Degan Ali, a global champion for reforming the global aid and development ecosystem, explores how we can decolonize philanthropy.

One of my strongest memories from my youth is the sting of my mother’s humiliation.

She was a civil society leader in Somalia and founded Horn Relief (now called Adeso) to promote peace, protect the environment, and support Somalia’s pastoralist communities.

She had been born into a pastoralist community in northeastern Somalia. Through a mix of faith, good fortune, and fortitude, she managed to get a master’s degree and become a champion for Somalia’s environment and the pastoralists, helping to curb deforestation by outlawing the export of charcoal and empowering hundreds of pastoralist communities to protect their environment.

But when she entered the halls of the United Nations, this hijab-wearing, brown-skinned, firecracker of a woman was viewed with suspicion, dismissed, and sometimes even laughed at.

Degan Ali’s mother Fatima Jibrell, founder of Adeso.

She was told that she had no right to be in the room when a group of White men were deciding the fate of her nation of Black people. Meeting after meeting to discuss how to stabilize her beloved Somalia occurred hundreds or thousands of miles away in Nairobi, Geneva, and New York.

I watched her as she pleaded in heavily accented English, her third language. That image, seared in my brain, broke my heart.

Standing Toe to Toe

My goal, when I started out in the world, was to get a lucrative job so that I could support my mother and nudge her to retire from all of her various projects, including her advocacy work on behalf of her people.

Degan Ali and her mother Fatima Jibrell, Marsabit County, Kenya, September 2015.

That’s what led me, ironically, to take a job with the United Nations — the very organization that had so demeaned my mother. When I started at the U.N., I thought, “I’m tough. I can handle it. I can stand toe to toe against these people.”

And I did.

But that didn’t make it any more palatable.

I eventually left the U.N. after almost four years and joined my mother’s organization. I became its second employee. Though that makes it sound more official and grand than reality, given that neither of us were paid.

Only between 0.2% to 2% of humanitarian funding from donors goes directly to local organizations in the Global South. Degan Ali

Camels Dying of Thirst

It was 2003, a fortuitous moment to return to Somalia. Parts of the country were experiencing the worst drought in decades. Through our work with pastoralist youth, we heard stories of a massive loss of livestock. It was so dry, the pastoralists told us, even their camels were dying of thirst. We carried out a survey and found that many communities reported losing 70% of their camels. We knew how devastating this could be for pastoralists who rely on the animals for milk, meat, and transportation.

I immediately submitted an urgent report to the Somalia Aid Coordination Body, an initiative of the U.N. I proposed cash transfers for the affected communities.

I was met with disbelief and incredulity.

“You want to give money to people in Somalia? Are you crazy? They’re going to buy guns.”

Eventually, we did receive US$900,000 to launch a cash transfer program to provide immediate aid to the thousands of vulnerable communities. It was the first emergency and large scale unconditional cash transfer program in Africa. We developed an inclusive community-based targeting model and a cash for work program that sparked a revolution in the sector, with some of the biggest names adopting our approach, including UNICEF, Save the Children, and Oxfam International.

Our model recognized that the traditional approach of humanitarian organizations to distribute aid through village and clan elders likely did not result in equitable or optimal distribution. Instead, we removed the middleman and mobilized the community, including women and vulnerable groups often overlooked by traditional elders, to lead the process of identifying the most vulnerable households.

But I can’t help wondering how many other locally developed innovative approaches never got off the ground. How many other local leaders with transformative ideas were met with distrust or laughed out of the room?

Tipping the Power Balance

Global data indicates that the challenges I have outlined are far from unique. Only between 0.2% to 2% of humanitarian funding from donors goes directly to local organizations in the Global South. The figure is slightly higher for the development sector, reaching an estimated 4%. And only 12% of international grant dollars from U.S. foundations goes directly to local organizations based in the country where the programs are implemented.

We know that local groups, whose intimate knowledge and understanding of the socioeconomic and political dynamics of their own communities, are better positioned to develop more sustainable, innovative, and impactful programs. Nevertheless, local leaders and civil society organizations are typically hired only to implement programs designed half a world away. The big ideas, the revolutionary approaches — they are all assumed to originate far away from where the problems reside.

Women carrying yellow drums of water back to their communities. Baidoa, Somalia, 2019.

As a result, our efforts are less efficient. Layer upon layer of international organizations peel off their overhead fees before the money reaches people on the ground. In addition, the current approach robs the communities closest to the problem of any agency in solving the problem.

This approach is at odds with both common sense and research, which shows that locally driven solutions, designed and led by people proximate to the problem, are most effective in creating impactful solutions that are sustainable.

The long overdue current global discourse about shifting the power dynamics in aid, development, and philanthropy is exciting, important, and urgent. No doubt, it is also bewildering. There is still a lack of clarity within the humanitarian and development sector about how we can shift power and resources to local groups.

Research shows that locally driven solutions, designed and led by people proximate to the problem, are most effective in creating impactful solutions that are sustainable. Degan Ali

The Path Forward

For forward-thinking social investors who are grappling with these same issues, the path forward isn’t obvious.

Many leaders in our sector have responded to the challenge by calling for trust-based philanthropy. And that sounds great. But trust-based philanthropy is only as good as your network. For trust-based philanthropy to work, you must purposefully expand your network to include those proximate to the challenge at hand.

This long overdue moment of reassessment and introspection in the philanthropy sector is an opportunity to do something more transformative. We need to decolonize the global development system and philanthropy. Decolonization is essentially a recognition of the political, economic, and financial underpinnings that have caused Global South and former colonies to be in need of aid. The decolonization movement recognizes this and actively works to dismantle these mechanisms while also trying to find some practical short-term technical solutions to shift resources and power. This requires a major shift in the way philanthropy has traditionally been practiced.

Degan Ali

Degan Ali is the executive director of Adeso, a humanitarian and development organization that is changing the way people think about and deliver aid in Africa. Ali has been leading the decolonization development movement and was the architect of the Grand Bargain commitment of 25% of funding to go directly to local organizations. Ali also co-founded the Network for Empowered Aid Response, a Global South civil society network trying to transform the current humanitarian and development system. Since 2020, she founded a consultancy firm, DA Global, and has worked with organizations like Sesame Workshop, the International Rescue Committee, the British Red Cross, and Save the Children on issues around decolonizing aid and transforming organizational strategies to align with anti-colonial and anti-racist principles. Her methodology and perspectives on international aid and African development have been featured in “The New York Times,” “Al Jazeera,” “The Guardian,” “Devex,” and “The New Humanitarian.” Learn more about Ali on http://www.deganali.com.

This article was originally published in Social Investor magazine, a publication by Chandler Foundation looking at the challenges of social impact, featuring insights from a diverse range of social change leaders.