by Jindra Cekan | Aug 4, 2026 | Aid effectiveness, Asia, Better Evaluation, Central Asia, ex-post evaluation, Exit strategies, foreign aid, humanitarian, international development, OECD, sustainability planning, Sustainable development, Sustained and Emerging Impact Evaluation (SEIE)
Continuing to Learn about Sustainability, Now more than ever
Since 2024, foreign aid has taken multiple shocks (post-Covid): wars, climate shocks, and a widespread retreat from foreign assistance, especially among OECD countries: “Official development assistance (ODA) by Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members and associates amounted to USD 174.3 billion in 2025, a 23.1% decrease over 2024. It is the largest annual contraction on record and a second consecutive year of decline, bringing ODA to where it stood at the start of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” Notably, many of these cuts were bilateral donations, notably from the USA, Germany, France, Japan, and the UK. Least developed countries and sub-Saharan Africa. A striking statistic cited by the US Council on Foreign Relations was that by 2025, Americans collectively spent more on their Halloween candy ($3.9B) than their government did on life-saving humanitarian aid ($3.4B).” However, they excluded in-donor refugee costs, humanitarian aid and debt relief, and while USAID was dismantled in early 2025, a bit of health funding has been restored. Still, 72% of the UN’s funding needs are unmet, unparalleled, which includes 25 million fewer people received aid in 2025, such as those with rising needs in Gaza, Sudan, Iran, Haiti, Yemen, and Ukraine’s wars not to mention rising natural catastrophes from floods and fires raging currently in 2026’s El Niño.
In mid-2026, OXFAM reported that “aid’s crucial role in combating diseases like HIV-AIDS and malaria, the Institute of Global Health of Barcelona estimated that global aid cuts of such magnitude would kill hundreds of thousands of people in 2025 alone. If this trend continues, aid cuts could kill over 9 million people by 2030” while Rockefeller Foundation cites Lancet projections that “aid cuts could lead to more than 22 million avoidable deaths by 2030, including 5.4 million children under five, according to the most comprehensive modelling to date.” (Oxfam pointedly notes that “top 0.1 percent richest people worldwide hide $2.84 trillion in tax havens. Even a small tax on that wealth would yield much more than the amount of aid cuts,” but political will is needed for that, in a world led by elites, thus unlikely.)
So this is bad, as according to a 2026 poll that found that 46% of African youth believed the “closure of USAID would have a damaging impact on their countries, with healthcare services and disease prevention seen as the areas most affected.” Yet a quarter of African youth, believed USAID cuts were positive, as they want their governments “to take agency and responsibility for their own reality” and stop being influenced by foreign powers. Further, “A lot of people find aid very demeaning…“they didn’t feel that the aid was being used for the right things and there is a sense of ‘We can do this for ourselves’.”
This gives us several learning opportunities, in addition to re-examining why the messages about the need for and effectiveness of aid were not heard.
1) We would ground-truth the modelling and confirm the projected negative effects as well as document the unintended positive effects of these aid cuts in terms of how communities coped This is because most sustained results documented by our SEIE (Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation) and other ex-post evaluation show that national uptake and continuation is key to results lasting as we documented in five cases in Part 1:What Happens After the Project Ends? driven by Country-national Ownership in Part 2.
2) We would also continue to evaluate the sustainability of results, as Japan’s JICA, which performs ex-post evaluations in addition to “terminal evaluations” and “post-project monitoring” several times post-closure for rich design learning. They have done 3,000 such evaluations and are a continued leader in this field, most recently highlighted in this recent annual report on lessons for Technical Cooperation, ODA Loans and Grant Aid, which showed they did 66 ex-post evaluations for Technical Cooperation, 24 for ODA Loans, and 26 for Grant Aid. Of the projects that do remain, the need is even more vital to show sustainability results to combat more aid cuts on the supposed lack of effective – and defensible- results.
3) What can be done immediately for all projects that are currently underway is to embed learning about projected sustainability by planning for it. This involves by using checklists from at least the mid-point onward that create the conditions for sustainability, as well as consider needed commitments to sustainability and revise implementation pre-closure. Authors from Central Asia and Asia share insights about the need for continued knowledge from such evaluations, below.
