Accountability Lab Global Annual Report 2025

2025 Overview

2025 may have been a disruptive year for NGOs from a funding and operational perspective but it also proved to be defining in a number of ways. One particularly poignant lesson for Accountability Lab was around the role of people as connectors rather than resources. Choosing to work together, rather than apart, and prioritizing support – whether micro or macro – to the broader civil society ecosystem proved to be stabilizing factors. When formal support systems weakened, our work shows it was trust, solidarity, and active citizenship that sustained critical governance and accountability work. Small acts of support, collaboration, and shared problem-solving had more immediate impact than trying to sustain stand-alone projects.

The global team prioritized research and advice around recovery and support, launching the Global Aid Freeze tracker with Humentum and Global Voices early in 2025. It began as a snapshot survey for our community, evolving into a comprehensive data collection effort that extended to more than 1,400 organizations worldwide.

Insights from from our tracker revealed a global need for pro-bono or low-cost help to organizations in transition. Civic Strength Partners (CSP), which we rapidly established with Development Gateway: An IREX Venture and Digital Public, functions as a partnership-matching and support network for civil society and social change organizations navigating major transitions. These include restructuring, mergers, or, in some cases, winding down. Our work on CSP is showing that the CSO ecosystem needs funders willing to support foundational capacities before the next crisis, not in response to it.

The Lab also worked hard to formally connect funders with proximate accountability organizations through our Civil Society Wayfinder campaign in 2025. It shines a light on groups operating on small budgets and without close ties to large Western NGOs, amplifying the work they are doing on the frontlines. The campaign is complementary to AL’s intermediary objectives, combining technical services such as fiscal sponsorship, regranting, and full service back-office support with ecosystem support, and development services such as training, convening, connecting, and advocating.

As part of our work supporting the accountability and anti-corruption ecosystem, the Lab also launched our Senior Non-Resident Fellowship Program in 2025. It engages global thought leaders, advocates and practitioners in advancing innovative approaches to accountability and governance. We’re proud to be working with them and look forward to amplifying their critical work even further this year. Related to this work, we were excited to contribute a chapter to a new Routledge volume, Anti-Corruption in a Discordant World, on the inherent value of translocal approaches. Aware of how corruption intersects with disinformation, shrinking civic space, and shifts in political power, we show that translocal approaches help us understand how power, trust and social norms shape corruption and anti-corruption work.

On the team front, we were sad to say goodbye to our AL Mali Country Director, Doussouba Konate, who left the organization after several years at the helm diversifying its partnerships and enhancing efforts greatly to promote citizen participation. She handed the reins to Deputy Director Habibou Diaou in November. During 2025, the AL global team also benefited from the contributions of two consultants, Juan Pane and Corina Rebegea, as well as two interns, Otsemaye Harriman and Yamone Aye. We’re grateful for their creative collaboration.

– AL Co-CEOs Cheri-Leigh Erasmus, Blair Glencorse, and Jean Scrimgeour.

Vision and Mission

We envision a world in which resources are used wisely, decisions benefit everyone fairly, and people lead secure lives. Our mission is to make governance work for people through supporting active citizens, responsible leaders and accountable institutions. We focus on building “unlikely networks” and insider-outsider coalitions to create change; and “naming and faming” the people, ideas and processes working collectively towards dynamic accountability goals.

Values

These values guide all our thinking and programs, and are exemplified by and expected of our directors, officers, employees, and volunteers. We continually hold ourselves accountable to them and encourage others to hold us accountable as well.

1. Integrity

We set an example of honesty and transparency in all that we do and how we do it.

We are accountable to all our stakeholders—including project beneficiaries, accountapreneurs (accountability entrepreneurs), donors, peer organizations, and government officials – and we continually evaluate our impact.

2. Innovation

We foster creativity and forward-thinking at all levels of our work.

We are open to trying new ideas and taking risks to further our mission; we acknowledge and learn from our failures; and we adapt to changing circumstances.

