Foreign aid: African organisations must learn to build beyond grants

By Chibueze Ewuzie

Official development assistance fell by 6.1% in 2024 and by a record 23.1% in 2025, with the United States responsible for roughly three-quarters of the decline. Nigeria alone lost more than $600 million in health funding, according to Chatham House. These numbers are more than a funding story. They are a stress test of whether African development organisations have built institutions capable of surviving beyond the next funding cycle.

FOR years, much of Africa’s development sector operated on a familiar rhythm: a donor priority shifted, a call for proposals opened, organisations adapted, delivered the programme and moved on to the next grant. That model has produced important gains and remains necessary. But the conditions that sustained it are changing.

The answer cannot simply be “find more donors”. It must be to rethink what organisational resilience means.

This is where innovation matters. Innovation is often reduced to AI, apps or digital platforms. But organisational innovation is broader: it is the ability to rethink what an organisation does, how it operates, how it creates and sustains value, and how it learns. Sometimes that means technology. Sometimes it means a new partnership, a different service model, a new revenue stream, or a better way of solving a problem that communities have faced for years.

At SCIDaR, the funding shock and USG Stop-Work Order accelerated a realisation that innovation could no longer depend on a few entrepreneurial individuals. It had to become an institutional capability and a deliberate strategy for organisational resilience, growth and long-term value creation. We established a dedicated Innovation function, created an Ideation Challenge to give staff a pathway from identifying problems to testing solutions, and introduced more systematic ways of listening to clients. We are also advancing a portfolio of strategically connected initiatives: the Strategic Emerging Leaders Programme is strengthening the leadership pipeline needed to sustain institutional growth; Leadership & Institutional Delivery, a new service line, is helping organisations build the systems and capabilities required to translate strategy into consistent performance; Tendara, an AI-enabled tool for identifying opportunities, is supporting more proactive and diversified business development; and our Data Repository System is converting years of programme experience into an organisational asset that can inform decisions, improve delivery and support the development of new solutions.

These initiatives matter not because they make SCIDaR look innovative, but because they illustrate a broader principle: organisations must learn to turn experience into assets, capabilities and new sources of value.

The sector still has three major blind spots.

First, we confuse innovation with technology. A sophisticated digital solution is not necessarily a good solution. In many settings, low-tech or locally designed approaches may be cheaper, more trusted and more sustainable.

Second, we design too far from the people who will use the solution. Innovation works better when communities, frontline workers and local institutions are involved in defining the problem and shaping the answer.

Third, we have become better at piloting than scaling. The global development sector has accumulated hundreds of digital health pilots with limited pathways to sustainable adoption. “Pilotitis” is not a technology problem; it is an organisational one. We need fewer experiments designed to impress funders and more solutions designed from the beginning for adoption, financing and scale.

For African development organisations beginning this journey, I would prioritise three foundations: money, people and evidence.

Money means building a more diversified revenue base, combining donor funding with government contracts, domestic financing, philanthropy and, where appropriate, earned revenue. The objective is not to abandon grants, but to ensure that the loss of one funding stream does not threaten the institution.

People means investing in strong local leadership, talent and succession systems. If knowledge, relationships and decision-making leave when a project ends, the organisation has not really built institutional capacity.

Evidence means owning the data, knowledge and systems needed to make decisions. Data should not exist primarily to satisfy donor reporting requirements. It should help organisations understand their markets, improve delivery, demonstrate value and decide where to invest next.

But African organisations cannot make this transition alone. Donors need to fund institutional capability and longer-term resilience, not only project outputs. Governments should see capable development organisations as partners, clients and potential owners of solutions that can be embedded in public systems. Universities can turn implementation experience into evidence, talent and intellectual assets. The private sector can bring capital, technology and commercial expertise through genuine co-investment rather than CSR alone.

The aid cliff should therefore not be viewed only as a crisis. It is also a forcing function. It is exposing an uncomfortable truth: an organisation can be excellent at implementing projects and still be structurally fragile.

The next generation of African development organisations will need to do more than deliver programmes designed elsewhere. They will need to design, own, finance, scale and continuously improve solutions themselves.

The future of African development will not be determined by the organisations that depend on external resources, but by those that build the leadership, systems and resilience to shape their own future.

• Chibueze Ewuzie is the Chief Innovation Officer at the Solina Centre for International Development and Research (SCIDaR), where he leads the organisation’s Innovation portfolio.