The Future of NGOs

The impact of the sudden closure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is already being felt across Africa, especially in the social service sector. The top African recipients of United States (US) aid in 2023, according to the Office of Foreign Assistance in the US Department of State (2025), were Ethiopia (US$1.75 billion), Egypt (US$1.45 billion), Somalia (US$1.2 billion), Nigeria (US$1.01 billion), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (US$0.98 billion). The highest funding for HIV treatment went to South Africa (US$250 million), Mozambique (US$239 million), Nigeria (US$220 million), Zambia (US$215 million), and Uganda (US$194 million) (Agbetiloye, 2025). There are several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and nonprofits that were largely supported by USAID. The majority of these have either closed or are in the process of streamlining and cutting down their programs and staffing levels. The closure of USAID has raised the need to revisit funding models and rethink the future of the NGO/nonprofit. Since the mid-1960s, NGOs have risen to be the preferred development partners of Official Development Aid (ODA) agencies. Where the state had been viewed as overly bureaucratic, slow to act and wasteful, NGOs promised the opposite. They were seen as agile, responsive and able to provide services to the underserved at a very low cost.

However, today, the tide has turned. NGOs have become highly differentiated, ranging from large bureaucracies spanning multiple regions to national and local level entities. The larger ones mimic multinational corporations. They are operational in multiple countries and dominate in terms of revenues and the span of work that they do. Some of these have budgets equal to or higher than those of some third-world countries. These are the entities receiving the majority of official development aid. National and local level NGOs remain precarious with insecure funding and are usually seen as junior partners of the large-scale NGO sector. Regardless of size, the majority depend on funding, usually from ODA agencies and private philanthropy.

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