the collaboration principle

Before the Argument Starts.

I have spent more than a decade working alongside these organizations. WHO. UNDP. GAVI. WFP. World Bank Group. In Geneva, yes — but more importantly, in the field. In West Africa during vaccination campaigns. In the Middle East when the coordination tents were the only structure left standing. In Southern Asia with teams trying to hold programs together with less than they needed and more commitment than anyone had a right to expect.

I have seen what happens when a good idea leaves Geneva, New York, Washington, Rome or Paris. I know the distance between a strategy document and a community health worker standing in the rain with no supplies and no signal. I have been in those rooms — the ones where the people doing the actual work explain, patiently, again, what is really happening on the ground, and watch the information travel upward and arrive somewhere unrecognizable.

It has been one of the privileges of my working life to be trusted with that work. These are not faceless bureaucracies to me. They are colleagues. Friends. People who gave years — in some cases, decades — to something they believed in. People who still do.

That is why I am writing this. Not to bury these organizations. To fight for them.

The Age of the Professional Humanitarian Is Ending.

Not because the need is disappearing. The need is larger than it has ever been. But the architecture that was built to respond to it — the agencies, the frameworks, the funding flows, the whole elaborate system of global solidarity that took 80 years to construct — is breaking apart faster than anything is being built to replace it.

• 860 million people still live in extreme poverty. 733 million go to bed hungry every night. Climate-related displacement is projected to reach 1.2 billion people by 2050. The need has never been greater. The system has never been more fragile. (UN, FAO, World Bank, 2025)

This Is Not a Funding Crisis.

Global official development assistance fell by 23.1% in 2025 — the largest annual contraction in the recorded history of ODA, according to the OECD. That single statistic does not capture what it means in practice: 86% of USAID programs terminated, WHO cutting its Geneva headquarters from 76 departments to 34, a quarter of the WHO workforce — over 2,300 positions — eliminated by mid-2026. The multilateral system is running on reserve funds it will exhaust before the year is out.

This is not a funding crisis. It is a legitimacy crisis. And underneath it, a design crisis.

• ODA fell from USD 215 billion in 2024 to USD 174 billion in 2025 — bringing it back to 2015 levels. The OECD projects a further 5.8% decline in 2026. The US alone accounted for 57% of the total drop. Core contributions to the UN system fell by 27%, the largest annual decline on record. (OECD, April 2026)

The Old Model Was Always a Fiction.

The old model assumed that impact flowed from the top down — that resources, knowledge, and solutions originated in the North and were delivered to the South. That model was always contested. Now it is collapsing. And the question is not how to save it. The question is what comes next, and who gets to shape it.

• Of the USD 174 billion in ODA disbursed in 2025, ODA to Ukraine alone — a single country — exceeded the total bilateral aid provided to all Least Developed Countries combined, and all of sub-Saharan Africa combined. The geographic and political distortion of the system is no longer deniable. (OECD, 2026)

The Pivot Is Real. But It Goes Dangerously Shallow.

The pivot everyone is talking about — toward private finance, toward philanthropy, toward development banks and blended mechanisms — is real and necessary. GAVI’s new 2026-2030 strategy (Gavi 6.0) points in this direction. Lean delivery, measurable outcomes, results tied to disbursement. That logic is right. The world cannot afford to fund process. It must fund impact.

But here is where the conversation goes dangerously shallow.

• At GAVI’s June 2025 replenishment summit, world leaders secured USD 9 billion against a USD 11.9 billion target — a USD 2.9 billion shortfall. Private sector and development finance institutions unlocked an additional USD 4.5 billion in complementary financing, signaling the direction of travel. The model is shifting from grants to outcomes-based investment. (GAVI, 2025)

Measurable Impact Cannot Be Designed in Geneva and Delivered at Scale.

Measurable impact in complex human systems — in health, in education, in food security, in climate adaptation — is not a product you can design in Geneva and deliver at scale. It is something that has to be co-created, continuously, with governments, with institutions, with communities, and most critically, with the people who are supposed to benefit from it.

You cannot make a lean system work without genuine collaboration at every level of it. Leaner is not simpler. Leaner means less redundancy, less slack, less room for error — which means the quality of the decisions that drive the system has to be dramatically higher. And better decisions in complex environments don’t come from smaller leadership teams with faster approval cycles. They come from mobilizing the intelligence of everyone who holds a piece of the reality you are trying to change.

