The Cost of Resilience: What International Development Gets Wrong About Success

The shuttering of USAID is a stress test revealing fundamental flaws in how international development measures success. For decades, international NGOs (iNGOs) operated within a system where legitimacy and money flowed from the same source: The US government and similar bilateral donors. When that source disappears, the entire architecture collapses.

Growth—staff expansion, geographic reach, budget increases—was mistaken for impact. We built an industry optimized for a world that no longer exists, one premised on stable, humane governments.

The conventional response is predictable: reduce costs, diversify revenue, weather the storm. But treating this as a temporary crisis wastes an opportunity to fundamentally reimagine who pays, who does, and who decides.

The Shift in Power Dynamics

Three core elements are changing simultaneously.

First, who pays is shifting from bilateral donors to potentially "beneficiary" governments themselves—entities previously treated as recipients rather than clients.

Second, who does the work may transition from iNGOs to grassroots organizations that already understand local context intimately.

Third, who decides what gets done could move from donor-iNGO partnerships to genuinely local actors, down to individual beneficiaries.

Refugee-led organizations are already demonstrating demand for something different than traditional technical assistance. They want help navigating cultural differences and mapping power dynamics. Local leaders lack the networking opportunities their foreign counterparts take for granted, suggesting a role for facilitation rather than implementation.

Learning from Pre-Resilient Networks

Digital rights organizations offer instructive precedent. Groups fighting for internet freedom face routine government shutdowns and have designed redundancy into their systems from the start. The #KeepItOn Coalition—a network of over 150 organizations across 60 countries—works to prevent internet shutdowns while helping activists circumvent them when they occur. These networks can maintain operations despite attacks because resilience was built into the architecture, not bolted on during crisis.

International development did the opposite. It optimized for growth within a stable funding environment, creating single points of failure. When USAID closes, there's no fallback because the system assumed continuity.

Organizations like Elimu Fanaka are mapping education actors in Kenya not to coordinate them under a single umbrella, but to build relationships within an ecosystem. The Resilio Fund is positioning to fund local actors as first responders. These models prioritize durability over dependency.

Decoupling Growth from Success

The hardest cognitive shift is psychological. How do we rewire our thinking to decouple growth from success?

Consider the metrics that actually matter: reach, depth, and durability = impact. A one-time investment that builds local capacity may deliver more lasting impact than maintaining expensive iNGO infrastructure and all its foreign aid dependencies.

This raises an uncomfortable question deliberately ignored in crisis mode: What is the opportunity of closing an iNGO? Not just the cost. How much capacity could be built locally with the resources currently maintaining international overhead?

Success in this new system doesn't necessarily mean preserving iNGOs. It means building systems that withstand shocks. It means demand-led work where local actors define priorities rather than having needs assessed for them. It means peer learning exchanges where refugee-led organizations share knowledge horizontally rather than receiving it vertically from "experts."

The Strategic Opportunity

Short-term cost reduction and revenue diversification are considered necessary for survival, but ultimately insufficient. They keep organizations alive without asking whether organizational survival serves mission.

The real strategy requires asking: What assumptions was this system built on that no longer hold? If the answer is "stable, humane government willing to fund foreign interventions," then the strategy cannot be "maintain current operations with different funders."

Instead, development practitioners must consider whether their organizations are designed for a world that existed or one that's emerging. Legitimacy and money no longer flow from the same source—if they flow at all. The question isn't how to restore the old system, but what competencies enable us to build something more resilient.

The humanitarian aid system assumed continuity it never actually had. Organizations optimized for scale within that assumption are now paying the price. Those that survive won't be those that cut fastest or fundraise hardest. They'll be those willing to reimagine what success looks like when growth is no longer the goal.