, providing them with direct access to funding, and enabling them to make decisions based on local needs would create a more efficient and equitable development model.
Aid That Works: Enhancing US Support for Civil Society Organizations
Global South Experts Turn the Tables
By Aude Darnal • Nadia Nata • Seydina Mouhamadou Ndiaye • Preethi Vatadahosahalli
Grand Strategy
The Trump administration’s recent decision to pause foreign assistance has sudden implications for civil society organizations and communities that rely on aid to address humanitarian and development challenges. This pause has placed critical programs at risk and heightened uncertainty for those on the ground. While the administration’s long-term strategy remains unclear, what is certain is that local actors are best positioned to shape international assistance strategies and programs. However, current top-down aid models often prioritize international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), limiting the role of local organizations that have the expertise and contextual knowledge needed for sustainable development.
Currently, less than 10% of U.S. assistance reaches grassroots organizations, despite their critical role in addressing local challenges. This imbalance not only weakens local capacity but also reduces aid effectiveness and slows progress in fragile regions such as West Africa and the Sahel. Addressing these shortcomings will be essential once aid flows resume, ensuring that assistance reaches those best positioned to create lasting change.
This piece explores how innovative donor approaches can strengthen the long-term impact of U.S. assistance. By centering local actors in decision-making, U.S. aid can foster greater resilience, drive efficiency, and create sustainable development outcomes.
Editor’s Note: This project brought together the perspectives of two experts from Africa to amplify the perspectives of local underrepresented civil society actors with respect to U.S. international aid.
Nadia Nata (Benin) is an Africa peace and security specialist with experience working in Africa in regional organizations, INGOs, and local civil society groups.
Seydina Ndiaye is a social entrepreneur and the cofounder of a Senegalese civil society organization that seeks to empower community-level agents of change. They are uniquely qualified to comment on the complexities of international aid and grassroots-level development.
By Aude Darnal, Research Analyst, Reimagining US Grand Strategy
Introduction
During the past two decades, the U.S. government has dedicated several hundred billion dollars to U.S. international aid to fund programs aimed at fostering peace and addressing development and humanitarian challenges in target countries. Yet, many of these countries continue to lag behind in human development indexes.
In West Africa, local actors often decry their marginalization in the design and implementation of aid programs, as well as the lack of sustainability and adequacy of such programs to address local needs. Indeed, in 2023, less than 10% of U.S. aid reached local organizations, despite a commitment of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to channel 25% directly to these organizations by 2025. This imbalance between local and foreign actors’ roles severely undermines local civil society organizations’ (CSOs’) participation in addressing community needs. Practically, top-down funding models perpetuate inefficiencies, reinforce the dependency of communities on foreign intervention, and marginalize those targeted by aid from decision-making processes.
To achieve sustainable development, aid governance should be refocused by directing international assistance to local actors and reframing funding mechanisms in line with grassroots priorities. Of course, challenges exist in terms of local capacities and the bureaucracies of donor organizations. However, the U.S. government should adopt a differentiated approach to the contexts in which it intervenes in order to leverage existing competencies, help develop them when necessary, and address U.S. aid actors’ own limitations. This would ensure that U.S. international assistance is used to build on existing initiatives at the local level and help champions of change to become self-sufficient, breaking from a dependence on foreign aid.
This policy brief highlights opportunities for U.S. aid to be redesigned to better support CSOs through more inclusive community-driven strategies.
Empowering Local Voices: Strengthening Civil Society in West Africa
Nadia Nata, Senior Research Associate, Amani Africa Associates, shares perspectives from Benin.
West African countries face challenges both internally — inadequate institutions, ineffective governance, high unemployment, and climate change — and externally, including geopolitical dynamics, the global economy, and transborder crime. In recent years, these difficulties have led to setbacks in democratic governance, as well as insecurity, political instability, persistent poverty, violent extremism, coups, and armed conflicts. For example, several West African countries — such as Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Niger — are in the bottom 20 of the 2023-24 United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index and the 2024 Global Social Progress Index.
Only a few West African countries, such as Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, have recently been able to raise sovereign capital owing to their economic performance. Given the scarcity of most West African governments’ budgets, aid remains crucial for the region to address development challenges. Local CSOs can play a pivotal role in ensuring programs have a lasting impact.
The United States has channeled significant resources through international assistance to support these countries because it recognizes that instability in West Africa is not in the United States’ or its European allies’ interests, whether owing to illegal immigration or the impact of instability on economic partnerships.