3. Humility

We recognize that local people know best how to create change in their community.

We understand that building trust, changing mindsets, and setting up systems of accountability ultimately must be done from within, and can take years to show their full impact.

4. Practicality

We emphasize the creation of useful tools that are sustainable and scalable over time.

We are cost-effective and use resources efficiently in all our operations, and encourage our accountapreneurs to do the same with our small grants.

5. Collaboration

We strive to listen to, learn from, and find positive ways to collaborate with everyone we can.

We believe in the power of community, and seek to build solidarity and cooperation in the local communities in which we work and in the international development field more broadly.

Data for Collective Action

Amid the uncertainty of multilateral and bilateral aid cuts in 2025, Accountability Lab responded with #SharedStrengthCollective, an initiative launched in Kathmandu by Accountability Lab Nepal. It began as a simple act of solidarity: opening the Lab’s doors to other CSOs and NGOs to strategize, share information, and support one another through the fallout of aid disruptions.

In Washington DC, the same spirit took shape through weekly gatherings of partners to exchange updates and tactics. The Lab also deployed a global aid-freeze tracking survey to measure the real-world effects of the crisis. Local Labs in Pakistan, Mali, and Nepal ran complementary projects to gather and share context-specific data.

Within a week of USAID’s Stop Work Order on 27 January 2025, our first global survey was live, capturing the human dimension of the shock. What began as a quick snapshot for our community evolved into a comprehensive survey including more than 1,400 organizations worldwide. In the first three weeks, the data told a stark story: sixty percent of organizations would likely close within six months. As the aid freeze hardened into the closure of over 80 percent of USAID programs, the cascading effects forced civil-society actors to rethink how the sector could survive.

The survey also showed that a quarter of organizations had only a one-month financial runway; another quarter had three months. Many foresaw erosion of trust with participants, disruption to governance ecosystems, job losses, and policy regressions in democracy and human rights. More than 60% of respondents had not found alternate revenue sources by the third survey in May. In addition, more than 60% had furloughed staff. By survey 4 in October, those organizations still standing felt the volatility of the sector constantly, and possible risk of closure. Many reported providing services for alternative revenue, and 64% were either actively seeking or considering mergers or other partnerships.

Those findings galvanized a shared mission – to prevent knowledge, people, and hard-won civic gains from disappearing. A key outtake was that weakening civil society and independent media wasn’t a side effect of funding cuts. Rather, it’s a core impact with long-term consequences for stability and development. Democracy support must be reframed not as “nice to have” after meeting basic needs, but as one of the basics itself.

Our data shows that direct, flexible, multi-year support is critical. We need to prioritize a non-duplicative, “elbows down” system that values collaboration among doers, thinkers, and those able to manage complex financial systems. We also need organizations that weave together language, skills, evidence, and peer-learning models between these groups. Abrupt, politicized cuts are not just morally costly but also deeply inefficient. Reinvesting in democratic governance, accountability, and civic space is one of the most cost-effective approaches for long-term peace and development.

Civic Strength Partners

Critical data insights from AL’s Global Aid Flows Tracker revealed a widespread need for pro-bono or low-cost help to organizations in transition. Civic Strength Partners (CSP) functions as a partnership-matching and support network for civil society and social change organizations navigating major transitions – whether restructuring, mergers, or, in some cases, winding down. AL co-founded the organization in April 2025 with Development Gateway: An IREX Venture and Digital Public.

Each of the partner organizations brings complementary expertise to this work: AL has the translocal networks and relationships to drive data and learning, as well as the shared experience of designing and fiscally sponsoring complex organizations for many years. Development Gateway has a global footprint, substantial operating infrastructure and significant experience building, sustaining, and transitioning public interest digital and data systems. Digital Public builds public interest digital governance systems, products, and institutions, using a range of legal, technical, and organizational tools.

CSP provides resources, professional services, and infrastructure to help organizations protect what matters most: their people, their data and intellectual property, and their relationships and legacy. This includes triage support for managing abrupt funding loss, or exploring mergers with like-minded organizations rather than closing. CSP also provides expert guidance to safely archive sensitive digital assets when programs must end.

