There is a very popular children's game in Colombia called ‘Congelados’ which means ‘Frozen’ in English. It is a more interesting version of ‘Catch me if you can’. It consists of a group of children running to escape a child who aims to catch and ‘freeze’ them, leaving them immobile for a long time. The obvious strategy of the freezing child is to chase those who are less agile to ensure quick victories. However, an unfrozen child can approach a frozen child and unfreeze them, with a gentle tap on the shoulder and the word ‘descongelado’ (unfrozen).

I watched my daughter play this game with her friends – she stood motionless, waiting for a friend to unfreeze her – while I thought about what had just happened in our lives. The organisation where I had been working for almost five years had just terminated my employment contract because the President of the United States had ordered a freeze on all government funding for international cooperation. Twenty minutes ago, I had become unemployed. In my head, there was a whirlwind of anguished thoughts for my and my daughter’s future, but also a deep sorrow for my work, which I loved and which supported many meaningful initiatives around the world. I, now jobless and without a future, was frozen like my daughter. But, unlike the game, in my situation there was no- one coming to unfreeze me.

The organisation I worked for was an operator of funds from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Our job was to deliver aid projects that benefitted many local organisations and communities around the world, delivering humanitarian assistance, ensuring access to healthcare and strengthening their capacities to expand civic space and transform difficult realities or contexts.

Being an organisation operating USAID resources was not an easy job. The accountability, audit and control processes were demanding, and it was imperative to consolidate reporting, data management and technical excellence of the highest standards. In the aid sector, we all knew that implementing USAID-funded projects was a demanding job that required a lot of preparation and experience. It took me 15 years of hard work, effort and daily preparation to get to the position I had in my organisation, and the people I worked with had the highest level of academic training.

I had come to understand the inner workings of international cooperation and USAID's strict bureaucracy, including how its practices could torpedo less colonialist and more effective work. Still, I was shocked to realise that in addition to losing my job, there was a disinformation campaign led by the newly elected US government. This campaign falsely spoke of USAID officials and their operating partners as “corrupt” people who had embezzled from the American people for decades. The administration spoke of us as having plundered taxpayers’ money and wasted these funds on activities that were supposedly never properly audited.

The public’s lack of knowledge of how international cooperation works meant this misinformation permeated public opinion, leading many Americans to celebrate the so-called end to the ‘corruption’ of USAID and the ‘miscreants’ who were supposedly squandering money while people in the US went hungry and had no access to healthcare.

The elephant in the room

In addition to working for years in international cooperation, I work on a voluntary basis in a local organisation that I co-founded with some young community leaders in Colombia. I put all my knowledge and experience in the cooperation sector at the disposal of this local initiative, where we present proposals to different funders to access funding, and implement activities that allow us to work on peacebuilding, territorial development and strengthening youth leadership in my country.

My two distinct roles in the sector have enabled me to see that, while the funding freeze has had a devastating impact on all affected, local organisations and US implementing partner organisations initially responded in different ways. ‘Implementing partners’ refers to large international organisations, such as Chemonichs, Tetratech, MSI, in charge of implementing concrete activities to ensure the accomplishment of strategic outcomes aligned with the US national policy and strategy.

The executive order activated the survival and submission modes of these USAID implementing partners. Uncertain about how to continue operating, they focused on reducing costs to ‘save some of their operations’. Some reviewed and changed narratives used in project documents to align with the new government’s strategic perspective. Several embarked on the courageous task of suing the government in the hopes of suspending, at least temporarily, the funding freeze and closure of the agency. They are trying to resist an authoritarian situation that not only threatens progress of international cooperation efforts, but also the foundations of democracy and the rule of law.[1]

For local actors, instability and uncertainty regarding the availability of resources is not new. Dealing with restrictions, untimely closures and lack of resources has been the daily bread of local organisations. Many of them were waiting for payments for activities they already implemented, and many of them were following instructions about how to report work to avoid terminations. At the same time, they were discussing how to diversify funding sources. They were not prepared, but they were not panicking either.

Many also held uncomfortable conversations about the elephant in the room: the system’s vulnerability to the whims of the US. Often, these conversations acknowledged that we knew the system was flawed, that there was too much sector dependency on (US) government funding, that bureaucracy was hindering sustainability of local efforts. That there’ s an urgent need to promote changes to decolonise the system. Many argued that we need to use this challenging situation to build momentum and imagine a better model for international cooperation. Yet, that conversation seemed to be taking place only among local organisations, with less engagement from INGOs, including those who had implemented USAID funds.

