Building Civil Society Wayfinder to Close the Proximity Gap

After nearly nine months of participatory curation, our Civil Society Wayfinder campaign includes more than 50 organizations from 25 different countries, all gathered based on word-of-mouth recommendations from peers, regional allies, friends in the Accountability Lab community, and LinkedIn followers tracking this simple but powerful campaign.

Conceived in late 2025 as the NGO sector reeled from the demolition of the United States government’s foreign aid infrastructure, Wayfinder is based on two core premises: local communities know best how to promote local governance, and international donors and experts would do well to listen first and let their funds follow where those local examples lead.

At the start of the project, we reviewed analyses of the shifting democracy, rights, and governance landscape conducted by the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, EPIC-Africa, International IDEA, and Wilton Park, among others. In those recommendations we saw thematic approaches we knew were already in use by civil society groups around the world, including youth leadership, narrative power, healthy information ecosystems, and decentralized funding. 

Civil Society Wayfinder is designed to find and promote the local groups already working along these lines, not as a dismissal of the reports we read, but as vivid proof that those high-level findings are aligned with local practices that deserve attention and support. By shining a spotlight on NGOs like these, we can shrink the “proximity gap” between groups who need visibility to attract resources and the international experts whose decisions and funds often guide the sector.

Based on the responses so far, we think we are on the right track. Our peers and online followers continue to recommend groups for consideration, including a number of recommendations sent “manually” to Accountability Lab colleagues over email and WhatsApp.

Funders and international groups have been watching too, inquiring about the Wayfinder approach and sending recommendations of their own. Wayfinder explicitly does not offer a channel to funding, but we know wider networks lead to more opportunities. 

Most importantly, our participating organizations, reaching from Argentina and Thailand to Nigeria and Nepal, are now more visible and more connected to peers around the world. On LinkedIn, #CivilSocietyWayfinder posts have received responses from more than 50 countries, and have been viewed by more than 10,000 people.

Sunday Taiwo from the Wayfinder group Paradigm Leadership Support Initiative (PLSI) in Nigeria says he finds the deliberate effort to reduce fragmentation within the civic space most valuable. “Too often, civil society organisations work in silos, even when they share similar goals,” he says. 

He shares how some of PLSI’s most impactful work has come through collaboration. In 2023 the organization convened the inaugural Nigeria Accountability Summit (NAS) with a few partners, but by the following year had intentionally crowded in more. Now 12 leading civil society organizations including Accountability Lab Nigeria, BudgIT, UNODC Nigeria, and others, serve as co-implementing partners. Each organization brought unique strengths to the table. Their access to high-profile speakers and broader networks increased credibility, visibility, technical expertise, and collective ownership – all of which elevated the Summit. Today, NAS brings together diverse stakeholders to interrogate policy implementation challenges, identify practical solutions, and collectively advance governance reforms.

Initiatives like Wayfinder help cultivate exactly this mindset. They encourage trust, mutual learning, and a shared commitment to advancing public good; qualities that are increasingly important at a time when societies are becoming more polarised. If the civil society sector is to remain effective, we must continue building bridges, sharing knowledge, and working together across organisational boundaries.

Greater reach is especially important because, according to a survey of Wayfinder groups, about half of respondents said they now spend ten or more hours per week on donor and partner outreach, a new strain on capacity at a moment of instability. 

Global Learning for Sustainability (GLS) is a youth, and young women-led organization based in Uganda, and another of the organizations platformed by Wayfinder. Team lead Harriet Mukajambo says campaign is a strong ecosystem building initiative that has the potential to connect organizations to each other, share tools and promote learning across contexts. She adds: “It can be designed to help civil society groups map resources, building synergies while checking duplication of efforts.”

When we convened Wayfinder groups online to celebrate reaching 50 organizations, that link between cooperation and capacity was a key theme. One thing on which attendees agreed is that without their longstanding U.S. agency partners, and with most donors restructuring programming, they need new relationships more than ever. Stronger networks and shared goals have shifted from important objectives to existential imperatives. 

One activist bluntly referred to that shift as the difference between “ceremonial collaboration” and “actual collaboration for system strengthening.” The groups also recognized the value of learning from each other. Though many of them are expert coalition-builders, they are now more proactively seeking peer learning, in areas such as fundraising and operational adaptation.

Our guest speaker Rose Maruru, CEO of EPIC-Africa, talked about the lack of structural support for community-led organizations — a dynamic that predates the 2025 funding crisis. But she also reminded us to recognize hope in the resiliency of local leaders. She said the Wayfinder work — which EPIC-Africa helped to define — is an example of how connectedness can drive future impact.

For a closer look at how Wayfinder works and what we are learning as we go, please see these notes from recent Program Interns Yamone “Mabel” Aye and Otsemaye Harriman. Their insight and diligence were central to the Wayfinder process as we identified organizations, stress-tested our framework, and navigated the complexities of different regional and political contexts. Otsemaye reflects on regional patterns across the Wayfinder cohort and her own lessons at the intersection of research and advocacy. Mabel writes about how our methodology developed in practice, and shares the changes in her own perspective while tracking civil society trends in places far from Southeast Asia.

Civil Society Wayfinder is one part of Accountability Lab’s broader mission to promote democracy, rights and governance by centering local actors as both implementers and international models. Our work does not solve the funding gap or eliminate the proximity gap. But we believe that connectedness builds resiliency and that visibility helps the Wayfinder NGOs to serve as models to NGOs and donors.

We hope you will join in the process by making your own recommendations for groups to include. As one Wayfinder leader told our recent gathering, “The work is too important to not have anyone do it.”