This table comes from 9 checklists cited in the following work we did on capacity development and lessons pre-exit and ex-post closure: https://valuingvoices.com/fostering-values-driven-sustainability-through-an-ex-post-capacities-lens-reposting-a-book-chapter/. Please note the increasing need to evaluate the ecological systems in which development and humanitarian projects are embedded.
The blog posts above noting the need to embed resilience and institutional pathways during the crisis itself, as well as excellent pages from Muhammad Maksudul Hannan from Bangladesh noting the need to retain knowledge locally and how we should be measuring behavior change rather than trainings done, show how, overall, to do good monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL). This continues to be true for the remaining 77% of aid programming that continues to assist ‘development’, as well as the many corporates launching projects in LDCs such as for community-level carbon credits which are equally in need of MEL.
A recent Better Evaluation post on whether evaluating sustainability in humanitarian contexts matters amid shrinking budgets and hyper-prioritization; “whether today’s investments yield benefits that endure and whether responses help build systems and capacities that can last.” Examples from Central Asia and Afghanistan show the need to localize evaluation to the context, but that it is still sorely needed, pre-exit and post to “provide evidence on humanitarian interventions’ lasting contributions.”
4) For those restructuring foreign aid (USA especially): The ex-post sustainability learning shows that when donors design and implementation by putting ownership in local communities from the start in true partnership, take sufficient time to implement (up to 10 years, not 1 or 2), put in feedback loops and act on their input by revising implementation to support capacities to maintain assets and pass on knowledge to non-participants, have sufficient resources generated to pay for ongoing costs and expand livelihoods in emerging ways to be resilient to new shocks (and opportunities!) in their ecological contexts, sustainability and greater resilience will follow.
Let me know your thoughts during this turbulent time…
by Jindra Cekan | Dec 30, 2025 | Climate Investment Funds (CIF), Congo, Grand Bargain, M&E, OCHA, Sustainability, Sustainable development
Localization and investing in what lasts: locally-led development and ex-post learning
This year-end blog highlights learning from the Climate Investment Funds (CIF), IRC/ CARE, about what can work, what needs more resources, learning from what didn’t, OCHA challenging assumptions and RI data, bring true localization, and sustainability/ resilience learning for Adaptation Fund (CF) to come.
1. CIF’s PPCR and ARISE programs
A final, summative evaluation of a $1.2 billion Climate Investment Funds (CIF) 10-year programme, the PPRC, that I and Valuing Voices evaluators were involved through ICF has led to inspiring learning on local leadership and investments in nature-based solutions (NbS). We did three ex-post evaluations of work in Samoa, Bangladesh and Mozambique which i mentioned in this 2025 blog. The CIF used our evaluation findings for both a management response and learning and follow-on programme design.
The learning is shown in their management response to our recommendations including on Sustainability:
* “Management agrees that future programs should give greater attention to sustainability from the outset by improving design and exit planning to ensure that project outcomes, institutional capacities, and partnerships remain effective beyond project completion.
* To sustain results over time, Management agrees to foster local ownership, build institutional and technical capacities, and mobilize resources for operations and maintenance, which were found lacking in operations and maintenance across the three ex-posts.” These drew on our ex-post evaluation findings:
* “Also, Management acknowledges the value of maintaining robust monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems to enable adaptive program and project management and support sustainability….
* Building on the country led monitoring processes, introduced within the PPCR, future programs will explore opportunities for supporting further monitoring and evaluation to better understand the factors that contribute to long-term resilience in the face of increasing climate risks and uncertainties.”
