International Nonprofits After USAID: A View from the Global South

In 2025, Manushya, an 8-year-old Thai-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) with an intersectional feminist human rights mission and a practice of providing safe houses for Southeast Asian environmental and political opposition activists, had a near-death experience.

Back in 2024, the NGO got a $750,000 grant from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to enable it to subgrant to movement groups across Southeast Asia. It was supposed to receive another $525,000 in 2025—money that never came as the Trump administration worked to shut down the agency.

Emilie Palamy Pradichit, the organization’s founder and executive director, told NPQ this represented “75 percent of our overall funding.” More than money, lives were at stake. “We were providing life-saving grants. We were able to provide emergency grants within 24 to 48 hours. We were really protecting lives and saving lives….We had a refugee die because a hospital was closed at the border of Myanmar and Thailand.”

The initial effect of the shutdown of USAID was catastrophic, but Manushya did manage to pivot and survive. In large measure because Pradichit was able to speak to the international press, including NPR and the BBC, Manushya obtained foundation grants that enabled the organization to raise $200,000 in new funds, far less than the originally promised USAID funding, but enough to sustain operations, albeit at a smaller scale.

USAID’s Mixed Legacy

Manushya, of course, was just one of many USAID grantees around the world. In fiscal year 2023, USAID distributed $43.8 billion in aid, of which a sizeable percentage went to health and humanitarian assistance, such as disaster relief. PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, credited with saving 26 million lives worldwide since its inception in 2003, was largely implemented by USAID.

A lot of both what worked and did not work in international aid can be traced to USAID for a simple reason. As Pradichit explained, “When you realize that USAID was almost 50 percent of total global aid, that is when you realize that everybody is impacted.”

Now, she says, Global South activists need to rethink how NGOs function. The story of USAID is complicated. Yes, USAID funded many valuable programs. But it also supported a system of international NGOs that operated as a colonial structure. At Manushya, Pradichit has seen both sides of this.

Prior to getting a USAID grant in 2024, Pradichit noted, “every year we were complaining about the fact that USAID was providing a lot of funding in Thailand, but local groups like us and those we work with would never see it.” Instead, she said, USAID would fund “a consortium of NGOs and then they would end up opening the offices or building a new Thai organization instead of giving to the people already there.”

“When you realize that USAID was almost 50 percent of total global aid, that is when you realize that everybody is impacted.”

Manushya’s first direct interaction with USAID came in 2018. Starting that year, it was contracted for a modest $10,000 annual fee to write the Thailand “country report” for the agency. “We had to launch this report every year,” Pradichit recalls. “So, every year, we had to invite the USAID regional office head to open the launch.”

During these events, Pradichit said, “we would bring local groups that would complain to USAID and ask, ‘Where is your funding going? We don’t receive it.…We are the groups working on the ground. How come we don’t see it?’ It had been like that for about five years.”

Pradichit’s experience is hardly unique. As Rachel Bonnifield and Justin Sandefur of the Center for Global Development, a strong USAID supporter, conceded, “Yes, more money should flow directly to local partners. Yes, overhead rates at some US implementers are too high, and layers of sub-awards can result in progressively fewer aid dollars making it to beneficiaries.”

Pradichit called out how international NGOs often centralize power and resources. As she put it, “When we talk about decolonization and you ask an NGO what are you going to do to shift the power, they talk about localization.…For them localization means opening offices at the local level and hiring local staff. They really don’t see [their role] as [to] stop existing; they see [their role to] keep existing through localization, moving everybody to the local level, hiring more locals and still having the foreigner boss. That’s not decolonization. It is even more colonizing.”

An Experiment Within USAID

That $750,000 grant to Manushya in 2024 was from a new program from within USAID called Powered by the People. The program, launched in October 2023, was originally designed to be a five-year, $45 million initiative—representing less than 0.1 percent of the USAID budget—that sought to support social movement organizations. It also had the audacious goal to correct many of the deficiencies in USAID operations noted by Pradichit and her colleagues.

As Ben Naimark-Rowse, who at the time was USAID’s first-ever social movement advisor, explained in an article on Medium, the goal was for the agency to incorporate a “movement mindset.”

“Hiring more locals and still having the foreigner boss. That’s not decolonization. It is even more colonizing.”

This mindset, he wrote, included a commitment “to doing no harm in the process, to being transparent about and learning from mistakes, and to keep showing up when movements experience repression and failure, just as when movements succeed.”

As Pradichit explained, “The whole goal of this project was to decrease the number of NGOs and build regional actors and local groups to support movements and provide some grants.”

How did this program come to be? Pradichit says she believes that there was significant internal lobbying within USAID. “I believe the people behind the Powered by the People project were often immigrants. There were people of color. I felt very aligned,” she said. No small feat, Pradichit noted, due to the complexity of identity in a world that is increasingly transnational.

Pointing to her own French citizenship, Pradichit added, “At the end of the day, it is not about the national identity that we have because many of us, we grew up in another country because of the war or because of economic migration reasons, but that doesn’t remove that fact of who we are inside.”

Even so, Pradichit noted, “a lot of people criticized us for receiving USAID funding because it was blood money,” she said. “But at the time it was necessary money to protect the lives of [human rights] defenders.” She added that having the funds “did not stop us from taking a stand on human rights and democracy. And we were publicly and openly for supporting Palestine,” a point that she emphasized, because she knew of many colleagues who had been “threatened by the donors because of their Palestine stand.”

While the grant money flowed, in addition to providing safe houses for activists, Manushya did four main things: capacity building, community-based research, community campaigns (for example, to make sure local community groups are consulted in government projects), and subgranting. Pradichit emphasized that, in contrast to common practice with international NGOs, Manushya was careful not to insist that subgrantees become NGOs themselves.

As she put it, “We don’t force them to do reporting because we experienced that. We were tired of being policed and we didn’t want to police the groups we work with. That’s why we developed a decolonial strategy where we do the work in house. We do monthly check-ins with partners and write the narrative reports and if they send us the receipts we will do the financial reporting for them. We don’t want to transform Indigenous groups and workers and refugees into an NGO if they don’t want to.”

What Now for the Global NGO Community?

Pradichit is not the only one considering whether a silver lining of the demise of USAID might be to offer the opportunity to build a more democratic system. Collective Diaspora, an international group of Black co-op organizers, noted that “for Black solidarity economy organizers, this moment calls for a radical reimagining of how cooperative economies are built and sustained—free from neocolonial purse strings and rooted in community self-determination, cross border collaboration, and diasporic solidarity.”

For Pradichit, building more decolonial systems moving forward starts with a dose of realism: “We need to rethink the development field. We need to accept the reality.” She added that for her and Manushya this involves a shift in thinking from a quantitative growth focus to a focus on quality and meeting local needs. “We need to focus on what we do best. I don’t think we need to do everything,” she said.

While in Washington, DC, this past July, Pradichit said she noticed widespread denial among many in the DC-based global development community. Many, she said, were looking to “find funding to grow again, instead of accepting the reality that maybe you aren’t going to grow again.” This shutdown of USAID, she added, marks “the end of the NGO world as we used to experience it.”

“We really need to bring regional and local groups together to rethink the way we finance ourselves, so we can stop relying on foreign dollars.”