Donors built Africa’s aid system, now African civil society wants to rebuild it

When a donor offered money to an organization working in Kenya, it came with an opportunity to expand its work into more communities. For a small organization that needed funding, it might have seemed like an easy decision. It wasn’t.

The donor wanted the organization to expand quickly. The organisation said the communities it was already working with needed deeper support before it moved elsewhere. So they made a tough decision.

“They respectfully denied the funding,” said Nafissatou Sene, senior manager of Portfolio Services at African Collaborative, an organization that raises money and funds for African groups working in health, education, gender justice, agriculture and livelihoods.

Sene declined to identify the Kenyan organization because she did not have permission to name it. She said its budget was small and it needed money, making the decision especially difficult, but in the end it decided it had no choice.

“We’re not going to take anything just because it comes our way,” Sene said of the organisation’s position.

That kind of decision-making is what Nana Asantewa Afadzinu, executive director of the West Africa Civil Society Institute, said has too often been missing from development in Africa.

“For too long we’ve had development done to us,” Afadzinu said. “We’ve not been in the driving seats of deciding what the solutions should be to our own problems and resourcing them.”

The story has become an example of the kind of power a grouping of African civil society organizations gathered here for the first-ever meeting of African civil society leaders, say they want: the ability to decide what their communities need and insist that donors adjust their requirements to match the communities’ priorities rather than their own.

The three-day conference “Africa at the Centre: Leading Change, Shifting Power” brought together more than 200 civil society leaders, funders, policymakers and development experts from 30 countries, including Nigeria. Organizers said decades of development assistance have left foreign donors with too much control over which African problems receive money, how projects are designed and how success is measured. They say this has led to failed projects, lack of accountability, talent diverted from entrepreneurship and job creation, dependency and corruption.

Now, as traditional foreign aid from rich countries shrinks, they are pushing for African organizations and communities to have greater control over development spending by demanding donors listen. But they are also looking to raise more funds from Africans and African governments, and to limit the amount of money that flows out of the continent in corruption and debt payments.

One participant at the conference, Oyebisi Babatunde Oyebisi, executive director of the Nigeria Network of NGOs an umbrella body representing more than 3,000 civil society organisations, said the fight over control of development money is ultimately a fight over who gets to set the terms.

Mr Oyebisi said the current relationship between African organizations and traditional donors functions like a one-sided negotiation: recipients are offered only part of what they say they need, on conditions set by the donor, while further support often arrives as loans from institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund rather than grants.

In the past two years, he said, some of the same donor countries that once provided that support outright have pulled back, arguing that recipient countries had grown too dependent on them — and are increasingly steering money toward investment models or directly to governments rather than through NGOs.

“It’s going to be a long walk to freedom,” Oyebisi said. “It will require a whole-of-systems, a whole-of-sector approach.”

He pointed to the withdrawal of US assistance as a concrete example of what is at stake. President Donald Trump’s administration ended six decades of USAID support to Nigeria in January 2025, closing out an agency that had obligated $930.2 million to the country in 2024 alone, according to a review by Nigeria’s Development Research and Projects Center. Between 2020 and 2024, USAID had obligated $2.54 billion to Nigeria’s humanitarian response and more than $2.8 billion to its health sector, including HIV/AIDS treatment, the review found.

The effects have rippled through Nigeria’s civil society sector, Mr Oyebisi said. Jobs have been lost, and he expects many nonprofits that depended on that funding to shut down by the second quarter of 2027 as their reserves run out. Communities that relied on donor-funded nonprofits for services such as HIV prevention supplies, clean water, schools and clinics are already feeling the gap — particularly, he said, in areas affected by insurgency such as Borno state, where the aid cuts have compounded a humanitarian crisis among communities displaced by Boko Haram.

“We needed reforms of the aid architecture,” Mr Oyebisi said. “We were over-dependent on that too much. We weren’t expecting a major re-jig of aid architecture that’s been there since the ‘70s.” He said the question now is how to rethink that architecture so that people do not suffer for decisions made at the United Nations, by individual donor countries or by African governments themselves.

He said he does not want to see aid return to what it was before 2025. Any new arrangement should be built around the lessons of the past, past commitments made by donor countries, calls for reparations, and addressing imbalances in global governance and resource control. Many African leaders, he added, say they no longer want aid at all — they want business and jobs — which means African governments and institutions also need to lean more on domestic revenue, loans and grants of their own rather than relying primarily on foreign assistance.

Putting more money in African hands raises its own risk, Mr Oyebisi acknowledged: corruption and illicit financial flows. He said African governments need to improve their tax systems and block illicit financial flows, while civil society groups need to keep following the money and pressing for results.

“We need active citizens,” he said. In Nigeria, he said, about 28 to 29 of the country’s 36 states now publish their budgets and citizens’ budgets — but publishing a budget is not enough. Citizens need to be able to track who the contractor is, where a road or clinic is being built, and whether it gets finished, with a mechanism to flag problems and get a response.

That kind of oversight work, Oyebisi said, is exactly why he worries about donor funding for civil society disappearing. Governments cannot be expected to fund the organizations that monitor them, he said, so independent civil society groups need resources that do not come from the governments they are holding accountable.

“You don’t expect my government to give me money to monitor it,” he said. “So you need some neutral support, and that’s why it’s really a big challenge when those resources are pulled.”

West African Civil Society Institute’s Afadzinu said changing the system does not mean simply replacing foreign money. It also means changing who decides how that money is used. She said she wanted to see donors provide more flexible and core funding that allows African organizations to strengthen themselves instead of moving from one donor-designed project to another.

“Don’t help us to continuously depend on you,” Afadzinu said. “Help us to become stronger.”

African countries and organizations must also raise more of their own money, she said, including through local philanthropy, diaspora support, businesses and social enterprises.

Sene said African organizations may already have more power in their relationship with donors than they realize. One organization refusing money may have little influence, she said. Many organizations taking the same position could force donors to listen.

“We cannot give grants or funds to people who refuse to take it from us,” Sene said. “If everybody said no, what are we going to do with the money?”

At least one international funder at the Accra gathering is already onboard.

Tendisai Chigwedere of the US-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which was a financial backer of the Convening, said philanthropy has historically held enormous influence because it controlled the money. She said Hewlett is listening to local organizations, giving them more control with long-term partnerships and flexible funding. The Hewlett Foundation said it awarded $631 million in grants in 2024, with nearly three-quarters provided as flexible funding.

“We don’t want you to be boxed into a project,” Chigwedere said. “Allowing you to have general operating support helps you build the institution, build the vision, and work on the agenda… to do the things you need to do.”

There is already substantial work developing new models.

Wanjiru Kanyiha, network coordinator of the Global Public Investment Network, is pushing an idea in which African countries would contribute to a common pool according to their ability and participate in deciding how the money is spent. The idea is summed up in three phrases: all contribute, all benefit, all decide.

Under such a system, Kanyiha said, a country with fewer resources would not be expected to contribute as much as a wealthier one but would still have a voice in decisions and could receive more than it contributed based on need. Supporters hope to have governments working around one or two pilots by the end of 2028.

After three days in Accra, the West African Civil Society Institute said it will temporarily steward the work after the meeting, coordinate follow-up and help participants continue developing ideas that emerged from the gathering.

“Redistributing power is not about reversing hierarchies,” Charles Vandyck, the Institute’s head of capacity development wrote in a post-conference reflection. “It is about building systems where power is shared, accountability is mutual, and agency is respected.”