They used, among other lessons, ex-post findings in the design of the ARISE programme (Accelerating Resilience Investments and Innovations for Sustainable Economies), This includes key learning like “CIF will continue to promote a systems-oriented approach and adaptive design frameworks that link national, sub-national, and local interventions…[and] encourage inclusive engagement of local stakeholders, particularly disadvantaged and climate-vulnerable groups.” They also heard us about local Ownership: “Champion locally-led adaptation solutions, empowering communities to drive innovations and deliver lasting impact – with inclusive, scalable funding approaches rooted in communities most affected” and “Countries being in the driver’s seat is the best way to set priorities. Some PPCR countries chose smart agriculture, others infrastructure and flood protection, or early warning systems…” They also chose to listen to community desires for sustainable solutions, including lessons from Mozambique: “Install solar-powered, efficient irrigation to conserve water and maintain productivity”,
2. IRC & CARE Congo’s Community Driven Development (CDD)
5 years after a 4-year CDD programme called Tuungane 1 in Eastern Congo closed, they found “evidence as to its effects remains inconclusive.” It had two components: 1) an intervention at the VDC (village development committees) level that involved $3,000 grants, and 2) further $50,000 to $70,000 sub-grants to undertake infrastructure projects such as the construction of schools and hospitals. A key element was a focus on women’s empowerment and on championing the rights and roles of women in collective decision-making. A robust evaluation of 781 villages found that while “the program had a positive [output] on the quality of primary schools and health facilities, and on the presence of material and supplies in these facilities… villagers living in areas that received Tuungane 1 have education and health facilities nearby that are built and stocked better than in areas the program did not focus on.
Yet they found no evidence for improvements in education outcomes or long-term impact(s):
- “We find no evidence that the program had an effect on other dimensions of service provision: capacity, staff quality, quality of administration, community participation, service cost or utilization.” They determined that it was a dearth of resources invested into salaries and costs”: “Teachers and nurses still received very little compensation for their work…. [and] Many individuals mentioned that prohibitive prices remained a central obstacle for making of use educational or
health services….
- We do not find positive economic effects and even see some (generally scattered) evidence suggesting adverse economic effects.
- Finally, when it comes to the role of women, the evidence does not suggest that Tuungane 1 led to improvements in women’s empowerment.”
Many programs do that show that an insufficient investment in only “gender quotas, which increase the number of women in leadership positions, may not be sufficient to alter entrenched gender roles and norms.” Such gender roles are complex and ‘just’ making sure women are participating is not enough. This is a common finding across many ex-post evaluations. Doing ex-post evaluations shows how to design better, and foster locally-led development in fact, not theory. Kudos for publishing valuable, if disappointing, results.
3) OCHA leadership created a Grand Bargain 2.0 in 2021, it is high time it is implemented de facto.
- “Approaches and methodologies to localization of ‘sustainable development’ programming must be promoted so that local NGOs can take ownership of such approaches and start implement them. Most aid agencies don’t have yet the know-how to implement such a “localization approach” as this requires a complete change in the way they operate. This would also imply to “educate” donors on this new way of working as being initially more time consuming in terms of planning, and would require a “power change” from the humanitarian “elites” to the local communities and authorities….
- The concentration of monetary resources at the top facilitates accountability to global north donors at the expense of accountability to aid recipients. Humanitarian elites wield power by dominating the discourse that sets the agenda for action, notes scholar Sheila Nair. Meanwhile, power imbalances in humanitarian governance tend to exclude local communities from direct funding and leadership opportunities….How much are organizations excluded? “Even where international organizations have adopted localized funding models, international-local partnership practices remain highly hierarchical. In a 2019 survey by the Accelerating Localisation through Partnerships consortium, only 24% of local and national NGOs said international-local partnerships seemed ‘genuine’….
- While the Grand Bargain has not yielded significant results, local groups are busy enacting change outside of formal international frameworks. ODI’s July study identifies bottom-up action as the driving force for the most significant localization shifts during the [COVID] pandemic. Standout initiatives include an informal coalition of Red Cross national societies in the Pacific region that draws from their collective resources and expertise to improve local capacity and access to funding. And in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Santé & Développement emerged as a grassroots effort to address pandemic-related needs with the support of locally raised funds.” In fact, “While Grand Bargain signatories pledged by 2020 to give at least 25% of humanitarian funding to local and national stakeholders, only a tiny fraction of that — just 1.2% in 2022 — went directly to local and national groups.”
And given huge funding cuts of humanitarian aid alone as of end of 2025 (the USA is offering the UN only $2 billion of the $50 billion+ needed and many other donors are pulling back aid) maybe there is a silver lining. Refugees International (RI) announced in late 2024, that “New evidence reveals a compelling financial case for localizing humanitarian aid: Local organizations are delivering assistance in a more cost-efficient way than their international counterparts. And yet they remain woefully underfunded.”
