For decades, development money in Africa has arrived with its own instructions: what to fix, how to fix it, and who should do the work. Now a small but growing movement is asking a different question: what if the people receiving the money wrote the brief?
By Caleb Ahinakwah
A community in Zambia, Nyankanga, had spent years being asked to explain its problems to international organisations that arrived with forms, frameworks and programmes designed in foreign capitals that failed to address the community’s real needs. So, in 2024, it decided to reverse the arrangement.
Instead of waiting for a donor to announce what it wanted to fund, the community wrote its own call for proposals.
It identified the things it wanted changed over the coming years: better basic services, stronger schools, support for subsistence farmers and roads capable of reaching a clinic. It worked out the costs. Then it did something that, in the development world, communities are rarely invited to do.
It asked donors to apply to fund them.
The “reverse call for proposals” is just one of a number of ideas being tried by a growing movement of African civil society organisations. They have condemned an aid system designed largely in Western capitals and where the people who understand a problem best are rarely the people trusted to define it.
At a major conference in Accra this week, more than 200 leaders from 30 countries will gather for Africa at the Center: Leading Change, Shifting Power, the first time African civil society organizations have gathered to come up with concrete plans for an African-led disruption of the aid system that they say is rooted in centuries of colonial relationships.
“Let’s shift away from those of us who want to control communities to a situation where communities are in the driving seat,” said Charles Kojo Vandyck, of the West Africa Civil Society Institute, organizers of the convening, in an interview.
The idea for the event grew out of a West Africa Civil Society Institute project called RINGO — Reimagining the INGO — launched in 2021.
More than 95 civil society leaders, funders and organizations were given one instruction: stop writing reports about what is broken and build something that works instead.
Jimm Chick Fomunjong and Gideon Ahenkorah of the West Africa Civil Society Institute described the assumption buried inside that system in a soon-to-be-released opinion piece.
The aid world’s traditional call for proposals is the mechanism by which government, foundation or international agency decides what it wants to fund, writes the objectives and conditions, publishes an invitation, and waits for organisations to respond.
The call for proposals “is only the smallest expression of a much larger architecture: who controls resources, who sets the terms on which they move, and who gets to decide what counts as a legitimate priority,” the pair write.
“The scale of what these prototypes are responding to is difficult to overstate, and African institutions have spent years documenting it themselves.
Africa received $74 billion in official aid in 2023. In the same year, according to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, the continent lost an estimated $90 billion to illicit financial flows, largely through trade mis-invoicing and tax avoidance. It paid a further $103 billion servicing external debt in 2024.
At the International Monetary Fund, where decisions of consequence require an 85 percent majority, the 46 nations of sub-Saharan Africa, a region with a combined economy larger than India’s, shared just two seats on the 24-member executive board until 2024.
A third was added only after a decade of advocacy. Africa’s collective vote today stands at roughly 5 per cent. None of these figures, taken together, simply describe a system that malfunctioned.
They point instead to an architecture in which the rules governing money, risk and decision-making have too often been set elsewhere, with African countries carrying consequences without possessing an equivalent share of power over the system itself.”
Organizers want the Accra gathering to advance three broad goals: an African-led development financing system, development in which communities are in the driving seat, and stronger institutions that work for Africa. The conference will also showcase practical approaches already being tested rather than simply producing speeches about problems in the existing system.
Nyankanga’s experiment is one of those approaches. The community foundation sat down and assessed them, much as a donor would normally assess the organisations seeking its money. 20 applications came back. Eventually, it chose Plan International Zambia.
Nyankanga community in Zambia
When Plan’s team arrived expecting to conduct the usual due diligence on the community, they were stopped.
“You did not send the call. We sent the call,” the community said, according to Charles Kojo Vandyck, of the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI), the Convening organisers, in an interview.
The questions were suddenly going in the other direction. Where were Plan’s annual reports? What had it previously invested in Zambia? What would happen to the community if the organisation withdrew? The questions were not merely about whether Plan could deliver a project. They were about whether it could be trusted as a partner.
The money at stake was relatively modest – about $17,000. Proponents of a new approach to aid say the idea was not. It started a snowball that proponents say could revolutionise the aid dynamic.
In Tamale, a Ghanaian civil society organisation is following Nyankanga’s lead. Alhaji Alhassan Mohammed Awal has spent two decades frustrated with the existing model that undermined his efforts to achieve lasting impact.
Awal runs the Northern Sector Action on Awareness Centre, known as NORSAAC, which works on women’s and youth issues across Ghana’s Northern Region. His experience of development funding is that organisations like his often learn to become exceptionally good at answering questions that somebody else has already decided to ask.
