When ~$50 billion was wiped from global development ledgers last year, the existing gap between powerholders and doers yawned open. People, organizations, institutional memory, and hard-fought civic gains were at risk of falling into the maw. It was also proving difficult to find up-to-date information in what became a fast-changing situation.

Stronger together: #SharedStrengthCollective
Accountability Lab responded with #SharedStrengthCollective – an initiative first launched by Accountability Lab Nepal, which opened its doors to CSOs and NGOs in Kathmandu to  jointly navigate challenges as a result of US government aid cuts. In Washington DC, #SharedStrengthCollective meant gathering partners and friends for weekly meetings to share updates, information and tactics in response to sweeping and devastating changes. The Lab also launched a global aid freeze tracking survey, while Accountability Lab Nepal, Pakistan, and Mali ran local surveys to measure impact and track country-level needs.

The first global survey was deployed in the same week as the Stop Work Order on 27 January 2025. It tracked the global impact of the USAID freeze to help inform the actions of partners and donors who were mobilizing resources, information, and tools to try to assist organizations and people in need. 

On the financial front, a quarter of respondents reported that they had a runway of 1 month, while a further 25% reported only 3 months. More than 50% of organizations reported that they would likely be closed by May. Early responses on impact named potential breakdown of trust with program participants as a result of the orders, as well as disruption to the governance ecosystem. Other mentions included the economic and psycho-social impacts of widespread joblessness and potential policy-related regressions in the fields of democracy and governance. Some also shared the risks associated with the sudden removal of protections for people working in insecure environments.

The Lab shared the survey reports widely; with philanthropies and donors to inform and collectively influence the future state of global development, and with organizations to build community and support. Critical work, people and knowledge could not be lost.

Data-driven action
Three weeks and 700 survey respondents in, 60% of organizations estimated that they would close within 6 months. And as Stop Work Orders evolved into the closure of over 80% of USAID programs, the cascading effects of international civil society support shifts meant a large number of non-profit, international development, and civil society organizations were confronting the need to re-organize.

Organizations’ needs were emerging quickly, and with the data to back it, Accountability Lab merged skills and resources with long-time data and technology partners Development Gateway, and public interest digital governance organization Digital Public, to map immediate requirements and help preserve as much as possible. 

Together, we launched an – unfunded at the time – partnership matching service to support organizations in finding like-minded, strategic partners with whom to safeguard critical work, knowledge products, relationships and teams. In addition, we produced a context-informed toolkit to help organizations use short financial runways to strategically navigate the practical considerations that go into transition planning. We also hosted webinars on navigating legal considerations for mergers and wind downs in the United States, United Kingdom and Kenya, in partnership with the International Senior Lawyers Project. 

Stronger together: building sustainable foundations for public interest work
In tandem with the launch and iteration of the matching service, we continued to share updated aid cut surveys in partnership with Humentum and Global Voices – four in total across the year. Each update included new questions based on the previous round’s results and the impact we were observing, which helped keep a finger on the pulse of the sector and informed the shape of our response.

Over time and calls for collaborators, our pool of resources grew. Organizations providing transition support resources, services, and other forms of support to civil society, as well as archives, fiscal sponsors, communities of practice and professional governance institutions, signed up to provide low- and pro-bono work for transitioning participants.

The framework for a more formalized structure had begun to take shape. The 160 organizations that contributed to the database generated a series of recommendations and a tangible pipeline of potential partnerships. Each partner organization also offered a distinct and complementary set of expertise. Accountability Lab’s translocal networks and relationships support data and learning, alongside years of experience in designing and fiscally sponsoring complex organizations and initiatives. Development Gateway brings a global presence, substantial operational infrastructure, and extensive experience in building, sustaining, and transitioning public-interest digital and data systems. And Digital Public has spent nearly a decade developing public-interest digital governance systems.

Those early days of partnership matching taught us three important lessons that led to the facility called Civic Strength Partners:

• No one teaches this – organizations of all sizes benefit from dedicated capacity, expertise, and professional support, during a big transition;
• We won’t save everything – lots of organizations that have done valuable work don’t have an obvious way forward. The best way to support those organizations is to help find mission-aligned infrastructures and approaches to carry forward the value of their work; and
• We’re going to need a much, much bigger boat – Our work is most successful when we’re able to connect, activate, and resource experts who support civil society’s evolution and adaptation.

In its first months, Civic Strength Partners began accompanying a growing network of organizations not by offering prescriptions, but by creating structure,facilitation, and trusted connection. By December 2025, 15 pairs of organizations were working towards solutions. We noticed some consistent patterns such as organizations making decisions under pressure and without the full picture, change plans that overlooked trust being adopted, and perceiving adaptation as failure rather than evidence of resilience. These realities have shaped how Civil Strength Partners works, and the lessons we surface will continue to inform our response. We’re even working to ensure that these learnings don’t apply only to those we support but to our own nascent organization.

Where do we stand now?
Last year’s US government aid cuts may have been swift and deep, but were by no means the first. Development aid has been shrinking, and those shifts have caused funding shocks and exposed structural limitations. Specifically, much of the funding released was heavily restricted, leaving organizations without the necessary reserves to keep operations going or adapt. Accountability Lab’s survey indicated that a majority of organizations only had a three- to six-month runway of funding left, which limited their ability to adapt due to disappearing staffing and resources.

A year on from the cuts, the Lab sat down with 22 organizations whose experiences confirmed that the system was structured to encourage competition rather than collaboration. The crisis forced organizations to collaborate and share resources, which is a relatively new dynamic for some. The report One Year On: Impacts of shrinking aid on local CSOs in the Global South, reflects participants’ realities around institutional strain, ethical trade-offs, erosion of trust, and hard decisions about pivoting towards better funded issues. It also explores how organizations are adapting, what they’re giving up to survive, and how prolonged instability is reshaping civil society ecosystems, often in irreversible ways. 

Crucially, CSOs shared recommendations on how donors can best contribute to supporting the development ecosystem as it now stands.This included prioritising core, flexible, multi-year funding, preventing mandate drift through funding design, supporting representative joint advocacy and ecosystem-level infrastructure, and treating civic space protection as a funding priority.

Findings also showed that even though organizations recognize that resource scarcity may be a long-term constraint, they are proactively seeking funding diversification, including shared services. Participants agree on another point – that meaningful support from funders with greater flexibility and unrestricted funding, will enable organizations on the ground to continue to do impactful, trust-based work.

Samina Anwary