Un-sustaining ‘Sustainable Development’ via USAID shuttering and other US learning losses

by | 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?

Partners For Democratic Change: Promote Capacity Building to Achieve Self-Sustainability!

by | Feb 27, 2014 | Evaluation, Governance, Local Participants, Participation, Results, Sustainability

Catalyst organizations are those whose focus is on implementing programs with community level involvement during projects and local feedback loops to inform post-project evaluations for impact self-sustainability. An excellent example of this is Partners for Democratic Change, whose stated mission is, “to build sustainable capacity to advance civil society and a culture of change and conflict management worldwide,” focusing on initiating democratic practices through an approach called Sustainable Impact Investing. The goal of this approach is to foster the capacity of in-country organizations to “deliver systematic change,” with a focus on development that, “is bottom-up, locally-led rather than foreign-led, based on the belief that change comes from sustainable efforts led by local people, organizations and institutions invested in their own long-term future.”

To implement this progressive and participatory vision for sustainable development, Partners’ founded 22 Centers for Change and Conflict Management between 1989-2011, initially in the regions of Eastern and Central Europe. They later expanded to other regions struggling with democratic sociopolitical change. Partners’ conducted its own ex-post evaluation that averaged the results of 55 case studies that led to positive significant outcomes. The takeaway resulted in three main sustainability lessons:

  1. “The importance of investing in local partners and building their capacity to promote democratic change;
     
  2. the most pressing development challenges facing the world need to be addressed in a participatory manner with the input and shared commitment of government, businesses and civil society, which requires local leaders with sophisticated skills in change and conflict management;
     
  3. and finally, the work of social entrepreneurs to make a difference in their own countries is strengthened and legitimated by technical and relational support from an international network of like-minded professionals facing similar challenges.”

With these objectives in mind, the greatest positive outcome that was observed occurred in almost 90% of the 55 stories. This outcome was that development and participation of civil society is most commonly achieved through, “education, training, mentoring, coaching, partnerships and coalition building, organizational development and capacity building, and creating and enabling environment that supports civil society development, such as passing NGO laws.” Further, in 80% of cases, there was advancement of good governance by influencing the participation of civil society working with government on the issues listed above, specifically free and fair elections, human rights protection, etc. Another 50% of the cases increased access to justice and managing and resolving disputes/conflicts, thereby strengthening civil society, and about 40% of the stories focused on promoting inclusive societies, improving majority-minority relations, and increasing leadership capacity for women and youth as agents for social change. The overall result of Partners’ efforts resulted in substantial impacts. Since 1991, the Centers have trained around 15,000 mediators and worked directly with more than 300,000 participants, benefitting an estimated total of 17.5 million people – and these are even considered to be conservative estimates. 22 total Centers had been established, and 18 still exist today with a success rate of 82%.

Yet the Centers still faced challenges, most notably in, “institutionalizing the processes they used to achieve results so that impact can be maximized and sustainable.” While the Centers effectively managed to implement collaborative and participatory methods to attain these successful outcomes, without the ability to institutionalize these processes in local communities and government institutions, the likelihood of sustainability is threatened.

Herein lies the importance of valuing local voices and participation, as it is clear that successful development initiatives depend on working with the community rather than on behalf of the community. Collaborative efforts between local participants and the international organizations that aim to enhance socioeconomic development in their communities results in both farther reaching and more sustainable outcomes than projects that ignore local feedback. Partners also does a great job bridging the objectives of building organizational capacity to sustain programming while also ValuingVoices of participants regarding how that capacity will be beneficial to them. There is an obvious need throughout the development community to follow the good examples made by Partners for Democratic Change in order to promote greater levels of participation on the path to sustainable development.