The international aid sector is in shock. The brusque downsizing of USAID has an immediate impact on millions of people and many aid-funded organisations: UN, NGOs, and government institutions running programmes with US funding. The brutality of it tends to obscure that European aid donors have been, and continue cutting, their aid budgets for some time now; USAID maintained its level until the new administration took over this year. It is the cumulative impact of budget cuts of the main Western aid-donors that is biting deep.
The aid sector is responding with arguments to the Western donors not to cut so drastically. Some hope this decline will be temporary, with official aid picking up again in a few years, when the political landscape has changed. Meanwhile, while searching for alternative sources to at least partially compensate the drastic losses in income, many must let go of large numbers of staff, and several have already closed down.
We are beginning to hear views that this must be the opportunity to drastically change an aid sector with significant flaws.
This brief supports the argument that radical change is needed. But it goes deeper in its analysis and imagining of the nature of that change. First, the analysis of what is happening needs improvement: The cuts in aid budgets go together with a sustained disregard for international norms and with an increasingly frontal attack on the primary multilateral institution tasked with promoting and defending them, the United Nations – by several of the countries behind its creation at the end of WWII. Simultaneously, we are also seeing a clear attack on the freedom of speech, academic independence, civic activism and the right to protest in the US, a trend that was already noticeable in several European countries. Therefore
- ONLY focusing on ‘downsizing’ and ‘re-prioritising’ project, and searching for alternative funding, is not good enough.
-The aid sector cannot continue to ignore the national, regional and international political economies that create and maintain poverty, disease, ‘underdevelopment’, wars, forced displacement, and humanitarian suffering.
- INGOs in particular need to engage much more with the marginalisation, climate crisis impacts, but also polarisation in their home societies, and the economic policies of their own governments.
- Agencies need to fundamentally rethink purpose, role, and collaborations in a new world disorder. That must start with a critical self-examination, in each, about how it has been working, individually and as part of a wider sector. We must let go of mindsets and ways of working similar to those that drive today's crises. Only then can we consider, with fresh eyes, how we best contribute to what the world now needs. The Annex offers some initial points for such critical reflection. Find the full brief here.