But limited funding reaches local CSOs, which are crucial actors for supporting efforts to promote good governance, citizen engagement, and government accountability. Indeed, many countries experience the shrinking of the political and civic space, a weakening of checks and balances of local institutions, and the use of the judicial system for political gains.
The United States should take pragmatic actions to amplify local CSOs’ participation in internationally funded aid programs.
The United States should increase the flexibility of its aid mechanisms to enhance the impact of aid and the efficiency of its distribution.
Reimagining Aid: Empowering Senegal’s Grassroots for Sustainable Development
Seydina Ndiaye, Social Entrepreneur and Co-Founder, Collectif des Volontaires du Senegal, shares perspectives from Senegal.
The Stagnation of Senegal’s Human Development Index (HDI) and the Need for Change
Senegal’s Human Development Index remained stagnant from 2020 to 2023, with the country ranked 169th in human development indicators. In 2020, Senegal received $155 million from USAID for various development projects spanning sectors such as agriculture, local governance, youth development (supporting youth personal and professional growth), and economic entrepreneurship. Despite receiving international assistance from USAID and other international donors, expected advancements in the Human Development Index have not materialized, pointing to inherent inefficiencies in the allocation and management of aid.
The Misallocation of Development Aid: A Systemic Issue
In 2023, only a meagre 9.6% of USAID’s overall funding directly reached local actors and grassroots organizations. This funding model has been partly driven by a belief that local organizations lack the capacity to develop, implement, and manage large projects. This has led to the centralization of power and funding within INGOs, a dynamic that also exists in Senegal.
However, these large foreign organizations, although well-funded, fail to address local needs effectively and sustainably. As a result, a disconnect exists between international donors and the communities they aim to help, perpetuating inefficiency as well as stagnation in human and sustainable development indicators.
In addition, only a small pool of local organizations receive funding from international donors. Consequently, a few local stakeholders are often responsible for implementing different projects concurrently. Moreover, the stakeholders’ objectives often overlap, creating redundancy in programs.
Meanwhile, Senegal’s larger base of grassroots organizations struggles to gain access to USAID funding to implement local development initiatives.
The CODEVS Model: A Sustainable Approach to Grassroots Empowerment
In contrast to the dominant funding model whereby INGOs are the primary recipients of aid, the Collectif des Volontaires du Senegal (CODEVS) has developed an alternative model that empowers grassroots organizations.
The organization’s mandate is to empower local grassroots organizations in poor and rural areas in order to make them the main actors in addressing development challenges, while also giving them opportunities to prioritize their interventions.
From 2020 to 2024, CODEVS created a network of local grassroots organizations to provide them with technical assistance in governance, financial management, and strategic development. The organization also launched a Community Project Support Fund that aims to help grassroots actors use the skills they developed by enabling them to implement projects. CODEVS has also developed an online platform to display the activities of member organizations to increase visibility, accountability, and transparency.
Contrary to the usual development models, CODEVS acts as a support hub for small community-level organizations. It centralizes and manages fundraising and administration processes, while building the capacities of its members and mentoring them. This allows grassroots organizations to focus on developing, implementing and evaluating their projects, while building their capabilities, creating sustainability, and ensuring long-lasting impact.
Breaking the Cycle: The Need for Direct Funding to Local Actors
So far, CODEVS has not received international funding and has primarily relied on members’ and partners’ financial contributions and donations. The organization’s successes despite its limited financial resources make a strong case for allocating a larger portion of international assistance directly to grassroots organizations. Admittedly, in some contexts, the lack of administrative capacity to meet donors’ standards is an impediment to such partnerships. But using local hubs such as the model developed by CODEVS might help to solve such a conundrum. Moreover, this model also encourages donors to leverage local actors, as opposed to INGOs, to provide technical support in governance and financial management to grassroot partners.
This approach not only reduces inefficiencies but also fosters local ownership of projects, ensuring that initiatives are more sustainable and better aligned with community needs. The need for donors to deconstruct prevailing blanket statements and misconceptions about local organizations, skills, and knowledge and invest in local stakeholders is central to achieving long-term development goals.
To achieve progress and sustainability in human development in Senegal, USAID and other donors should modernize their approach to funding. Empowering local grassroots organizations, providing them with direct access to funding, and enabling them to make decisions based on local needs would create a more efficient and equitable development model.
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