Sparking resilience in a time of aid cuts  

By Wairu Kinyori, Lucy Morris and Timothy Kisuule 

Earlier this year, INTRAC launched ‘Spark’, an organisational development (OD) and partnerships community of practice – bringing together staff and OD consultants in our network to connect, share, and learn. 

In June 2025, 18 OD consultants from the Basque Country, Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and the UK gathered online to discuss changes in the humanitarian and development sector – including positive moves towards localisation and decolonisation – alongside the recent, unprecedented aid cuts impacting civil society organisations worldwide.   

The purpose was to make collective sense of these changes, and to understand which civil society organisations are surviving or even thriving under such pressure – and what we could learn about organisational resilience at this time. 

Governments are impacted.  In Uganda, severe funding cuts have left the government struggling to manage 1.5 million refugees, with food rations in some camps reduced to nothing. Without UNHCR support, and with major INGOs reducing staff, both local and international partners face uncertainty, especially those reliant on UN funding. 

For UN agencies, the practical implications of funding cuts are still unfolding, but there’s an assumption that partners relying on funding from UN agencies will face increasing uncertainty because of this, especially in the coming months. 

Local NGOs and grassroot organisations are also under strain, having to learn new fundraising skills and compete for scarce resources in the face of strong local competition.   

In the UK, public support for international aid continues to erode.  However, there are opportunities to learn from other countries about how to re-engage the public in addressing issues of global poverty and inequality. 

Consultants were also impacted by the recent changes. Some Spark members had declined USAID-funded work on principle, while others lost contracts when USAID programmes were dismantled.  Most on the call knew organisations severely impacted and friends that had lost jobs.  We also noticed a reduction in consultancy work being advertised, and increased competition where the number of quality bids per tender has tripled in some cases.  Giving technical advice when organisations are in flux can also be challenging, as recommendations made now (for example, as part of a current evaluation) may become obsolete by end of the year.   

Organisations still thriving despite the challenging context tended to be a mix of: 

• Confident, passionate and committed to their purpose, and down-to-earth and highly focused on core vision and mission rather than donor agendas  

• Committed to continuous learning and improvement 

• Actively making strategic decisions – including the difficult ones  

• Prioritising organisational resilience – for instance, a Kenyan CSO covering core costs from their own office rental income   

• Having diversified income sources through investing in domestic and community fundraising – for example, an Indonesian philanthropic organisation that has raised $6.5 million locally  

Some consultants based in global majority / global South countries were finding greater opportunities now, and there is more traction when advocating for local resource mobilisation and shifting power to increase the autonomy of civil society organisations.   

Suggestions for OD investments that can help CSOs remain effective in the current context, included: 

1. Reaffirm organisational purpose and values  
2. Refresh organisational strategies and making hard decisions by re-focusing where there is greatest need.  What will you not do in order to do other things effectively? 
3. Avoiding getting locked into short-term and business-as-usual mentality. Instead, develop the capacity to think immediate, medium-term and long-term concurrently  
4. Expand capacity strengthening beyond skills and into investments in infrastructure and sustainable income models  
5. Prioritise becoming a learning organisation to remain relevant and agile in a changing context 
6. Prioritise long-term partnerships that cover core costs 
7. Invest in new forms of resource mobilisation (domestic, private sector, digital) and ways to approach existing funders for additional/crisis funding 
8. Creating spaces for leaders and teams to reflect, mourn, re-energise and think creatively 
9. Investing in “ending well” if moving towards closure 

The call was a timely reminder that the end of funding does not mean the end of need! While aid cuts had caused job losses and strained CSOs, the greatest burden falls on the most vulnerable — people already living in extreme poverty, often on less than $2 a day, and facing deteriorating living conditions. These communities, already on the margins, are now confronting deeper hardship, reduced access to basic services, and diminished safety nets. 

We left with a shared sense that, despite unprecedented uncertainty, this moment is a wake-up call.  The necessity to invest in strengthening local capacity, reimagine systems and ensure that resilience becomes an intentional, built-in feature of civil society work has never been clearer.