Our practice is majority-world-anchored by design. About 75% of the organizations we support are based in Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. That shapes who is in our advisor circle, how we think about power and context, what good processes look like across different organizational cultures, and what equity requires in practice.

We remain free of charge to the vast majority of organizations we support because we believe that transition support should not be available only to organizations with resources to pay for it. The organizations that most need accompaniment are often the ones least able to access it. Equity-based access is built into our model, funded through pooled resources, and it shapes who we can reach and how.

Our work shows that the CSO ecosystem needs funders willing to support foundational capacities before the next crisis, not in response to it. The sector also needs transition support that is accessible, contextual, and human, not just technically competent.

Emerging Lessons From Civic Strength Partners

CSP’s early observations offer a practical framework for donors and partners to reimagine support for organizations in transition:

1. Start early – accompaniment matters upstream.
   Engaging at the first signs of change helps preserve clarity of purpose and trust before crisis hits.
2. Balance structure and emergence.
   Provide scaffolding but leave room for creativity; flexible funding makes this possible.
3. Clarity and care over pressure.
   Deliberate, values-based decision-making leads to sustainable outcomes, not just short-term fixes.
4. Trust over over-consultation.
   Investing in aligned relationships moves work faster and deeper than endless consensus-building.
5. Transitions aren’t always loss.
   Funding dignified closure can safeguard legacy and signal maturity, not failure.
6. The space in-between is fertile.
   Periods of uncertainty are opportunities for imagination and partnership if resourced properly.
7. Collective leadership is key.
   Successful transitions are carried by teams and boards, not individual heroes.
8. Nature as a guide.
   Growth and renewal follow cyclical patterns; pauses are part of resilience, not interruptions to it.

Civil Society Wayfinder

While big funders and field leaders are working to restrategize, too little money and too little attention is going to the smaller organizations that have been quietly doing the daily work of holding governments to account and creating spaces for citizens to act. These groups often operate on small budgets and without the close ties to large Western NGOs.

As new reports and recommendations are being shared across the sector, we’re matching them with organizations around the world that can corroborate those recommendations with lived experience and evidence from their work. This campaign, Civil Society Wayfinder, is an effort to shine a light on some of the good work already happening, learn a little from those at the frontlines, and help speed up the thinking so we can move more quickly to the doing.

Our selection criteria focuses on four themes:

• Youth and new champions.
  Groups led by youth or elevating leaders outside electoral politics, such as artists, academics, technologists and faith leaders.
• Narrative power.
  Groups that use storytelling, music, spoken word, digital platforms and other live or broadcast media to leverage narrative power for community outreach, public accountability and participation.
• Healthy information ecosystems:
  Groups promoting more functional media and information systems through community journalism, media literacy, digital literacy, or other online and offline tools to combat disinformation.
• Decentralized funding:
  Groups that rely on diversified or decentralized funding models, by turning to local donors over international funders, for example, or through local outreach and mutual aid.

Private philanthropy is being forced to ask big questions about its role. Foundations and donors are reassessing who should be supported and how their limited dollars can have the most effect. They are weighing up whether to keep funding larger, often US-based organizations (that have traditionally held the ecosystem together) or refocus resources to direct grants to smaller, locally rooted groups.

This is a healthy debate, but it takes time, and time is scarce when programs are ending and people need help now. Quick, flexible grants and trust-based partnerships can help organizations keep operating while the larger field shifts. And while there are legitimate questions about “bridge funds” and what future these might bridge to – but unless we keep local organizations alive, there will be no future at all for civil society.

Accountability Lab’s Senior Non-Resident Fellowship

AL’s Senior Non-Resident Fellowship Program engages global thought leaders, advocates and practitioners in advancing innovative approaches to accountability and governance. Fellows are formally affiliated with the Lab’s international network, contributing their expertise and leadership to drive systemic change. By providing resources, collaboration opportunities, and a global platform, the Fellowship enables changemakers to amplify their work, influence policy, and strengthen governance ecosystems.

