Somali blueprint becomes survival guide for Kenyan NGOs amid aid exodus

Following USAID cutbacks, Kenyan civil society organisations are increasingly looking to locally driven funding models championed by Adeso. [AFP]

As Western donors slash budgets and USAID scales back, Kenyan civil society is drawing on an advocacy track record more than a decade in the making: Adeso, a Somali-led organisation headquartered in Nairobi, has spent years pushing global donors to send funding directly to local and national organisations rather than through international intermediaries. As remaining donors reassess where their money goes, that advocacy is now central to how much of it still reaches Kenyan and other Global South civil society organisations.

When Degan Ali, the Executive Director of Adeso, addressed an official side event of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September 2023, her warning to the world's largest philanthropies was unflinching. “You are shackled when you receive funding that is given in a colonial and restrictive way,” she said. “It limits what you and communities can do.”