Lessons from Mapping Civil Society in an Era of Aid Uncertainty”

In January 2025, USAID was dissolved, and this created significant uncertainty across the international development sector, particularly for democracy, rights, and governance work. Many organisations in this space rely on donor funding to sustain advocacy, accountability, civic engagement, and human rights programmes, so changes in funding priorities have direct implications for their visibility, stability, and long-term impact.

Against this backdrop, my internship with Accountability Lab gave me a deeper understanding of how civil society organisations operate across different political, regional, and funding contexts. Through the Civil Society Wayfinder Campaign, I helped identify, verify, and amplify locally rooted organisations working on democracy, rights, and governance. The timing of the campaign made this work especially important, as it highlighted the need to make credible local actors more visible at a moment when the wider civic space was facing funding uncertainty and shifting international support.

The wider funding context also showed why the Civil Society Wayfinder Campaign matters. The effects of U.S. aid cuts have not been limited to programme closures or organisational funding gaps, as shown in a recent analysis by the Center for Global Development. Drawing on ACLED conflict data and aid exposure data, Lee Crawfurd argues that countries and regions in Africa more exposed to USAID cuts experienced a roughly 5% increase in armed conflict events in 2025, alongside a similarly estimated increase in conflict fatalities. The figure does not prove that aid cuts directly caused every instance of conflict, but it does suggest that withdrawing support for governance, peacebuilding, and civic accountability can increase the risk of instability. For me, this reinforced the importance of DRG work and the need to identify community-led organisations that can sustain accountability, participation, and resilience in fragile contexts.

The Civil Society Wayfinder Campaign is a response to a clear sectoral need: to make locally rooted civil society organisations more visible and connected to potential support. The campaign recognises that many smaller organisations are close to the communities and governance challenges they work on, but are often overlooked by funders, international organisations, and sector leaders. This made the internship both practical and intellectually valuable for me. It was not only a communications or outreach project, but also a research, verification, stakeholder mapping, and civil society ecosystem analysis project.

How the Campaign Works

The campaign uses a combination of network-based recommendations, desk research, verification, thematic categorisation, consent-based outreach, and digital amplification. We reached out to people and colleagues with deep, current knowledge of civil society ecosystems, including peers at local NGOs, team leads from aid agencies who had faced disruptions to their programmes, Accountability Lab’s country directors, and contacts identified through my own regional knowledge. We also considered recommendations from Mabel, my fellow Programs Intern, whose networks helped broaden the range of organisations reviewed. 

Our review process involved confirming each group’s alignment with democracy, rights, and governance and with thematic categories we identified as emerging from analyses by international donors seeking to coordinate high-level responses to the aid crisis. Accountability Lab sought to demonstrate that the ideas in those higher-level convenings can be seen already in action by locally-based NGOs around the world 

The initial thematic categories were youth and new champions of democracy, narrative power, information ecosystems, and decentralised funding. During implementation, we added gender equity as a fifth category, based on the number of related groups Mabel and I observed among the organisations reviewed. This was an important learning point because it showed that even a well-designed framework must remain flexible enough to respond to patterns emerging from the data.

We also assessed whether organisations were currently active, and then proceeded with a consent-based selection process, ensuring that each selected group agreed to participate in the Wayfinder campaign. This was important because visibility can have different implications depending on context. In politically sensitive environments, being featured on a global platform can create both opportunities and risks.

Implementation and Activities

A large part of the work required sorting through datasets of NGO recommendations, checking each organisation carefully, and assessing whether they met the campaign criteria.

The project required patience and teamwork. A large part of the work required sorting through our partners’ NGO recommendations. Some datasets have hundreds of organisations. Where contact details were missing, we searched for websites, emails, phone numbers, and social media handles. Where activity was unclear, we looked for recent posts, reports, news articles, public events, or partnerships with recognised networks.

One important part of the selection process was contextual sensitivity. In countries such as Pakistan and Nepal, or Mali and Burkina Faso, we had to think carefully about what public visibility might mean for organisations. Some groups are operating in environments where external affiliations or public amplification can carry risks. 

Technical Skills and Tools Used

Although the campaign had a strong communications element, my internship was more research-focused than I initially expected. I developed and applied several technical skills across the project.

First, I strengthened my desk-based research skills. This included reviewing websites, reports, social media pages, public profiles, news articles, and organisational affiliations to assess whether NGOs were active, credible, and relevant to the campaign. I learned how to triangulate information across multiple sources rather than relying on one public profile.

Second, I developed stakeholder mapping skills. The campaign required us to identify not just organisations, but also the networks, intermediaries, and regional actors who could help us access credible recommendations. This made me more aware of how civil society ecosystems operate through relationships, trust, referrals, and reputational knowledge.