• A landmark PLOS One systematic review of community participation in health systems found consistent positive outcomes — in health, empowerment, and organizational effectiveness — when communities were genuinely involved in design and implementation, not just consulted. The evidence is clear: participation is not a values choice. It is a performance variable. (PLOS One, 2019; WHO, 2024)

That Means Everyone in the Room. Actually.

That means governments as genuine co-architects, not compliance partners. That means civil society as strategic actors, not delivery mechanisms. That means communities not just consulted at the margins but present in the rooms where priorities are set, where resources are allocated, where course corrections are made.

This is a culture shift, not a structural adjustment. And it is the one shift the sector is most capable of making — because the values that justify it have been written into every mission statement, every theory of change, every funding proposal the sector has ever produced. The sector has always known this. It now has the necessity, and the permission, to actually do it.

• GAVI 6.0 explicitly commits to being ‘community-owned and inclusive,’ directly engaging communities and civil society organisations in planning, implementation, and oversight of immunisation — and consolidating all cash-based funding into a single country-led envelope tied to immunisation delivery outcomes. The new model names co-creation as an operating principle, not an aspiration. (GAVI 6.0 Strategy, 2024)

The Culture That Built the Old System Cannot Build the New One.

The hierarchical, expert-driven culture of the old model was not malicious. It was a rational response to the constraints of its time. But those constraints have changed. The question is whether the sector’s culture can change with them.

You cannot build participatory systems with institutions that cannot practice participation internally. You cannot credibly claim to center communities in your programs while running leadership processes that exclude 95% of your own staff. The organizations that close that gap — between what they say and how they actually work — will be the ones that earn the trust the new model requires.

• When WHO announced its restructuring plan — cutting headquarters departments from 76 to 34, reducing staff by up to 22% — its own Staff Association stated: ‘This is not just about numbers. It is about trust.’ Decisions about workforce reductions were being made without access to the data by the people most affected. The sector’s internal culture gap is not a soft problem. It is a systemic risk. (Health Policy Watch, 2025)

The Organizations That Thrive Will Not Be the Biggest.

The hierarchical, expert-driven culture of the old model was not malicious. It was a rational response to the constraints of its time. The organizations that thrive in this transition will not be the biggest, or the best-funded, or the ones with the longest history. They will be the ones that genuinely change how they think together — that build the internal collaborative infrastructure to match the external collaborative demands being placed on them.

And more than that: the organizations that shape what comes next will not be organizations at all in the traditional sense. They will be coalitions. Temporary structures built around specific outcomes, drawing on the knowledge of governments and communities and the private sector and civil society simultaneously, designed to dissolve when the work is done and reconstitute around the next challenge.e constraints have changed. The question is whether the sector’s culture can change with them.

• The five largest bilateral donors — the US, Germany, UK, Japan, and France — accounted for 96% of the total ODA decline in 2025. No single institution, however large, can absorb that shock alone. The math of impact now requires coalition. (OECD, April 2026)

The Collaboration Imperative.

The collaboration imperative is not a call for more coordination meetings or better stakeholder engagement frameworks. It is a call for a different theory of change altogether — one that starts from the premise that the intelligence needed to solve the world’s most complex problems is already distributed across the people most affected by them, and that the job of any serious global institution is to build the conditions in which that intelligence can be heard, connected, and converted into action.

The world doesn’t need more experts delivering solutions.

It needs better infrastructure for thinking together.

• The SDG financing gap stands at USD 4 trillion per year. No government, foundation, or multilateral institution can close it alone. Only a genuinely collaborative architecture — one that connects public finance, private capital, community knowledge, and government commitment around shared, measurable outcomes — has any chance of getting close. (UNCTAD, 2024; UNDP, 2025)

This Is the Moment.

This is the moment the aid sector becomes what it always promised to be.

And I say that as someone who has sat across the table from the people inside these organizations — the program officers who stayed late to make something work, the field coordinators who improvised when the plan fell apart, the country directors who fought for their teams when headquarters stopped listening. I have watched extraordinary people operate inside imperfect systems and produce results that should not have been possible.

Those people deserve a system worthy of them.

The window is open. I don’t know how long it stays open. But I know some of what it takes to think together under pressure — to create the conditions where the right conversations actually happen, where the intelligence in the room gets used, where people leave with something they built together rather than something handed down to them.

If any of that is useful to you right now, I am here.