Donors as Partners, Not Bosses: What Community-Led Aid Looks Like

International assistance can play a vital role in helping countries address challenges, ranging from conflict and poverty to climate shocks and weak public systems. But how aid is designed and delivered often limits the local leadership it is meant to support. Too often, donors decide what the problem is, what to fund, and how to measure success before local organizations and communities have a meaningful say.

From my experience working in development and humanitarian programs in East Africa for over a decade, the biggest change needed is to give local actors more decision-making power, more flexibility over how funding is used, and more responsibility for defining what success looks like. Ultimately, foreign assistance should move to a model that prioritizes long-term partnerships over short-term projects and mutual accountability over compliance-heavy relationships. Donors should view implementers as partners, not act like their bosses.

What would genuinely partner-led development look like?

One of the biggest problems I see is that donors and international organizations often decide what problem to address before consulting local people about what they actually need. Donors create proposal requirements, frameworks, indicators, and reporting systems, and then ask local organizations to implement them. This can make local organizations responsible for delivering decisions they did not make.

There is a difference between asking local actors to deliver a project and giving them the power to decide what the project should be. At the organization I work for, Adeso, an African social enterprise rooted in Africa, we have seen this through our “Saxansaxo” approach to survivor- and community-led responses to challenges they face.

We provide microgrants to active local community groups, but the community itself is the starting point. The local group identifies its own need, develops a proposal, and contributes its own resources, either through money, labor, or materials. Adeso then supports the community in moving the idea forward. The aim is not to replace local initiative, but to amplify it.

A notable example of how this approach works comes from Ceel Buh, a small town in Somalia’s Sanaag region that did not have a local hospital. Residents did not wait for an outside organization to build one. They organized themselves and raised more than $70,000 from the residents and the wider community before external support arrived. Through the Saxansaxo approach, Adeso then provided two microgrants totaling $9,400, which helped the hospital purchase a Complete Blood Count machine and install a biochemistry machine and a solar power system.

What struck me about this was not only the amount the community raised, but the local ownership behind it. The community had decided what it needed and invested in its own solution.

A community group in Laako, Somalia also told us that they had never been asked what their needs were or given the opportunity to write their own proposal. They weren’t simply being asked to participate in a project someone else designed; they were being treated with the dignity of people who know their own community and have something to contribute. They were given the space to say what they needed, develop their own ideas, and take responsibility for making it work.

This is what local leadership means. The community is not simply implementing someone else’s project. It is identifying the problem, proposing the response, and taking responsibility for the solution. Adeso’s role was to provide resources and support, not to replace local decision-making.

The United States previously recognized some of these challenges and the importance of local leadership. Before the Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, its localization vision called for shifting power and giving local actors a more meaningful role in decisions about assistance.

The challenge is turning that principle into everyday practice.

What mechanisms can make aid more accountable to communities and improve local impact?

Aid organizations are usually very good at upward accountability. They report to donors, complete financial reports, conduct audits, track indicators, and respond to donor questions. These things matter. But accountability should not stop there. Downward accountability to the people the aid is supposed to serve is also needed.

If communities have no meaningful way to provide feedback about a program that is not working, question decisions, or influence what happens next, then the system is not genuinely accountable to them. This requires a shift in power dynamics. Communities should not only be treated as beneficiaries who receive services. They should have a voice in deciding what those services should look like and whether they are useful.

My experience with Saxansaxo has reinforced this. When communities identify their own priorities and put their own resources behind them, the relationship with an aid organization changes. Adeso supports communities with their own ideas who ask for support — it doesn’t tell them what to do.

Different ways to strengthen this depend on the context. Communities can participate in program design and monitoring. Local organizations can create feedback mechanisms that influence decisions rather than simply collecting complaints. Funding models can also give communities greater choices where appropriate. The larger point is that accountability should be mutual.

Local organizations receiving funds should be transparent about how they use resources and what they achieve. Donors should also be transparent about their decisions, funding constraints, and expectations. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) guidance on locally led development highlights the importance of trust, flexible financing, and stronger local leadership.

Changing the power dynamic is not about removing all oversight, but about asking who has the power to question whom, who makes the final decisions, and whose priorities ultimately shape the program.

How can aid move from short-term projects to long-term systems and economic development?

Reducing dependence on short-term grants is the best place to start. A one-year or two-year grant can help meet an immediate need. But organizations can't build strong institutions, resilient communities, or sustainable businesses while they are constantly waiting for the next funding opportunity.

Short-term funding can also change a local organization’s behavior. Instead of focusing on what can best serve a community over the next five to 10 years, organizations can end up asking, “What can we fit into the next grant?” Aid success should be measured not only by what happens during the grant, but by what remains when the grant ends.

At Adeso, we have been thinking differently about sustainability through social enterprises such as the Durdur water project in Somalia. Rather than relying on short-term water trucking or building wells and leaving communities dependent on external funding to maintain services, Durdur is designed as a locally operated water service that generates revenue and can continue operating over time.

This is the type of thinking development cooperation needs more of. Aid can help build systems and businesses that eventually generate their own income, rather than funding the same service year after year.

That means providing more flexible, predictable funding that lets local organizations retain staff, strengthen their systems, plan ahead, and adapt when circumstances change.

But sustainability also means looking beyond aid. Aid should help create stronger local economies and institutions by supporting local businesses, improving access to finance, strengthening local markets, and investing in services that can eventually generate their own revenue.

The question should not only be, “What can this grant deliver?” It should also be, “What can this investment make possible after the grant ends?”

What role should conditionality and oversight play in reformed foreign assistance?

When donors provide public money, basic accountability is essential. Donors should set clear expectations for financial management, safeguarding, transparency, and proper use of funds. But there should be fewer conditions about how local organizations must achieve results. This is where the relationship needs to change. Donors should see themselves as partners, not bosses.

Too many conditions can make a local organization spend more time seeking approval than solving problems. Some local organizations may assume the donor knows the best solution, even if that donor is far removed from the local context.

A better approach would be to agree on goals together and then give local partners more space to decide how to reach them. If circumstances change, partners should be able to adjust their approach without renegotiating every small budget or activity.

This does not mean giving up oversight. It means making oversight proportionate to risk and building trust over time. Ultimately, the question is not whether donors should require accountability, but who gets to make decisions.

If we genuinely believe local people and institutions understand their own context, then we have to be willing to give them some of the power that comes with that knowledge.

International donors can make a valuable contribution to fostering development — but they should help build local power, not hold it permanently.

That is the difference between localization as a slogan and local leadership as a reality.