The language is familiar: objectives, indicators, activities, outputs, log frames.
The proposal arrives. The organisation reads it. It studies what the donor wants. It works out how to present its own priorities in a way that fits. By the time the project reaches the community, the most important decisions may already have been made.
If the community does not fit neatly inside the framework, the community – rather than the framework – can end up being judged. A target is missed. An intervention is declared ineffective.
A project cannot be called successful, Awal argues, simply because it delivers what the donor designed. The measure should be whether it delivers what the people were supposed to benefit from actually needed.
“That is not development,” Awal says. “Such a project imposes what the results look like on the people and not what the people feel about it. So you can’t describe such a project as a successful one.”
Awal points to the Accelerating Social and Behavior Change project in Ghana as an example of the contradiction.
The USAID-funded programme ran from 2023 until it was cancelled in 2025 amid cuts to USAID under the Trump administration. It was presented, Awal says, as a localisation effort – an attempt to place Ghanaian organisations closer to the centre of development work.
FHI 360, a US-based organisation, won the original USAID solicitation and brought in NORSAAC and the Ghana Health Service as implementing partners.
But, Awal says, some of the most consequential decisions had already been made before NORSAAC entered the process. The programme had identified 17 districts for intervention and established objectives and activities that, in his account, left little room for the Ghanaian organisation to substantially reshape the project in response to what communities said they needed.
The irony was difficult to miss. A project intended to localise development still left the local organisation responding to a design it had not written.
NORSAAC has now begun experimenting with the alternative. In three communities – Garjio, Shiu and Singa, all in Ghana’s Sagnarigu Municipal Assembly – it has piloted its own reverse call for proposals.
The initial focus is water and sanitation.
Instead of approaching communities with a predetermined project, NORSAAC asks them to articulate their priorities. The intention is eventually to extend the model across the more than 55 districts where the organisation works in northern Ghana.
But reversing the relationship is harder than it sounds.
Communities accustomed to receiving development interventions do not necessarily begin by seeing themselves as institutions capable of commissioning them. Organisations accustomed to answering donor calls must learn how to surrender some of that control.
Awal says the process is expensive and slow. There is also a political economy to the hesitation.
Many Ghanaian NGOs, he believes, are reluctant to challenge the power imbalance because their survival depends on the money at the other end of the relationship.
“They’re our masters,” he says of the sentiment he encounters among fellow organisations.
Why risk a funding relationship by asking the funder to share power?
That is one of the most difficult questions facing the movement. The problem is not simply that donors have too much power, critics say. It is that the development ecosystem has been built around that power for so long that many of its participants have learned to work within it.
The experiment is beginning to travel.
The Zambian Governance Foundation has replicated the reverse-call process in nine communities since Nyankanga. In Malawi, the Tilitonse Foundation is testing an early version of the model.
The West Africa Civil Society Institute has also been speaking to donors about what it would mean to receive proposals rather than issue them. The response has been uneven.
Some funders appear interested in a different relationship with African institutions, according to Vandyck. Others have raised the obvious question: if communities are given greater control over funding, how can donors be sure that the money will be properly managed?
That question is not trivial. Any serious attempt to redistribute power in development financing has to deal with accountability, financial controls and institutional capacity.
But the movement’s answer is that trust cannot be built by permanently denying one side of the relationship the opportunity to exercise power. It means giving communities ownership of the project and transparency that will allow them to police accountability. Vandyck estimates that making reverse calls a familiar norm could take five to 10 years.
Movement gains momentum as aid is slashed and African governments push back
The Africa at the Centre gathering comes at a pivotal moment. At the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September 2025, Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, called for a fundamental rethink of development systems.
“If we are to heal our health systems, we must first reset development itself,” he said.
Vandyck describes this moment as the “Accra Reset”.
This year, Ghana turned down a new health funding agreement with the US Trump administration this year after officials decided the data-sharing terms it demanded cost more than the funding was worth. Zimbabwe had already rejected a similar deal. Kenya’s version of the same fight is now in its own courts.
The next stage of that conversation will take place in Accra this week.
The choice of Ghana as the setting carries its own symbolism. Ambassador Ekow Spio-Garbrah, the country’s presidential special envoy on reparations, is due to deliver the opening keynote, linking the debate about development finance to the wider question of Africa’s historical relationship with former colonial and slave-trading powers.
The case for reparations is slowly gaining traction in global capitals. Attendees at this week’s gathering say the case for an African-led disruption of aid must come next.
This story was a collaboration with New Narratives.