As mentioned earlier, local organisations have always had to deal with complex contexts and problematic funder habits. For example, they might receive important resources to implement activities one day, and the next they would be informed of project closures by the funder – which would not affect the funder themselves. In my own experience, a small, local organisation’s project promoting social inclusion among migrant and host communities was abruptly closed two years early. At the time, I asked the funder if they had considered any no-harm policy before requesting the project’s closure. I was told that no such policy existed. Such experiences were typical for local organisations, demonstrating the problems pervading the sector long before the USAID collapse.

My first thought in the face of all this was why had many of the international organisations operating USAID funds not yet contacted local partners to at least ask them about their experience navigating scenarios of high uncertainty and few resources? I heard of internal meetings focused on reducing costs and saving staff, with no mentions of joining forces with local partners to have a shared reading of what was happening. US organisations were so scared of any sanctions from the government, their first decision was not getting in touch with local partners. Why, despite the courage shown in making demands and leading advocacy actions, did the bridges of communication with the local organisations they had worked with for decades remain closed? Why was an organised and robust response, between operators and local organisations, not yet taking shape?

Descongelados, together

Going back to my daughter and her friends' game of ‘Congelados’ (frozen), I kept thinking about the dynamics of the game, so simple but so enlightening: while someone freezes, others have the power to unfreeze them by touching them and saying ‘descongelados’ (unfrozen). The truth is that in this funding crisis, like in the children’s game, one actor does not have the control nor the power to freeze everything. It may seem to us like the US government has the power to destabilise everything and exterminate the sector, but that’s far from the truth. There are far more players with the capacity to unfreeze than freeze, and the key is to start working directly with local partners.

For more than a decade, international cooperation has been focused on strengthening local capacities so communities can be engaged with their own path of progress and development. It’s time to trust in the increased strength of local actors. If international organisations are looking for ways to continue their mission, this is the opportunity to prove that vocation is stronger than circumstances. No-one has banned alliances between international workers and local partners.

Let’s not wait for the US government or US courts to unfreeze the funding, and ‘return everything to normal’. Let’s work together to identify what we can each do, right now, to ‘unfreeze’ our sector.

Who has the capacity to unfreeze? Are there aid practitioners who have lost their jobs, local leaders, grassroots organisations, other funder countries and recipient countries who have the capacity to unfreeze? Can local organisations share their lessons of resilience in the face of funding uncertainty?

Let’s open collective spaces and use the strengths and learning we have to:

  • Talk about what we have learned as development aid practitioners and local actors and how we have shaped together what we understand development aid to mean.
  • Look at the strengths that each actor in the system has and bring them to the table to see how those strengths, working together, sustain us in the short- and medium-term.
  • Identify the challenges and problems we have had around sustainability in this system.
  • Share the ways both local and international operators have responded to the need for adaptability.
  • Identify tools, processes, and instruments that have been successful and that we should strengthen, replicate and improve together.
  • Propose new ideas and organise ourselves to experiment at low cost.
  • Develop joint mobilisation actions as well as results-based evidence-gathering exercises that synchronise and feed back to combat misinformation.
  • Design a new, collective vision, and identify key individuals that bring us together for the collective purpose of strengthening the cooperation system, building trust and strengthening interactions between all actors in the system.
  • Let’s organise a bank of innovative local initiatives that international organisations have supported. Under the consortium model, it is possible to ensure priority projects can be implemented.

The transformation of the conflict in which we are now immersed in can only be possible if we open more opportunities for dialogue. The changes we are seeing in the world today remind us of the imperative need for a peacebuilding paradigm sustained in real solidarity and collective impact. The international funding crisis is a catalysing moment to reflect and recognise that we need creativity, innovation and empathy to transform the conflicts we will experience in the future.

As the days go by, we may find new ideas and tools that can help us better understand how to continue our work in the new reality. As a former international aid worker and a local-led activist, I know active, reflective, decolonial, peacebuilding minds can unfreeze us all.

[1] https://as.cornell.edu/news/dismantling-usaid-will-have-clear-costs-home-and-abroad