When the Trump administration abruptly froze USAID funding earlier this year, it sent shockwaves through the development sector, especially in Africa. The consequences were immediate: programmes halted, research stalled, and critical services disrupted. This crisis laid bare an uncomfortable truth — that even well-intentioned external support can be disrupted, and that foreign aid, while helpful, is not a dependable foundation for sustainable development locally.
The moment underscored the urgent need to cultivate robust local funding ecosystems to ensure sustainable, long-term support for Africa’s progress.
The fragility of external reliance: Imbalances in African education funding and research
International donors, primarily from the Global North, continue to dominate Africa’s philanthropic and development landscape. Findings from the African Education Research Funding Consortium (AERFC) 2023 and 2024 Grantee Mapping Report highlights a persistent challenge: while African institutions are often the grantees, most funding still originates from the Global North and stays in the global north. This highlights an ongoing reliance of African organizations on external funders.
While this funding has supported meaningful progress, it also creates a dangerous dependency subject to the volatility of foreign policy and economic fluctuations. These funding patterns also raise serious concerns about the autonomy and sustainability of education research and development in Africa. They restrict local institutions’ ability to set priorities, build capacity, and create lasting impact.
The over-reliance on external funding has also contributed to power imbalances that perpetuate extractive research practices. Often, research agendas are set by Global North funders, with limited input from local researchers. As a result, research agendas are often dictated by donors, not local experts. African researchers are still frequently relegated to roles like data collection or consulting, while the leadership, analysis, and authorship reside abroad. The result is research that doesn’t always align with local needs or translate into local policy, leaving a gap between research and real-world impact.
A complex web of practical constraints and entrenched power dynamics perpetuates this dependency:
- Funding pathways: Most large grants go to institutions with pre-established reputations and administrative capacity for managing large grants, often based in the Global North.
- Publication biases: High-impact journals often prioritise work from foreign institutions, often overlooking locally generated knowledge.
- Career incentives: Career advancement is tied to publishing in high-impact (often Western) journals, not solving local problems.
- Short-term funding: Projects are structured for quick wins, not long-term transformation. Short-term, project-based funding does little to build sustainable local institutions, resulting in a cycle where local entities are perpetually dependent on external expertise and resources.
- Accountability gaps: Researchers often report to donors, not the communities they serve. There is also a historical perception of research as being “far removed from practice” by local donors.
- Brain drain: Talented African researchers are sometimes co-opted into projects led by foreign institutions, leading to a brain drain and limiting the development of indigenous research capacities. In practice, this often means that local research is focused on foreign instead of national agendas.
- Underinvestment in local capacity: Few resources are directed to building African institutions’ capacity to manage large grants and set their own agendas in the future.
Together, this system sidelines African voices and entrenches a harmful cycle of dependency. Rather than empowering local ownership and innovation, it perpetuates externally driven solutions that are externally driven, locally disconnected, and lack cultural relevance.
From donor-driven to domestically anchored: A pathway towards ownership and sustainability
The path forward requires a deliberate shift in mindset and action from both African and international actors. Local funders—governments, philanthropic organisations, and the private sector—are uniquely positioned to provide stable, context-sensitive support. Their proximity and intimate understanding of local needs allow them to provide targeted, more relevant, and sustainable support, including funding. Strengthening their capacity and encouraging domestic investment can gradually shift power back to African institutions.
AERFC’s recent convening of funders and other stakeholders in the African education sector emphasised the urgent need for long-term, inclusive, and locally driven funding. Such a shift will not only enhance the sustainability and relevance of research, but also ensure that education systems across the continent are better equipped to meet future challenges.
To build truly self-sustaining research and development ecosystems, participants at the recent AERFC convening suggested real change would include the following:
- Global funders adopting a “local plus local plus local” mindset, truly seeing themselves as being in service of local priorities and needs. This includes preferencing local evidence and engaging in joint agenda setting to ensure that research addresses locally identified needs.
- Increasing investment in strengthening the capacity of local funders to strategically engage with and support research and development. This includes building their understanding of the value of research and establishing mechanisms for effective grant management.
- Governments demonstrating greater commitment to research and development through increased domestic funding, potentially by matching donor contributions, and creating an enabling policy environment such as committing a greater share of GDP to research and development.
- Prioritising the curation, publication, and dissemination of locally generated knowledge, ensuring that valuable insights are accessible to policymakers and practitioners.
- Fostering equitable partnerships where research agendas are co-created, data ownership is shared, and local researchers are empowered to lead and shape the research process. This requires a conscious effort from Global North partners to avoid “fly-in, fly-out” extractive models and instead build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships, potentially through agreements at the country or council level.
- Better storytelling to highlight the crucial role and impact of local research, thereby attracting greater support from local philanthropists and the private sector.
Local funding isn’t just about resilience—it’s about sovereignty. By financing its own research and development agendas, Africa can break free from the volatility of external aid and take full ownership of its future. This shift is not a rejection of international support, but a recalibration toward balance, mutual respect, and genuine partnership.
If Africa is to shape its own future—including how knowledge is produced, shared, and used—strengthening domestic funding ecosystems is no longer optional—it’s a necessity. By investing in robust domestic ecosystems and redefining global-local relationships, Africa can move from dependency to resilience.