Localization is cheaper (as mentioned in 2015’s American Red Cross Haiti $500 million scandal) and must now become the priority, especially given research RI cites, that “local organizations are delivering assistance that is 17% more cost-efficient on average. Global data suggests that this figure could be as high as 32% for large U.N. and INGO budgets.” They go on to note that “The system must stop treating local organizations as subcontractors and meet them on equal terms as partners who lead…. ”
Given aid cuts, localization may be the (best?) last resort, and possibly the most sustainable.
4) Adaptation Fund’s ex-post adaptive sustainability and resilience learning continues
Finally, I am excited that in spite of a challenging funding environment, our ICF team has been selected by the Adaptation Fund (AF) to lead its 8th ex-post evaluation. This 5 years post-closure is of an $8 million water project run by Government of Ghana’s MEST and UNDP, of Increased Resilience to Climate Change in Northern Ghana through the Management of Water Resources and Diversification of Livelihoods. I am team lead under ICF Director Jessica Kyle and with the help of Isabel Morford-Cheibub, with an excellent Ghanaian expert Dr Martha Aata-Asantewa. We will be examining sustainability drivers, including local ownership, resources, partnerships, capacities and resilience characteristics as well as looking to learn from emerging outcome pathways to adaptive sustainability. Excited to share more lessons in 2026!
by Jindra Cekan | Oct 17, 2025 | carbon offsets, Ecosystem services, Return on Environment (ROEn), Sustainability, Sustainable development, Sustained Impact
Sustain our planet: Sustained Impact, Return on Environment, Environmental Impact Continuum & MRV (M&E)
I’ve been focusing on sustainability and reframing impact from the perspective of nature, thanks to lessons about the earth’s carrying capacity and tipping points being breached. I’ve learned about this thanks to my environmental colleague Margaret Spearman and others like Scientists Rebellion. I have also learned more while managing our 150-year old family forest (Lesy Cekanova) which I have been diversifying, naturally regenerating, and trying desperately to fell as little of as possible so more trees could provide the ‘ecosystem services’/ return on environment (ROEn) as possible to us all (more on Ecosystem Services, which is “any benefit that humans get from nature” (EU). Why? Because I know our 540ha (1335acre) forest is under threat, as are the rest of our planet’s 12 million species including humanity.
The EU writes, “Ecosystems services offer benefits such as the pollination of crops, clean air, a reduction in extreme weather, human mental and physical well-being, wood for construction, fossil fuels, fresh water, tourism, science, education, recycling, fertilizer, carbon capture, outdoor sports, lakes, flood protection, hydroelectric power, and decomposition of wastes. It’s hard to put a value on every way that rocks, forests, beaches, woods, plants and animals help our lives. But we can put an economic value on the combined benefits of the world’s ecosystems.”
Also, as a Buddhist, I know that we humans Are nature, indivisibly connected. So harming nature harms us.
What are ways in which we are investing in retaining nature? The ideals are investing in the oceans, but on land, carbon credits voluntary markets mostly focus on forests (selling the ability of trees to absorb our CO2). But while they are great additions to vitally needed decreasing emissions or sequestering carbon, industry claims that these offsets support planetary sustainability need checking. A new Oxford Uni/U of Pa study showing Carbon offsets have failed: “These junk offsets—the ones not backed by permanent carbon removal and storage—are a dangerous distraction from the real solution to climate change, which is rapid and sustained emission reductions” and they recommend that the Oxford Offsetting Principles, which “encourage companies to reduce emissions first and foremost, and to transition to durable, carbon removal offsetting for residual emissions.” Yes, AND that’s what we evaluators are for: MRV, which is monitoring, reporting and verification! I answered on Linkedin today “When there is not good faith participation with the landowners not planting monocultures and locals not cutting down what grows, it is inevitable. There needs to be robust MRV. And transparency. As a forest owner, I am looking into selling carbon credits and if we get income from it, it means we can finally stop seeing trees’ only value as cash and wood once they are felled. I’m a huge fan of carbon credits because it will decrease the amount we need to cut while still caring for our forest sustainably by giving us money to invest in a more diverse forest which serves a wide range of ecosystem services needs. A mindshift needs to happen to include – even prioritize – what nature gets from our investments, given how we’ve ravaged it.
As the Planetary Health Check 2025 report states, we are in trouble, breaching 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries.