Our approach is rooted in trust, collaboration, and mutual benefit. We work with Fellows whose values align with the Lab’s mission, offering them space to pursue independent projects while contributing to shared learning and advocacy efforts. Through access to our global network, digital tools, and event platforms, Fellows are able to expand their reach and impact. We prioritize partnerships that uphold the highest standards of integrity, inclusion, and transparency.

Protecting the governance ecosystem

During the first quarter of 2025, AL started surveying organizations affected by the US government’s aid cuts. Within the first few weeks, half of respondents had told us they had less than 3 months of operating reserves. We worked hard to amplify news about the cuts and their impact on the governance sector, working with media outlets including Associated Press, DEVEX and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. As Co-CEO Blair Glencorse shared at the time, the Lab also hosted a number of discussions with global foundations to help them determine where their support could be most strategic.

This work led to the founding of Civic Strength Partners which allowed us to start producing advice-oriented content around legal compliance, mission-alignment and alternative funding streams.

We also shared leadership and learning principles for a sector in flux, and tried to embed ideas around changing governance structures. From the rise of authoritarian populism to the use of AI and shifting global political alliances, the Lab’s key messages have centered on the need for reform at some of our most important institutions. We also looked at the role the private sector should be playing in transforming development in partnership with civil society.

Bridging divides between elites and citizens

We contributed to a new Routledge Books volume, titled “Anti-Corruption in a Discordant World: Contestation, Abuse and Innovation”, sharing our experience of translocal networks. At the Lab, we’ve learnt that anti-corruption efforts today need to link local realities with broader support structures and learning resources in order to be effective. This requires shifts in how we fund, design and talk about anti-corruption as part of a translocal approach.

Meet our Participants

Being part of the cohort was particularly valuable because of the diversity of perspectives and the safe space to test ideas. Learning alongside peers working in different contexts helped me realise that while the forms of corruption differ, the underlying challenges of trust, incentives, and citizen engagement are often shared. That exchange made my own approach more practical and grounded.

My biggest insight was that accountability movements become sustainable only when they are locally owned and culturally relevant. Legal tools are important, but they need to be complemented with community-driven strategies that make integrity visible, relatable, and actionable.

At the time we applied for the fellowship, we were at a point where we needed to launch, but didn’t know how to start or where to start from. We were no doubt passionate and committed, but it was obvious we needed structured guidance to help us navigate the shrinking development space.

Civic Charge also helped us map our North Star as an organisation. That ‘discovery’ has made it easy to make objective decisions about prospective donors, partners and organizations we approach, and our strategies for subsequent projects.

Through CSP’s accompaniment model, we engaged with Ben Wrobel from Proximate, an independent media outlet covering movements for participatory problem-solving that was facing limitations in garnering support for flexible general operating funds. Through a series of conversations that included potential partners, CSP’s Sean McDonald supported Ben and others through the serious questions that everyone involved needed to work through before any decisions were made. “It’s one thing to merge”, said Ben, “but does it make strategic sense, financial sense, and cultural sense.”

As Ben noted, one of the most helpful parts of the process was knowing that Sean was there, often just an email away, supporting as a champion and when needed, as a calm and grounding presence during a stressful time. “Knowing that Sean is a guy that has our back, but asks the tough questions” gave him peace of mind, said Ben.

Another advantage to working with CSP was the access to technical expertise. Although Ben was experienced with fundraising, as a non-profit person, Sean helped him work though questions surrounding his business model, something he was less familiar with. CSP was also able to help him access legal support, something that would otherwise be difficult for a smaller organization to access without paying for a large retainer. Ben considered that it is possible that without CSP, his organization might have reached the same result. However, he believes the process would have been unpleasant. The thoughtfulness of CSP’s approach provided clarity that “helped preserve relationships, and helped us not rush into such a big decision”.