Third, I used categorisation and qualitative judgment. Assigning organisations to thematic categories was not always straightforward. Some organisations worked across youth participation, governance accountability, gender equity, and advocacy at the same time. This required analytical judgment and showed me that frameworks are useful, but they must be applied flexibly.

Fourth, I contributed to campaign monitoring and digital engagement analysis. We analysed 13 LinkedIn posts to understand how the campaign was performing. The analysis looked at who engaged with the posts, where they were located, what regions they came from, what professional sectors they represented, and how they engaged through reactions, reposts, and comments. This made the analysis useful not just as a reporting exercise, but to understand reach, resonance, and audience behaviour.

Our LinkedIn analysis covered 13 posts and recorded 559 total engagements and a reach of over 10,150 LinkedIn members, with the numbers still increasing. Engagement included 375 reactions, 148 reposts, and 36 comments. Reactions accounted for the largest share of engagement, suggesting that the posts were visible and positively received, while reposts helped extend the campaign beyond Accountability Lab’s immediate network.

Key Learning and Reflection

Working on the Civil Society Wayfinder Campaign was an integrative experience for me. It allowed me to engage with several country labs across Accountability Lab, collaborate with colleagues across different teams, interact with the communications team, and contribute to work that involved all three Co-CEOs. This gave me a wider understanding of how an international civil society organisation coordinates across regions while still trying to remain locally grounded.

One of my main reflections is how central community and peer recommendations are to civil society work. You only know as much as your network knows. The most useful recommendations often came from people who were already connected to relevant organisations or had encountered them through their work. This type of contextual knowledge cannot easily be found through online searches alone.

At the same time, the project showed me the limits of relying too heavily on external recommendations. In some cases, delays in receiving recommendations created bottlenecks. In other cases, the lists we received were larger in size or wider in scope than we had expected. This taught me the importance of being proactive, using existing networks, and balancing external input with independent research.

The project also deepened my understanding of stakeholder engagement. I learned that effective engagement depends on context, trust, accessibility, and political sensitivity. Working with colleagues in more restrictive political contexts, it became clear that outreach cannot be treated as a uniform process. Civil society actors operate within different levels of openness, risk, and visibility. 

Another important learning point was regional variation. Across Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, I noticed shared DRG themes, but different expressions of those themes. Youth-centred organisations such as Akili Dada, Yiaga Africa, and YUWA often connect youth leadership with governance, accountability, and democratic participation. Media and investigative journalism networks such as the Balkans Investigative Reporting Network, the Nepal Investigative Journalism Network, and New Naratif reflect the importance of information integrity and public accountability. However, their roles vary depending on civic space and political conditions.

This helped me understand that democracy, rights, and governance work cannot be considered as one fixed category. It looks different depending on the region, the level of civic freedom, the strength of institutions, and the risks faced by civil society actors.

Teamwork and Collaboration

This project showed me the importance of communication across teams. Research, outreach, communications, leadership review, and social media posting all had to connect. A campaign like Wayfinder depends on each stage being done properly. Poor research would weaken the credibility of the campaign. Poor communication would weaken the relationship with featured organisations. Poor analysis would limit our ability to learn from the campaign’s performance.

Working with my immediate team was largely smooth and productive. We were able to delegate responsibilities according to each person’s strengths, which created trust and efficiency. When gaps appeared, team members stepped in without needing to be prompted. I learnt that effective collaboration depends not only on individual contributions but also on clear communication at every stage of the work. 

Recommendations for the Campaign Going Forward

As Civil Society Wayfinder grows and continues tracking engagement data, I hope the research can go beyond total engagement figures. It would be useful to track which types of organisations generate the most reposts, comments, and recommendations. This could help identify what kinds of stories resonate most strongly with audiences.

The Civil Society Wayfinder Campaign showed me that locally rooted organisations often hold the knowledge, trust, and proximity needed to support accountable governance and active citizenship. However, these organisations are not always visible to the funders, international actors, and policy networks that shape resources and decisions. By helping to identify, verify, categorise, and amplify these organisations, I contributed to a campaign that responds to a real gap in the civil society ecosystem.

The internship taught me that effective civil society work requires both technical rigour and relational sensitivity. It depends on accurate data, careful verification, strong analysis, ethical outreach, and humility. Local actors often understand their realities in ways that external observers cannot, so meaningful engagement must respect their knowledge, agency, and context.

Through this project, I have come to see visibility as more than communication. When handled responsibly, it can help credible local organisations be recognised, connected to wider networks, and included in conversations that shape funding, partnerships, and policy attention. In that sense, visibility can support accountability and contribute to power shifting, but only when it is grounded in consent, context, and respect for the organisations being featured. This has been the central lesson of the internship.