Yet “the solutions are just as important as the diagnostics of the state of the planet. It is encouraging that a growing number of actors around the world are beginning to put the boundaries into action. From national biodiversity strategies to companies setting sciences-based targets – the boundary framework can inform real-world decisions,” said Norström.
So, join us to discuss how to implement real sustained impact measures, Return on Environment and Environmental Continuum! You could see the talk I gave in Oslo (short version of the keynote here) or join us for an expanded version and discussion with investors on 20 October with Margaret at the Global Rethinking Finance Collaborative (GFRC Futures Fair Overview and registration & Agenda). Also, there are nearly 50 amazing “Investable Initiatives and Catalytic Enablers” pitching to investors via GRFC – Building Better Bridges ranging from agriculture & forestry, desalinization, nature restoration & ILM, solar, distributed carbon-negative manufacturing, architecture, affordable housing, waste management & wealth care etc in Africa and Asia! Come along!
by Jindra Cekan | Jul 7, 2025 | Adaptive Sustainability, Bangladesh, Climate Investment Funds (CIF), emerging outcomes, foreign aid, ICF, Mozambique, Resilience, Samoa, Sustainability, Sustainable development, Valuing Voices
Adaptive Sustainability lessons the Climate Investment Funds’ PPCR evaluation, including three ex-posts
I am excited to share our latest Climate Investment Funds (CIF) Adaptive Sustainability report including three ex-post evaluations conducted by our Valuing Voices team for ICF in Samoa, Bangladesh, and a former colleague in Mozambique (Appendix E). They are part of the PPCR project’s evaluation of this “$1 billion Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR) [that] champions pioneering resilience strategies and approaches, in the countries and regions most vulnerable to the destructive impacts of climate change”. We evaluated sustainability, climate resilience, and transformation, building on ex-post evaluation work done at the Adaptation Fund with Margaret Spearman. I reviewed nearly 40 other country reports to identify the drivers of sustainability and did intensive ex-post evaluations 3-5 years after closure in this Final report (April 2025) just published. Sincere thanks to the excellent ICF team (Jessica Kyle, Isabel Morford-Cheibub with Laura Kuhl) and the CIF team for this learning opportunity.
More broadly, here are sustainability and resilience-relevant lessons from the final report summary findings:
“The PPCR’s stated goal is to integrate climate resilience into countries’ core development planning and provide incentives for scaled-up action and transformational change, and was also meant to pilot and demonstrate ways to build resilience that could guide future adaptation initiatives. The evaluation finds that the PPCR advanced climate resilience through pioneering programs, planning, and investments, and modernized climate information services, successfully demonstrating new, innovative, and effective ways to embed climate resilience into national development. However, while the PPCR contributed to transformational change, it sometimes missed opportunities to deepen systemic change, enhance private sector engagement, increase scale, and strengthen long-term sustainability….”
More granularly, for the three ex-post case studies, we aimed to answer three Adaptive Sustainability evaluation questions:
1. Have the project outcomes/impact(s) been sustained since project completion, including what emerged?
2. How are the sustained project outcome(s) climate-resilient?
3. What signals of transformational change were noted by interviewees?
Adaptive Sustainability
The case studies evaluated outcome(s) ex-post, including the levels of specific outcomes and impact(s) at ex-post compared to the final project evaluation. They identified which drivers of sustainability (e.g., ownership, resources, partnerships, capacities) contributed to existing and emerging outcomes (what emerged from local efforts to sustain results differently ex-post). Findings are organized based on what was positive and what was negative, as well as what unexpected results or instances of maladaptation were observed ex-post. The teams looked for Emerging vs Advanced Transformation Signals across: a) Flexibility and dynamism, b) Capacity, ownership, and resources, and c) Vulnerability reduction and redundancy.
Some of the high-level lessons across all the PPCR projects regarding adaptive sustainability were:
1) High local ownership has contributed to most PPCR-supported infrastructure and natural assets still being operational, and agricultural practices continuing
2) Project outcomes have been sustained so far, though this is unlikely to last many more years.
3) Some unintended distributional justice issues arose after project completion, with vulnerable groups not experiencing the same lasting benefits as other stakeholders
4) There is limited evidence of follow-up or ongoing monitoring after project completion, representing a lost learning opportunity.
