The recent wave of aid cuts has triggered some interesting headlines across the development sector, “we are in a crisis,” “This is disruption, uncertainty, and institutional risk”. Bringing it back to Zambia, many organisations, particularly those heavily dependent on external funding, have experienced an immediate, real and destabilising impact. Programmes have been scaled down, staff contracts have been reviewed, and budgets have been tightened across multiple thematic areas.
However, even as the initial shock settles, the sector is not responding in a uniform way. Some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are struggling significantly, some are adapting with remarkable speed and creativity, and others appear, perhaps unexpectedly, to be navigating the moment with a degree of institutional comfort that raises deeper questions about how the development ecosystem has evolved.
The issue is not simply that aid has been reduced, but that the reduction is revealing long-standing structural differences in how NGOs were built, how they operate and how they understand sustainability.
While concerns about complacency within parts of the sector may exist, it is important to acknowledge that many NGOs continue to work tirelessly under increasingly difficult circumstances. Across the sector, organisations are adapting, innovating, and finding new ways to support communities despite funding pressures and a changing development landscape. A more balanced perspective is that the sector reflects both ongoing challenges and remarkable resilience. Some institutions are constrained by deeply embedded donor dependency models, while others are actively using this moment to rethink their purpose, financing structures and relationship with communities. The tension between these two responses is becoming one of the defining features of the current period.
On one hand, there are organisations whose operating models have become so closely aligned with external funding systems that disruption was almost inevitable. Over time, many NGOs evolved within a framework where survival depended on the continuous acquisition and renewal of grants. This created strong technical capacities in proposal writing, compliance and reporting, but often left weaker capacities in local resource mobilisation, constituency building, and long-term financial independence.
In such contexts, “comfort” does not mean abundance. It refers instead to predictability. Organisations learned how to function within donor cycles that, while competitive and demanding, were nonetheless structurally familiar. Funding would come, programmes would be implemented, reports would be submitted, and new proposals would be written. This stability created an unintended consequence: it allowed deeper questions about institutional sustainability to be postponed indefinitely. When aid cuts occurred, those postponed questions became urgent.
However, it is important not to reduce the sector to a narrative of donor dependence. Alongside these structural vulnerabilities, there are clear examples of NGOs that are actively responding to this moment of funding uncertainties with seriousness and innovation. In fact, some organisations are using this disruption as a catalyst for long-overdue transformation.
These organisations are doing several things differently. Some are diversifying their funding bases by investing in local philanthropy and private sector engagement. Others are strengthening community-led financing mechanisms, recognising that sustainability cannot rely solely on external flows of capital. A number are restructuring governance systems to increase accountability to local stakeholders rather than primarily to donors. Others are reducing dependence on project-based programming and moving toward longer-term, community-embedded models of work.
This divergence in response shows that resilience in the NGO sector is not evenly distributed. It is shaped by institutional history, leadership choices, funding architecture and the degree to which organisations have invested in relationships beyond the donor system.
A useful way to understand this is to distinguish between operational resilience and systemic resilience. Many NGOs have developed strong operational resilience, they can continue delivering projects under pressure, adjust budgets and comply with changing donor requirements. However, systemic resilience, which is the ability to function meaningfully outside of donor ecosystems, is far less developed in many cases.
This gap becomes visible precisely during moments of funding contraction.
It is also important to acknowledge that the structure of the aid system itself has contributed to this imbalance. Donor-driven development models have historically rewarded accountability upward rather than outward. Success is often measured through indicators that prioritise short-term outputs, financial compliance and reporting accuracy.
These metrics are important, but they do not always capture the deeper question of whether organisations are embedded within local systems of legitimacy and support.
As development thinker David Mosse has observed, “The success of aid projects is often in maintaining relationships and narratives rather than achieving stated objectives.” This insight is particularly relevant here because it highlights how institutional survival can become disconnected from substantive transformation.
Within such a system, it is understandable that NGOs optimise for what is rewarded. However, what is rewarded is not always what is sustainable.
In many contexts, this has produced organisations that are highly professionalised but unevenly anchored. They are fluent in global development discourse, technically competent in implementation, and skilled in navigating complex donor requirements. At the same time, they may be less integrated into local systems of resource generation and social accountability than their programming suggests.
Even this framing must be balanced. Because alongside structural dependency, there is also evidence of deep resilience within parts of the sector that has often gone unrecognised.
In Zambia and across similar contexts, NGOs are increasingly operating within environments where communities themselves are not passive recipients of aid but active agents of development. Informal savings groups, rotating credit associations, faith-based welfare systems, youth collectives, and local cooperative structures already function as parallel systems of support. These systems are not new, nor are they dependent on external funding to exist.
What is changing is the degree to which NGOs are beginning to recognise, engage with, and sometimes align themselves with these pre-existing systems rather than attempting to replace or formalise them entirely. This shift is significant. It suggests that parts of the sector are beginning to move toward a more embedded model of development practice, one that prioritises facilitation over delivery, and support over substitution.
The Global Fund for Community Foundations has long argued that “real sustainability comes not from the continuation of funding flows, but from the strengthening of local relationships, assets, and decision-making power.” This framing is increasingly relevant in a context where external funding is no longer guaranteed and where institutional survival must be reconsidered in broader ecosystem terms.
What the current moment reveals, therefore, is not simply a funding crisis but a structural inflection point. It exposes differences in how NGOs were designed, how they evolved, and how prepared they are to function in a more uncertain global funding environment.
Some organisations will struggle significantly. Others will adapt. A few will use this moment to fundamentally reimagine their role within the development ecosystem.
The danger is not only that funding has been reduced. The greater risk is that the sector may be viewing this moment as a temporary disruption rather than a structural signal.
If you would like to contribute to this discussion, please do so via info@zgf.org.zm
