What if we stopped aid altogether?

Over the years, I’ve heard all the buzzwords – localisation, refugee participation, decolonisation: They sit proudly on international NGO websites like badges of honour.

Yet step with me into Uganda’s so-called refugee settlements in Nakivale, Rwamwanja, or Bidi Bidi. Talk to the refugees, witness their daily struggles. You’ll quickly realise that the reality on the ground is far removed from the eloquent language in the INGO strategy documents.

The truth? Much of this aid work is piecemeal. Cosmetic. Let’s say it as it is: Aid has become a well-dressed performance – carefully packaged, transactional, and self-serving. 

INGOs have often maintained bloated salary structures, recycled consultancies, and have operated procurement loops that rarely involve the people they claim to serve.

[Host governments] host refugees not out of pan-African solidarity or hospitality, but as a means to court dollars and soft power – often to distract us from their deep domestic governance failings.

Meanwhile, host governments, like my own in Uganda, have perfected what I call the refugee chase game. They host refugees not out of pan-African solidarity or hospitality, but as a means to court dollars and soft power – often to distract us from their deep domestic governance failings.

In this setup, refugees are not humans with aspirations and potential. They are line items on proposals, population statistics that drive the next funding cycle: Their suffering becomes merely currency.

And the game isn’t played by donors alone. Even refugees have learned the script. They speak the language INGOs want to hear: “Yes, your training helped me a lot”; “Yes, we now practise good agricultural methods.”

From what I have seen on the ground, they may comply for a season or two. But as soon as the project ends, they revert to survival mode. Why? Because they’ve learned that playing the needy card attracts the next intervention.

As one refugee elder told me with a chuckle reflecting on an INGOs work in the Rwamwanja settlement in southwestern Uganda: “The cow that bellows the loudest gets the salt.”

“A lizard in a palace is still a lizard”

This performative aid model breeds dependency. It undermines local innovation. And worse, it masks the rot beneath the surface.

So, here’s a radical thought, one I’ve mulled during many visits to refugee settlements, where desperate living conditions still dominate despite years of aid projects: What if we stopped aid altogether?

Yes – some would suffer. Some might even die. But haven’t people been quietly dying anyway behind the glossy reports and donor field visits? Maybe, in the absence of aid, we’d be forced to reimagine our systems.

Refugee host governments might even be forced to open up more land to refugees. Integration might stop being taboo. Refugees might be allowed to settle freely, contribute to economic life, and – heaven forbid – own their futures.

Localisation is not about hashtags or seat-warming in coordination meetings. It’s about doing the messy, painful, deeply human work of letting go. Letting go of control, of ego, of institutional comfort.

Maybe aid has become the very thing blocking real empowerment.

Of course, this isn’t a call for cruelty. Instead, it’s a call for courage. If INGOs were truly serious about shifting power, they wouldn’t be folding their arms and walking away the moment donor priorities shift.

They’d downsize. Work with proximate leaders. Volunteer. Innovate. They’d do what grassroots actors have done for decades: Stretch every coin, lean on relationships, and co-create change with communities – with them, not for them.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: If your humanitarian mission dies when the money dries up, it was never a mission, it was a business.

As we say in my village, “A lizard in a palace is still a lizard.” Let's stop mistaking the trappings for substance. Localisation is not about hashtags or seat-warming in coordination meetings. It’s about doing the messy, painful, deeply human work of letting go. Letting go of control, of ego, of institutional comfort.

The future of refugee response doesn’t lie in smarter, donor-centric logframes or theories of change.

It lies in walking humbly with those most affected, building partnerships with refugee leaders based on human connection and relationships, working with them to mobilise resources internally and externally, trusting refugee leadership to determine how best they can use such resources to uplift their communities – and maybe finally turning rhetoric into reality.