The staff cuts and financial turbulence at Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee reported by The New Humanitarian in recent weeks follow years of aggressive growth by international NGOs (INGOs), even as government aid budgets have fallen.
A global funding squeeze on humanitarian finances has rippled through the system, as multiple donors tighten their belts. The World Food Programme and the International Committee of the Red Cross are among the bigger names where substantial cuts have reached the public eye.
But less publicly, other organisations like the Norwegian Refugee Council have also slimmed down or are preparing for “restructuring”, and smaller organisations have also been hit.
As well as potentially harming humanitarian programmes and those who rely on them for their survival, such moves can cause serious internal discord: Staff at Save have been vocally critical about how the cuts have been carried out, according to an unofficial survey obtained by The New Humanitarian.
More broadly, the cuts at Save and at the IRC in particular have shone a light on the highly corporate, aggressively growth-oriented models followed by the INGOs, which – unlike most of the private companies critics say they imitate – are largely funded through government aid budgets.
This unstable public funding can spike in times of grave crisis, following a business model that one critic described as “akin to dancing on graves”. As aid funding has become scarcer, INGOs have found it hard to sustain the growth that previous crisis funding enabled.
This dynamic highlights a fundamental tension in the global humanitarian aid system: Emergencies require fast funding and quick scale-ups – incentivising donors to use their pre-existing arrangements, usually through UN agencies and INGOs. On the other hand, these practices, even when well intentioned, can entrench the domination of international organisations.
Gabriella Waaijman, Save the Children’s COO, told staff during a call on 28 August that the organisation’s “structure is not affordable, and that is just a hard reality”.
“So we can stamp our feet, and we can disagree with it, but ultimately, we cannot afford what we are today, and that has got to change, unfortunately,” Waaijman said, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New Humanitarian.
A sector ‘incentivised around expansion’
Among INGO critics, there was some confusion over the notion that the layoffs came as a surprise.
“It’s been on [the] cards for a long time that aid funding will decrease,” said Deborah Doane, a partner at Rights CoLab and author of The INGO Problem. She said the cutbacks are down to a “dual pressure” of a shortage of humanitarian funding, but also money not going where “it should”: local civil society organisations, or CSOs.
“It speaks to the wider problem about growth and expansionism that [INGOs] don’t look at themselves and their role, their purpose, and their role in the ecosystem,” said Doane. “If they were strengthening local actors, they would never have grown so much in the first place.”
Several aid sector observers told The New Humanitarian that Save and IRC are notorious for being among the most aggressive expansionist INGOs. They linked this to other problems. The millionaire salary of IRC leader David Miliband, a lightning rod for aid sector discontent, is often justified by his ability to fundraise and grow the organisation. IRC projects “sustained annual income” of more than $1.5 billion.
IRC’s situation in particular is ironic, said Moses Isooba, executive director of the Uganda National NGO Forum. “They have always gotten big money from humanitarian disasters, and when there is a reduction in global polycrisis, there is a subsequent reduction in their funding,” he said. “While this is the reality, it looks like IRC raises money on the backs of suffering people – this is akin to dancing on graves.”
“I don't think this is morally problematic. Emergencies are often spikes in a trend.”
But Dany Bahar, director of the migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy programme at the Center for Global Development think tank, said it was normal for increased INGO fundraising enabled through the heightened public awareness caused by emergencies. He likened it to fundraising practised by other organisations, like political campaigns.
“I don't think this is morally problematic. Emergencies are often spikes in a trend,” said Bahar. “If there is an extremely hot summer that raises public awareness and an INGO dealing with climate change is able to get more funding that specific summer, it is not inconsistent – in my opinion – with their overall mandate.”
Emergency fundraising campaigns, like the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), have raised hundreds of millions for humanitarian causes in response to horrific crises.
But those INGOs are just the forefront of an “entire sector incentivised around expansion and bringing in more money”, according to Dustin Barter, senior research fellow for the Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI.
Across different aid jobs, he said, “everything is incentivised towards big being better which leads to this competitive dynamic, expansionist model”. That won’t change until there is incentivisation of “ideas around solidarity, localisation, decolonisation”, he added.
Barter recalled his time in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, during the Rohingya displacement crisis: “Lots of people were there to make a name for themselves”, treating it as an opportunity to display their credentials, managing big budgets during an emergency.
He saw INGO aid workers “struggling to deliver on what they had, but still pumping out proposals, bringing in more and more money, [taking] a very sick profiteering approach disconnected from an ability to actually implement”.
To give a more recent example, aid system critics consulted by The New Humanitarian repeatedly raised Ukraine, where only 0.07% of funding went directly to local organisations, according to research by The Share Trust.
This was symptomatic of INGO business models that tend to be overwhelmingly focused on fundraising, they told The New Humanitarian. This comes at the expense of an approach to “strengthen local actors and… the most marginalised communities”, said Doane. “They are asking the wrong questions when they are developing their organisations.”
And when much of the INGOs’ funding comes from governments, many critics believe it can compromise their ability to speak and campaign freely on certain issues.
Seeking to maximise public funding is little different from the behaviour of “beltway bandits”, added Doane, referring to the Washington, DC-based private companies whose business models are based on winning contracts from US government departments like the US Agency for International Development: “They capitalise on the charitable model and all of the advantages that come with that whilst behaving much more like a private sector entity.”
