Somali blueprint becomes survival guide for Kenyan NGOs amid aid exodus

As Western donors slash budgets and USAID scales back, Kenyan civil society is drawing on an advocacy track record more than a decade in the making: Adeso, a Somali-led organisation headquartered in Nairobi, has spent years pushing global donors to send funding directly to local and national organisations rather than through international intermediaries. As remaining donors reassess where their money goes, that advocacy is now central to how much of it still reaches Kenyan and other Global South civil society organisations.

When Degan Ali, the Executive Director of Adeso, addressed an official side event of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September 2023, her warning to the world's largest philanthropies was unflinching. “You are shackled when you receive funding that is given in a colonial and restrictive way,” she said. “It limits what you and communities can do.”

Less than two years later, those shackles are tightening into a chokehold. Adeso is a non-profit humanitarian and development organisation, originally founded by Somali environmental activist Fatima Jibrell, but headquartered for decades in Nairobi, Kenya, the de facto capital of international aid in East Africa. Somalia, a Horn of Africa nation that has spent three decades recovering from civil war and state collapse, has long been a testing ground for complex humanitarian interventions. Now, the strategies Adeso designed for that context are suddenly being looked to as a lifeline by its host country, Kenya, as the global aid system faces its largest structural shock in a generation.

That shock arrived in early 2025, when US President Donald Trump signed sweeping executive orders to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). As the world's largest bilateral aid donor effectively froze its flow of funds, the impact on Kenya, which hosts the regional headquarters for the United Nations and dozens of international charities, was immediate and devastating. Grassroots Kenyan community-based organisations, already starved of direct financing, found themselves staring into a deep funding abyss.

Yet a quiet strategic pivot is underway. The blueprint for surviving this crash is not coming from the corridors of European capitals or Washington, D.C. It is coming from Adeso's offices in Nairobi, where Ali and her team have spent a decade advocating for a radical overhaul of how money moves to the Global South.

“We need to create a new aid architecture based on abundance and trust,” Ali told a Global Washington conference in late 2022, a message that is now reverberating with urgent practicality across Kenya's non-profit boardrooms. “Instead of designing projects in these capitals, we give (local organisations) money to continue doing what they have been doing. Instead of looking at them as risky and not to be trusted, we need to think of them as creative, innovative, and efficient engines of social development.”

For the thousands of Kenyan civil society organisations (CSOs) that routinely lose out to large, Western-based international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in the competition for scarce funding, Adeso's decade-long campaign offers a different lesson: sustained, public pressure on donors can shift the global funding architecture itself. At the time, local and national organisations received only about 0.2 per cent of global humanitarian funding directly. [1] It was Ali who proposed moving that figure to a 20 per cent direct-funding target for local and national organisations, a target that was later adopted and raised to 25 per cent as part of the Grand Bargain commitment at the

2016 World Humanitarian Summit. [2] Nearly a decade on, that target remains largely unmet: Grand Bargain donors deliver just 0.6 per cent of humanitarian funding directly to local and national actors. [3] That same year, she founded the Network for Empowered Aid Response (NEAR), the first Global South civil society network built to hold donors and INGOs accountable to that commitment.

“The 20 per cent target we proposed became the Grand Bargain's 25 per cent commitment, and NEAR is the network we built to hold donors to it,” Ali said. “That fight didn't end when USAID pulled back. If anything, it got louder. Kenyan organisations don't need to wait for permission to lead it.”

But analysts warn that adopting this playbook will require local leaders to fundamentally break from a deeply entrenched culture of donor subservience.

“Adeso is offering something the sector desperately needs: a scalable, proven alternative to the top-down, multi-layered funding structures that have plagued East African development for decades,” said a senior development analyst at a Washington-based think tank, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss shifting policy dynamics. “For Kenya, which is a hub for UN agencies and INGOs but struggles to direct meaningful cash to its own frontlines, this isn't just aspirational, it is an urgent roadmap for institutional survival.”

Adeso's most potent weapon to date has been the Pledge for Change 2030, a formal coalition conceived in early 2021 at the height of the global Black Lives Matter reckoning over systemic racial inequalities. For 18 months, Adeso facilitated highly sensitive, closed-door conversations with top executives from the largest INGOs, organisations like Oxfam and Christian Aid, pressuring them to publicly admit their own complicity in maintaining neocolonial contracting systems. By October 2022, 12 of these powerful INGOs signed on, committing to radically reimagine how they partner with local groups and how they tell stories about the communities they serve.

“How we measure this change is where the pledge succeeds or fails,” Ali said at the coalition's public launch. “It's important our metrics reflect the needs of local organisations.”

Perhaps the most tangible and radical alternative on the horizon is Adeso's Proximate Fund, a planned $1 billion collaborative mechanism designed to completely bypass Western intermediaries. The fund will channel unrestricted, multi-year grants directly into local African civil society through a network of regionally-based national grant-making funds. It is currently being co-designed with Bridgespan, a global consulting firm.

“Funding more proximately isn't risky, but not doing so is,” Ali wrote in her 2022 contribution to the annual Development Co-operation Report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based international policy body that tracks global aid flows. For Kenyan philanthropists and foundations, analysts say, adopting even a scaled-down version of this unrestricted model is immediately actionable. “Restricted funding kills the agility needed to respond to fast-moving climate shocks or emergencies,” the Nairobi researcher added. “Unrestricted trust-based giving is not a luxury; it is the only way local groups can adapt to reality.”

That work has not gone unnoticed. In 2024, Avance Media named Ali among the “100 Most Influential African Women.” But for her, the metric that matters is the erosion of colonial-era funding structures, not the recognition itself.

“We assume they have agency and power, rather than that they have nothing,” she repeatedly tells international audiences, referring to local communities. For Kenya's own NGOs, the more immediate task is closer to home: most international funding aimed at Kenyan communities still flows through UN agencies and INGOs rather than to local organisations directly. NEAR's donor-accountability work and the Pledge for Change coalition are infrastructure Adeso has already built, and local groups can use it to press for a fairer share, rather than building something new from nothing.

But Ali is careful not to let that fight become the whole strategy. “Advocating for your fair share of the funding is important, and I'd encourage Kenyan NGOs to keep doing it,” she said. “But I'd push them to think more radically too. Look at other ways of generating income and becoming truly self-reliant, so the work doesn't rise and fall with someone else's budget cycle. That's a path we at Adeso are trying to walk ourselves.”