The Great Rethink: Part I – The NGO of the Future
By Lucy Minayo
Perhaps the greatest challenge in development is not a lack of resources, but rather the misalignment of institutions.
From Conference Rooms to Uncomfortable Questions
Over the past two decades in the development sector, I have attended numerous conferences, workshops, and policy seminars. These forums identify urgent problems, showcase innovations, form partnerships, and occasionally reveal difficult realities.
Recently, I have reflected more deeply on these unpleasant realities. At the 9th Pan African Conference on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, held in Mombasa, Kenya, convened by the Reproductive Health Network Kenya and its partners, a key issue was the future of philanthropy and NGO sustainability. The conference also featured discussions on service delivery, community-based interventions, and civil society models designed to reach those often overlooked by public systems.
Soon after, at a landmark conference on Transforming International Development Cooperation, convened by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Nairobi, Kenya, the conversation expanded to include topics such as artificial intelligence, digital transformation, the future of aid and philanthropy, global partnerships, and the changing structure of international development. However, I left considering a different question: What institutions are necessary to build egalitarian societies?
This is a critical question, as institutions outlast projects. Projects and funding cycles are temporary, and political administrations change, as recent years have demonstrated. Technologies change, but institutions either endure or fail.
NGOs as products of history
No institution better illustrates this period of transition than the non-governmental organisation. The modern NGO is a product of history. Before the term became common, voluntary associations, missionary organisations, trade union movements, women’s groups, and humanitarian organisations were already responding to social needs, injustice, and crises in the post-World War Two era.
The term “non-governmental organisation” gained formal recognition during the development of the United Nations Charter, where it was used to describe organisations that were neither governments nor member states, but that could still play a consultative role in international affairs. In this sense, NGOs emerged partly from the wider civil society imagination that accompanied the post-war international order and the development of global human rights norms.
The NGO sector expanded significantly after the Second World War and during post-independence periods, as non-state actors supported relief, reconstruction, education, health, human rights, and community development. In Africa, NGOs became the primary channel for development assistance from funders and Western governments, including those supporting democratic governance, human rights, and civic participation.
The 1980s and 1990s profoundly shaped the current NGO model. As structural adjustment programmes reduced many states’ capacity to provide public services, NGOs received increased funding to deliver health, education, livelihoods, and social protection programmes. This led to the dominant model today: project-based funding, donor-driven priorities, measurable outputs, short funding cycles, and a focus on service delivery.
This history is important because NGOs were defined by the politics, economics, and failures of their time. While some changes have occurred, often described as shifts in power, the NGO model remains rooted in the past. The key question is whether a model designed for previous eras is adequate for today’s challenges.
When service delivery became the model
For decades, NGOs have addressed state failures and gaps in meeting citizens’ needs by providing healthcare, education, humanitarian assistance, and livelihood support. They introduced new ideas, reached marginalised communities, and often operated where governments could not. In fragile states and humanitarian crises, this role continues to be essential.
However, the context has changed significantly. Many African states are experiencing a renaissance, demonstrating political maturity and supporting democratic transitions. They have established structures, growing workforces that contribute to the tax base, and improved infrastructure and public facilities.
Much of this progress was supported by international development cooperation, or aid, provided by the Global North in response to the impacts of colonialism in Africa and other regions. Scholars have argued that development cooperation was an attempt by the Global North to address its history of aggression against the global majority.
Development cooperation is now undergoing significant change. Aid is being replaced by trade, investment, and strategic partnerships. Countries that once provided unrestricted resources are now prioritising their own interests. Domestic resource mobilisation is increasingly replacing external financing, even as many governments face unsustainable debt, opaque borrowing, and weak public financial management. Artificial intelligence is transforming labour markets. Citizens are more connected, informed, and willing to question authority than ever before.
Despite these changes, many NGOs continue to operate within an outdated model. The key question is not whether NGOs are still relevant, but whether their comparative advantage has shifted.
The politics of service delivery
Over time, many NGOs have become parallel service-delivery systems, implementing health programmes, livelihoods projects, digital innovations, and social protection interventions, often with more flexibility than governments. However, service delivery is not only a technical function; it is also a political one.
In democratic societies, the delivery of public goods forms part of the social contract between citizens and the state. When governments fail to provide quality services, citizens have both the right and the responsibility to demand better.
When NGOs serve as long-term substitutes for public institutions, accountability can become blurred. Communities may relate more to projects than to public systems, and governments may become less accountable for service delivery. NGOs, dependent on state registration and permissions, often face tension between partnership and scrutiny.
This article does not criticise NGOs for providing public services. Instead, it invites the sector to consider whether service delivery should remain the defining feature of NGOs in countries with existing, if imperfect, public institutions.
Philanthropy, pilots, and public systems
A similar reflection applies to philanthropy, which has transformed lives and enabled innovations that governments may not have funded. However, philanthropy has also contributed to an ecosystem that rewards novelty over institutionalisation, pilots over public systems, and organisational visibility over collaboration. As a result, development is filled with effective projects that rarely become public policy.
It is important to acknowledge an encouraging shift in philanthropy, with greater adoption of a systems perspective in investment decisions. This approach moves the sector beyond measuring outputs, supporting critical consideration of the institutional resilience needed to achieve impact at various levels.
From parallel systems to civic power
If development is about expanding people’s freedoms, then the most important institutions are those that enable citizens to participate in public life, influence decisions, and hold power accountable. This suggests a different future for NGOs.
In this future, NGOs’ greatest contribution is not to replace the state, but to strengthen the relationship between citizens and the state by investing in civic participation rather than parallel systems.
NGOs also have a role in helping citizens understand taxation, public debt, procurement, and development finance. These are not only governance issues but also factors that shape societal equality.
The uncomfortable rethink
This requires NGOs to reconsider their structures. Can thousands of organisations with similar objectives continue to justify fragmented infrastructures as resources decline? The next generation of NGOs may need to pursue strategic mergers, shared services, and collaborative platforms that focus on collective impact over organisational survival. These are difficult but necessary questions for the sector.
The future of development will depend not on the number of projects funded, but on whether we build institutions capable of sustaining justice beyond the lifespan of individual projects.
I believe a real transition is underway, not just from aid to trade or from analogue to artificial intelligence, but from building programs to building institutions. This may be the most important development project of all.
But this rethink cannot remain conceptual. If NGOs are to move from parallel systems to civic power, the sector must confront practical questions: how to transition from service delivery to civic participation; how to collaborate without losing identity or community trust; how to support systems change at all levels; how to influence philanthropy; and how to measure institution-building rather than only project outputs. These are the questions I will explore in Part II,
(Lucy Minayo is the Co-CEO of Amplify Girls, Founder and Board Chairperson of Beyond Outrage Limited, Board Member of Last Mile 4D and Member of the Media Complaints Commission)
