Innovative Edge Session: Untying Aid to Northern CSOs

At the RINGO Learn­ing Fes­ti­val in 2022, RINGO Lab mem­ber Dylan Math­ews (the Idea Car­ri­er) shared key learn­ings from devel­op­ing and test­ing the inno­va­tion: Unty­ing Aid to North­ern CSOs.

How might we decrease the imbal­ance in civ­il soci­ety fund­ing to ensure that a larg­er share of fund­ing goes to glob­al south CSOs?

This pro­to­type focus­es on a key sys­temic pol­i­cy lever: end­ing the long-stand­ing prac­tice of tied aid that sees donors pri­ori­tise their own domes­tic INGOs over south­ern or local civ­il soci­ety. Accord­ing to an OECD-DAC study in 2020, 93% of all Civ­il Soci­ety Organ­i­sa­tion fund­ing goes to north­ern CSOs or INGOs. Despite seri­ous efforts at ‘local­i­sa­tion’ and a long-stand­ing com­mit­ment by DAC mem­bers to the Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment Effec­tive­ness Agen­da and its first prin­ci­ple on local own­er­ship, only 7% of fund­ing from bilat­er­al donors goes direct­ly to south­ern civ­il soci­ety. 

Work­ing across sec­tors includ­ing donors, this advo­ca­cy ini­tia­tive chal­lenges the pow­er­ful in the sec­tor to effec­tive­ly go against their own finan­cial inter­ests: call­ing on donors to bypass them in fund­ing flows. The team is look­ing to pres­sure donor gov­ern­ments and agen­cies to stop tied or ear­marked aid to their domes­tic CSOs or INGOs and find inno­v­a­tive ways to influ­ence INGOs in a mas­sive shift­ing pow­er ini­tia­tive.

Watch the record­ing of the Inno­v­a­tive Edge ses­sion: