It is a postponed shutdown

Nancy W. Muia

Nancy has spent nearly two decades strengthening public systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. She writes about what has to be in place before a donor leaves.

Below are the parts of her piece that stopped us, in her own words. The full piece is at the end if you want all of it.

For decades, the international development sector has treated donor transitions as administrative off-ramps rather than institutional transformations.

Yet, when project vehicles leave and parallel funding streams end, host systems are too frequently left with sophisticated operational models they lack the statutory mandate, multi-year budget lines, or administrative capacity to maintain.

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Tapering donor support without securing a corresponding line item in domestic public expenditure frameworks is not a transition plan; it is a postponed shutdown.

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Consider community child protection: during a project, donor-funded community workers are given stipends and tablets to log at-risk children into a custom project database. But if those workers have no statutory designation under national child welfare law, their authority evaporates the moment project stipends end.

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The question at the end of a grant should therefore not simply be whether an intervention can survive without the donor. It should be whether the function has become part of an institutional architecture capable of surviving without the project.

Over to you

We agree with Nancy. Here is our question. If that takes years, should donors fund anything that can't plan for it from day one?

If you have worked on a programme that ended: what was still running a year later, and why? Tell us in the comments. Or tell us your own story: fightglobalpoverty.com/contributors

Read Nancy's full piece: Download (PDF)

Follow Nancy on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nancy-w-muia