Cross-Border Giving: Funding Locally-led Development

In the first quarter of 2025, I spent a week in Tangier with friends from different corners of the world, each one engaged in some form of community philanthropy. We had gathered to talk about measuring what matters, though our conversations kept circling back to systems and structures that so often fail to focus on what matters to communities.

When the topic of the shifting global landscape came up in our conversation, I was struck by a markedly different response from what I had been hearing at academic gatherings and what I was reading in development blogs and LinkedIn posts. These community philanthropy practitioners wondered if there might just be a silver lining. Perhaps this shift might redirect attention toward what has always worked: locally led development, in its most authentic forms.

A System Under Pressure

For decades, international philanthropy has operated under a particular logic: wealthy-country governments and large development organizations send money, expertise, and frameworks to lower-income countries, expecting measurable results in return. That logic is cracking under the weight of its own contradictions and a shifting global landscape. Three shifts have converged to create what may be a defining moment for the future of global development.

• First, Official Development Assistance (ODA) is contracting at an unprecedented scale, as several major donor governments reduce or restructure their foreign aid budgets.
• Second, as noted in the 2025 Global Philanthropy Environment Index, it has become more challenging to send and receive philanthropic funds across country borders due to rising regulatory scrutiny, intended to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing, or to limit foreign political influence.
• Third, the so-called “Grand Bargain,” a sweeping 2016 commitment by major humanitarian donors and agencies to get more resources to local and national actors, has largely failed to deliver the expected results.

Set against this backdrop are growing calls for a return to locally led, community-rooted systems of development. Interestingly, these calls have advanced using three different perspectives. I refer to these different perspectives as the optimists, the pessimists, and the transformers.

Read the full article about cross-border giving by Dana R.H. Doan at Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy. Read the full article