All three ex-post detailed cases’ adaptive sustainability results were mixed. Table 2 below shows Ownership, followed by Capacity, and Partnerships being moderate, and Resources to sustain results being weaker drivers of adaptive sustainability. Therefore planning for ongoing resources to sustain operations and maintenance of assets is a clear lesson.
In the fieldwork, some elements continued to be sustained, mainly due to local ownership and other resilience sources (see the Samoan pool below). “There are multiple backup systems in place. Village governance structures, along with rehabilitated pools, provide redundancy and alternative water sources in case of government water supply disruptions due to climate events.”
Several assets faltered due to a lack of sufficient ongoing operations and maintenance while other assets disappeared or held on. One Bangladesh market stall sank months after construction, in part due to climate shocks and in part to insufficient design for resilience, while other assets, such as roads, withstood years of cyclones thanks to local maintenance:
In Mozambique, more farming irrigation assets were sustained than failed in the face of management design and climate stresses, but ownership was the driver to ensure continuation. At one site, a lack of resources, capacities, and partnerships limited success; however, the local farmers’ determination found additional resilience resources to compensate for irrigation issues, utilizing a natural spring and reverting to manual watering.
Across the cases, local ownership is the primary driver; however, resources are still needed. The CIF found the lessons to be very illuminating and is incorporating them into future programming. Let us know how you can use these lessons as well…
by Jindra Cekan | Feb 16, 2025 | Aid effectiveness, climate change, Donors, Evaluation, ex-post evaluation, Health programs, Impact Investors, international development, locally-led development, Monitoring and Evaluation, post-project evaluation, Sustainable development, USAID
The draconian cuts to USAID in February 2025 ($40 billion in currently allocated aid assistance, $63 billion in 2024, $71 billion in 2023, Pew) to 120 countries around the globe) are said to address waste and fraud and re-align priorities. Elon Musk of ‘DOGE‘ (government efficiency group tasked by US President Trump, without an approved remit or security clearances) called the Agency “a criminal organization. Time for it to die” (CBS) without citing proof. While aid is currently frozen under Secretary Rubio, the agency will likely be diminished to only humanitarian aid, leaving development programming shuttered. 10,000 USAID staff, thousands of US-funded contractors, and hundreds of thousands of INGO and NGO national staff and participants and ‘beneficiaries’ and partner organizations worldwide are abruptly without funding, inputs (medicines, seeds, research, scholarships, collaborations, etc) or information about timelines or recourse. While judges rule, suffering has already commenced, value chains have been broken, with aid rotting in warehouses, causing losses to donors (un-paid US farmers or contracted firms) and recipients.
FINANCIAL AND ECONOMIC LOSSES
From an ex-post sustainability view, what is difficult is that such sudden closures mean that not only this year’s already approved funding has been frozen, but all projects and programs that were implemented over a typical 1-5 years could not close properly and that received new funding this cycle. This means projects that began from 2019-2025 have not had time to finish implementing much less prepare for exit, nor learn or share lessons about what worked, what did not, and what the world can learn from such implementation. For instance, in an agriculture project, farmers are trained in year 1 of a 5 year project, inputs are given in year 2, with further inputs, farming practices and trainings and linkages with Ministry of agriculture are fine-tuned (e.g. in response to climatic shocks or changes in economic systems) in years 3 and 4, pre-closure in year 5. Some projects such as those in climate funds install the infrastructure by the end of the project, so any earlier closure is even more catastrophically unfinished. So too are capacity development and ongoing health and education and humanitarian help. While many of this current allocation cycle are likely to be new, many can be continuations of older projects. Premature exit dooms most projects that haven’t finished implementing fully or that needed extended funding to complete. As we shared in our nine checklists (see Capacities book chapter) drawing on best practices from sustained exit and ex-post research, sustainability pre-closure takes time. This time is to foster sustained handover to other partners, or finding alternate resources, including making sure capacities will continue to be passed on. Without time to do this plus evaluations and administrative close-out, far more than ‘just’ current billions allocated by Congress for current funding for programming is at stake; investments over the last 5+ years are also at stake. Thus, abrupt closeout means losing Years of funded implementation benefits and lessons.
