As INGOs, we must ask ourselves: ‘Why us? Why not local?’

Our world today is beset by complex crises, from climate change to conflict and displacement, to unsustainable debt, which carry the heaviest cost for the poorest people.

None of these crises can be tackled except through collective action. Meeting complex, collective challenges with fragmented, siloed responses is bound to blunt our effectiveness. Yet, as international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) we continue to behave as if most of the solutions to these problems sit inside, rather than outside, our organisations. A ‘scarcity’ mindset dominates, in which management and boards focus on the resources under their direct control, to the exclusion of what we might catalyse and complement beyond our organisational boundaries. Too often, official donors make this problem worse, by the signals they send to INGOs, fostering competition over collaboration, and making locally led development and humanitarian programmes more costly than direct operations implemented by INGO staff.

This scarcity and control mindset needs to be replaced by an ‘abundance and collaboration’ mindset. If we look beyond our individual organisations, there is an almost limitless pool of creativity, knowledge and agency, not least among people affected by poverty. Yet as a sector, we are much better at talking about people in poverty, than with them. We spend remarkably little time listening to, learning from, and taking seriously the agency of affected communities, or opening ourselves to being genuinely accountable.

These struggles to shift power and resources are not new. Nor is the mantra that we should measure ourselves by impact, rather than financial scale. But they have been given fresh impetus by debates in the aid sector about decolonisation. INGOs have been widely criticised for accumulating power and resources at the expense of local civil society, replicating colonial patterns of privilege and exclusion, and for a lack of legitimacy and accountability – criticisms most recently found in Deborah Doane’s important book, The INGO Problem. Increasingly, we’re hearing these challenges not only from partners and communities in the Global South, but also from supporters in the Global North.

Efforts towards localisation – Christian Aid’s progress

The Pledge for Change – an initiative by Adeso, an East African NGO, and a group of INGO signatories including Christian Aid, which was launched in 2022 – has been one effort to respond to these debates and to shift practice. Our commitments to the pledge build on previous sector-reform initiatives in which we play an active role, including the Charter for Change and the Grand Bargain, but take it a step further, by challenging us to change how we communicate our work, and how we are held accountable by partner organisations.

For a mid-sized INGO like Christian Aid, rooted in our relationship with the British and Irish churches, majority-voluntary funded, and part of a values-based global family in the ACT Alliance, bridging the gap between pledge and practice will look different than for other organisations that are differently shaped and sized. In a new report that we released this month, Shifting Power in Aid, we took stock of where we’ve got to.

Firstly, and most importantly, it shows that we are changing. We took the decision in 2022 to phase out all direct implementation, and double down on our partnership approach, despite that decision removing 20% of our institutional funding. This has created more headspace in the organisation to think about how we co-create with partners, become more responsive to affected communities, and therefore have greater impact. Currently over 80% of all our projects are managed by local partners, and in almost 90% of cases they’re playing a lead role in design. A similar proportion of partners are providing us with feedback on the quality of our engagement with them, as we look to continually improve our practice.

We also want to reduce stresses and cost for partners, so that they’re spending more time focused on impact, and less on compliance. We have committed to sharing half of all indirect cost recovery with partners so that they’re able to fund their back office adequately, and are piloting due diligence passporting with like-minded peer INGOs, recognising that in many cases local organisations are working with multiple INGOs, and having to handle parallel compliance processes.

We are also committed to increasing, to at least 25% of our unrestricted income, investment in flexible partner grants by 2026. Our ability to use flexible grants to sustain an underlying portfolio of work, independent of any institutional donor or individual project, is key to us taking a longer-term programmatic approach to impact, and being able to innovate and take disciplined risks. Our work on survivor- and community-led response in emergencies is a positive illustration of how we can innovate, evidence, and then leverage further resources, including from the Start Network, Irish Aid, the Disasters Emergency Committee, and ACT Alliance sister agencies.

Further room for improvement

There are plenty of areas where we still need to improve. In a third of projects, we’re still not equally sharing project costs with partners. Only 6% of our projects are entirely providing core funding, and only 40% of our communications materials are produced with local talent.

Reporting annually on our commitments should spur progress, but we also need to look more fundamentally at our own organisational model, so that we’re maximising our impact, stewarding well the resources entrusted to us, and focusing only on those things that we can do best. This will require us to more fully co-create with local partners, more intentionally learn from affected communities, and no longer default to creating capacity inside our organisation when we want to make something happen.

Increasingly, we need to ask ourselves the questions, ‘Why us? Why not local?’ in guiding how we allocate resources and make decisions. Our future value addition should lie in us playing a convening, connecting and catalytic role, linking the local to the global and supporting wider movements for change.

That will require a leaner and more agile organisation, that is able to flex without automatically expanding, recognising we are one node in a civil-society ecosystem working to effect positive change in the world.

The role of INGOs is changing, and needs to change further, if we’re to make a meaningful contribution to ending poverty and marginalisation. Christian Aid is committed to being part of that journey, in a way that builds on our history of working alongside others for equality, dignity and justice.

Patrick Watt is CEO of Christian Aid