After USAID: Who Gets to Shape What Comes Next?

Dear Unlock Aid community,

This week marks one year since the U.S. government functionally terminated USAID. The consequences remain dire: life-saving programs ended, essential services were disrupted, trusted partnerships collapsed, and communities around the world continue to bear the human cost.

We should name that loss clearly. But one year later, another question feels urgent: Who is shaping what comes next?

In 2023, we went on a global listening tour to ask hundreds of community members and leaders, entrepreneurs, and policymakers across the globe a simple but vital question: If you could redesign global development systems for the future, what would you do differently?

What we heard was about so much more than just USAID.

It was about a broader question: What do systems look like when they’re actually built by the people they are meant to serve?

As the field continues to reorganize itself, that question feels more urgent than ever.

Too often, conversations in the United States still begin with the assumption that Washington, DC, must decide what comes next.

But the future is already being built. No one is waiting for Washington.

It is being built by entrepreneurs creating jobs today; health workers delivering life-saving services against all odds; community leaders solving problems without the help of outside organizations; public servants improving institutions with limited resources; and young people building businesses, platforms, and civic initiatives while the international community underestimates them.

The question is whether the people building that future are also helping write the rules that govern it.

Are social innovators, local leaders, entrepreneurs, community-based organizations, and frontline practitioners being invited into the conversations taking place in Washington, London, Geneva, and other global capitals to define what comes next? Or are they still being treated primarily as beneficiaries rather than decision-makers?

A development system designed to support innovation, enterprise, and long-term opportunity cannot be built only by people who have encountered those things from the outside.

The gap has been visible in global development for years. Many of the people shaping entrepreneurship and economic growth policy have never made payroll with limited cash, found a first customer, rebuilt after a failed pilot, or grown a business without an institution behind them. They understood development policy. They did not always understand what it takes to build, sustain, and scale an organization focused on delivering impact.

Insider expertise is not the only expertise that matters.

The entrepreneur trying to keep a business alive, the local operator moving from pilot to scale, the community leader navigating decisions made far away, and the public servant improving a system from within all bring expertise that is too often undervalued. They are not simply stakeholders to be consulted. They are among the people best positioned to say what needs to change, and how.

No donor or government can reliably anticipate which sectors, technologies, or delivery models will matter most or work best.

As economist Yuen Yuen Ang writes, “The challenge for industrial policy is not simply picking winners but discovering them.”

That observation has implications far beyond industrial policy.

As economies evolve, external partners should move away from the impulse to prescribe solutions for communities they do not live in. Instead, their role should increasingly be to create the conditions for local ideas to emerge, be tested, and grow.

Too often, organizations are asked to prove their effectiveness before they have received the resources needed to build, test, and scale. The result is a system that rewards existing access to capital and institutional backing while overlooking the builders closest to both the challenge and the opportunity.

This is what we have previously described as the “tyranny of evidence.” It is not an argument against evidence. It is an argument for creating more opportunities to generate it.

As the field is forced to evolve, we should be asking not only what evidence matters, but who gets the opportunity to produce it, and what kinds of models are the best to promote long-term, sustainable economic and human development and flourishing.

One of Unlock Aid’s core principles is that immediate humanitarian response should be approached differently from long-term economic development.

Responding to a humanitarian emergency requires one set of capabilities. Supporting economic growth, strengthening health systems, or expanding opportunity requires another.

Yet we often collapse them into a single conversation about “aid.”

A crisis requires speed, logistics, protection, and life-saving support. Building jobs, stronger health systems, public institutions, and long-term opportunity requires patient investment, different partnerships, and sustained attention over years.

The challenge of asking the same institution to simultaneously address both mandates is that, when a major crisis emerges, such as the devastating earthquakes in Venezuela last week, it understandably absorbs senior leadership, political attention, and resources. The slower, more patient work of supporting enterprise development, strengthening institutions, and expanding economic opportunity in geographies not affected by crisis can too often then move to the back burner.

If different challenges require different solutions, they also require different expertise, different partnerships, and different voices at the table, along with more fit-for-purpose institutional architecture that can respond to different needs. The question is not simply how we rebuild development systems, but who we invite to help design them, and what we ask them to do.

One of the clearest lessons from our work is that progress often begins by asking better questions.

As the field enters its next chapter, especially among the flurry of “reimagine aid” initiatives, these are some of the questions we hope remain at the center of those conversations:

• Which voices remain absent from decision-making spaces?

• How do we create room for experimentation while maintaining accountability?

• How do we balance evidence with the need to invest in emerging solutions and also promote long-term and sustainable economic development?

• How do we better match different development challenges with the right models, partnerships, and leaders?

• Most importantly, how do we ensure that the people closest to the challenges are also closest to the decisions?

The people we spoke with during our 2023 listening tour were not simply asking for a more effective version of the old system. They were asking for new models that recognize local leadership as expertise, create more room for experimentation and discovery, deliberately support enterprise and long-term opportunity, and give people closest to the challenges a meaningful role in shaping the decisions that affect them.

The future of global development will not be determined only by what replaces USAID. It will be determined by whether the next generation of policymakers is willing to look beyond fighting for restoration of what was, and to ask what kinds of institutions the future needs.

To Progress,
Unlock Aid

P.S. Entrepreneurs around the world aren’t waiting for Washington, DC to decide what comes next. They’re already building it. That’s why we’ve launched the Solutions Index: a new reference tool for donors, policymakers, and partners that identifies among the most promising organizations delivering results across global health, food security, nutrition, and other sectors.

We presently have an open call for submissions for organizations for our Future Generations Index edition, designed to highlight pacesetting organizations working on the following challenges:

• Building the industries, jobs, and employment rails of the future;

• Economic opportunity, financial inclusion, and livelihoods;

• Education and pathways to opportunity;

• Mothers, babies, caregivers, and systems of care;

• Infrastructure for thriving and resilient communities

If you’re an entrepreneur, click here to learn more and apply by July 8.

Alternatively, do you know an organization that should be considered that you’d like to nominate? Click here to nominate an organization to Unlock Aid’s Future Generations Solutions Index.