Aid sector observers consulted by The New Humanitarian also pointed out the large number of private sector figures within INGOs. A 2021 paper by the Center for Global Development found that INGO governing boards “prioritised financial management and administration and fundraising competencies over subject matter expertise”. Meanwhile, less “than 2 percent of board members had experience as a refugee or had been otherwise impacted by a humanitarian crisis”.
For Arbie Baguios, director of Aid Re-imagined, a research and advocacy initiative, this raises some questions.
“Do these organisations have the balance right?” he asked, referring to the balance between fundraising expertise and people with expertise on humanitarian subject matters and people from crisis-affected communities, like refugees, and aid-receiving countries. Baguios added: “If these are the kinds of people making big decisions in the organisations, what does that tell us about the kinds of programmes these organisations are doing? What does this tell us about the professed goals [of] many of these organisations in terms of anti-racism, localisation, and decolonisation?”
Back to the future?
The trend toward highly corporate, growth-oriented culture has developed over many years as aid budgets have increased and as donor expectations have also influenced the way INGOs behave, observers say.
Tim Boyes-Watson, director at Fair Funding Solutions, remembered the sector he joined in the early 1990s had a much more radical tinge, which changed over time more in favour of fundraising – often ushered in by people associated with the UK’s New Labour Party: Miliband, a former British Foreign Secretary being the most high-profile example. Doane was not the only observer to note a “revolving door” between INGOs and donor governments, bringing civil service thinking into a campaigning sector.
While Boyes-Watson advocated some “going back to the roots” in terms of working on a solidarity basis, he stressed the importance of “forward-looking change, rethinking the role of INGOs to becoming facilitators, rather than the gatekeepers and power-brokers they are now”.
Such a move is long overdue, according to Boyes-Watson. “This sector has been very immune to change, and it's a bit pent up and really needs to happen,” he said. “The voices are just getting louder and louder both from the Global Majority and INGOs needing to shift their role.”
This view – once niche – is becoming more mainstream.
The “INGO of the past and present is quickly needing to adapt to a very changed world, where business models based on growth and expansion are no longer appropriate, sustainable or viable,” Romilly Greenhill, CEO at Bond, the UK network for international development organisations, told The New Humanitarian.
“Many of us from the Majority world… have often argued time and again, that INGOs have only 3 options: transform, die well, or die badly.”
Pressure has been caused by aid budget cuts, rising domestic costs, alongside an increasing movement to shift power to local actors, she said. INGOs “need to adopt business models that prioritise and respect local partners, do not compete with national organisations for staff and funding, and rethink the role and purpose of INGOs”, added Greenhill.
The big INGOs say they are doing just that. A Save spokesperson said the organisation’s growth “has been accompanied by a shift towards localisation, local ownership and locally led development which are fundamental to changing the aid system to be better fit for purpose and address children’s rights, structural challenges and power imbalances”. The charity’s restructuring will “better reflect these changes”, added the spokesperson.
Meanwhile, IRC is committed to “‘partner first, and as equals’ with local government, civil society and private sector actors”, said a spokesperson.
However, critics say the INGOs are digging in instead of really changing in response to financial pressures. “A lot of international actors are going into self-preservation, which is antithetical to advancing localisation and decolonisation,” said Barter.
A view from the Global South is even more dim. “Many of these INGOs operate their country offices like quasi-colonial outposts. So what we are currently seeing is a mad dash to rework their country office model,” said Isooba.
“Many of us from the Majority world… have often argued time and again, that INGOs have only 3 options: transform, die well, or die badly,” added Isooba. “While some have taken the option of transformation, this has taken the route of locally led development, which is a mechanistic way of ‘righting their wrongs’, and none is willing to take the bull by its horns and go the full mile of decolonisation.”
Turning the crisis into opportunity
But the widespread cutbacks could have other more positive implications for a sector that has been slow to shift resources and power.
“Through every crisis comes an opportunity. Let's use it to see what it can mean to strengthen local actors in the humanitarian system,” said Doane. “It's a good thing if these INGOs are cutting back and rightsizing, but I think they need to be doing that in the context of looking at what is their role in the ecosystem of civil society, not just their own brand survival.”
Nimo Hassan, director of the Somali NGO Consortium, made a similar point: “While the funding cuts pose significant challenges, they also offer a unique opportunity to transform humanitarian action. By empowering affected communities and strengthening partnerships with those on the front lines, more impactful and sustainable change can be achieved.” From this, more “relevant and sustainable” solutions can emerge, she added.
The sector’s funding crisis may also reframe long-standing assumptions that have held up reforms. For instance, the financial troubles at big INGOs present “a challenge to the idea that INGOs are better financial managers than Global South institutions”, said Barter, referring to a reason long held up as a key barrier to localising aid.
Isooba was less optimistic and didn’t see local organisations receiving any more funding in future as a result of the cuts at larger organisations. “Sadly,” he said, “we are in a weird world of mean-spirited ideas and missives flying around in the aid industrial complex, race-baiting insults, and conspiratorial broadsides – as seen from those handling the change management of these INGOs.”
Additional reporting by Jacob Goldberg. Edited by Andrew Gully.