While less than 1% of global development projects have been evaluated for sustainability, those ex-post studies 2-30 years post-closure have shown that over 50% of all interventions continue years after closure especially those with strong national ownership (see catalytic evaluations done by 40 organizations including USAID). While half-sustained may seem low, these can be successes given the withdrawal of funding, partnering, and capacities especially given strained conditions in-country to continue. Sometimes activities cannot or should not continue as conditions change, but others remain resilient even to climate shocks. One of the great joys of sustainability evaluations has been documenting emering outcomes, where local communities and partners have sustained results in new ways, which projects could learn from for future designs. But we need to complete programs fully and exit designing for sustainability, plus access other evaluations to learn this.
From 2018-2022 (the most recent, similar timeframe of data from the OECD), a total of 841 trillion in official Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) has been disbursed, with the US government’s share of ODA over those years was 51 billion, of which only US “Core support to NGOs, other private bodies, PPPs & research institutes” constituted ‘only‘ 935 million. It is, therefore, unsurprising the effect that withdrawing such amounts of foreign aid plays in the poorest recipient countries (CGD):
- “Eight low-income countries and eight lower-middle-income countries face losing over a fifth of the total foreign assistance they receive (South Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia). For these 8 countries: The economies of these eight low-income countries are so small that aid makes up an average of 11 percent of their total income (based on available GNI data for seven countries). With USAID providing 30 percent of that support, the freeze could create a shortfall equivalent to over 3 percent of GNI—a potentially major economic shock for countries that are home to 410 million people.”
- The economies of these eight low-income countries are so small that aid makes up an average of 11 percent of their total income (based on available GNI data for seven countries). With USAID providing 30 percent of that support, the freeze could create a shortfall equivalent to over 3 percent of GNI—a potentially major economic shock for countries that are home to 410 million people.
- A further eight [countries] rely on USAID for a fifth of their support: Haiti, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Honduras, Angola, Jordan, and Eswatini.
- If USAID’s freeze went on for a year it would leave twenty-three economies facing at least a 1 percent economic shock (sixteen LICs and seven LMICs). Eight of these would face [a 3-9] percent blow: South Sudan (9 percent), Somalia (9 percent), Afghanistan (7 percent), Liberia (4 percent), Syria (5 percent), the Central African Republic (4 percent), Yemen (4 percent), and Micronesia (3 percent).”
These ‘hits’ to the economic system of these countries will cause even more widespread suffering than ‘just’ those directly affected such as HIV+ babies, input-deprived farmers, students, and many more. Further other donors are also cutting budgets, e.g. the Netherlands and now Denmark, following the UK several years ago.
LEARNING LOSSES
Also, information, the vast troves of 60+ years of development experience housed in the USAID DEClearninghouse has disappeared as well. This included over 3 million mentions of evaluation, including over 50 ex-post studies and evaluations, and hundreds of millions of pages of research and programming, projects, and studies across economic development, health, refugees, climate, education, orphans and vulnerable children, democracy, etc. We can now only access a very partial set of archived documents until 2021. Many of us researchers who used USAID’s documents are having to go back to the archives and recover what we can – while it still exists. The loss of learning for researchers is exacerbated by losses of complementary global health data cand climate data (e.g. avian flu, ebola and NOAA climate models no longer funded to share data, etc). How can aid be effective without learning from the past for the future. Given we are approaching climate tipping points, we cannot afford to lose resources, data or focus. Further, we are losing all the institutional and technical knowledge of the staff and contractors being let go.
NEXT?
Other than Reinstatement, it is time for their own governments, wealthy country nationals, other countries, multilaterals, philanthropic foundations, and private donors, large and small, need to step back in (as during the first Trump administration to fill shortfalls). Droves of private ‘impact’ investors would be welcomed with open arms to finally engage in these countries to fill the gap. We can see that conserving democracy and helping the poorest is no longer the governments’ problem around the world. It is in our hands to save it. We can also make sustainable development better: fostering accountability from us to our development partners.
But this time it needs to be in greater collaboration with country national and civic leaders to invest sustainably in sectors and industries they believe have the greatest unmet needs, combined with the greatest prospects of locally-driven development and sustainability. This includes addressing power inbalances, long-term resources, partnerships, and capacities and fostering ownership from the onset and prevent future governments globally from shutting down their assistance without referendums.
What are your thoughts?
