For Nigerian NGOs that remain active into 2026 and continue to deliver impactful work despite funding constraints, this is a period of forced innovation, building new networks, leveraging new funders, and collective action to advocate for sustainable funding for the sector.
On 20th January 2025, the American government issued Executive Order 14169 (EO 14169), which effectively ended 65 years of USAID’s assistance to Nigeria, rolled out in 1961 with grants to four major colleges of agriculture in Nigerian universities in Ibadan, Nsukka, Zaria, and Ife. An in-depth review of USAID’s official assistance to Nigeria between 2002 and 2024 shows a steady progress in the US commitment to Nigeria’s development. From a $90 million obligation in 2002, the first fiscal year following Nigeria’s return to civilian rule and recertification, to a high point of US$1 billion for the budget year 2023, USAID’s commitment to Nigeria grew exponentially. By 2024, USAID’s obligated funds to Nigeria fell slightly to $930.2 million.
For most of these 65 years, USAID applied a programming model in Nigeria, favouring US Implementing Partners, with disproportionate funding going towards US consultants’ fees, grants to US prime implementing partners, and US technical assistance firms. What most people don’t know is that at the cusp of USAID’s departure from Nigeria, the Mission was the only development partner with a definitive localisation policy shaped by Grand Bargain commitments, with goals and targets for increased funding to Nigerian NGOs and reduced grant awards to US partners. Over a ten-year period, USAID official data, accessed in 2024, reports that direct funding to local Nigerian partners increased from 4.2 per cent in 2002 to 10.2 per cent in 2022, as a percentage of obligated funds.
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Under the USAID localisation programming policy, direct funding was awarded to Nigerian partners, including NGOs, coupled with capacity-strengthening support and CSO sector-wide network development. Nigerian NGOs in HIV/AIDS programming were the main beneficiaries of this localisation model in the development sector.
In 2025, as USAID closed out its Nigeria programmes, one interesting programme which shut down was an intervention designed to leverage learning from the Mission’s localisation experiences in the development sector for application to Nigeria’s humanitarian sector. This was a formative study by the Fritz Institute (USA), titled “Humanitarian Supply Chain Management – Partnership for Localisation,” commissioned by USAID-Washington and implemented under the supervision of the Federal Ministry of Economic Planning and Budgeting. The development Research and Projects Centre (dRPC) had a supportive role in this important project, providing technical assistance to review and improve research tools for field administration.
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With USAID’s exit from development and humanitarian spaces in Nigeria, NGOs in the humanitarian space lost the opportunity to benefit from the Fritz humanitarian study. In the development sector, several leading Nigerian NGOs, which received direct funding, lost their grants. Also losing funding were thousands of smaller sub-grantee NGOs, working under bigger NGOs to deliver services at the community level. Since April 2025, Nigerian NGOs working in multiple areas, including youth entrepreneurship; climate justice; public health advocacy; school safety; awareness creation to reduce the high and growing rates of zero-dose children; and human rights, have been forced to close out programmes, shut down offices, and disengage staff.
For Nigerian NGOs that remain active into 2026 and continue to deliver impactful work despite funding constraints, this is a period of forced innovation, building new networks, leveraging new funders, and collective action to advocate for sustainable funding for the sector.
On 24 October, 2025, the Nigerian offices of three charitable foundations – the MacArthur Foundation; the Ford Foundation; and Luminate convened a pivotal Dialogue to discuss the important question of the future of resilience for Nigerian NGOs, sans big donor funding. For five hours, NGOs, development partners, researchers, and thought leaders, discussed, debated and explored questions around the keynote presentation by The Nextier Group, before arriving at strategic recommendations on how to build sustainability and resilience for the Nigerian NGO sector.
While many of the recommendations put the onus on NGOs to think differently and to work smarter in order to leverage new funders and use new business models, recommendations also challenged development partners to be more innovative in providing strategic support for sustainability and resilience.
One important issue I raised at the close of the Dialogue was the need to reframe the issue of NGO sustainability and resilience within a broader context of localisation in development assistance. While USAID has left, localisation, USAID’s flagship downward accountability policy priority, should not leave Nigeria’s official assistance space. I pointed to a strategic opportunity that now exists to shore-up the NGO sector in Nigeria by mainstreaming localisation principles into Nigeria’s National Official Development Assistance (ODA) policy, currently under review by the Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning. This can be done by weaving into the ODA Policy, intentional guidelines for funding and capacity-strengthening support for local Nigerian NGOs working at national and sub-national levels across the value chain of development and humanitarian programming.
As Nigerian NGOs face the headwinds of 2026 with limited grant assistance opportunities, much more must be done to provide fit-for-purpose funding, similar to the small grants awarded by the dRPC’s NGO Support Initiative (NSI) with Ford Foundation support; by ACT Trust Foundation; by Global Affairs Canada; Irish Aid; and the Hungarian Government’s Mission to Nigeria.
But perhaps equally important is the new opportunity that has arisen for the government to provide direct funding to Nigerian community-based civil society organisations through new initiatives such as the Renewed Hope Ward Development (RHWD) programme. The good news is that the grants award process for the RHWD opened in 2026; the not-so-good news is that the process only accepts applications from individuals through Ward Coordinators. While this is a commendable initiative, greater impact can, no doubt be achieved with minimal redesign to include the thousands of community and self-help groups across the country working to improve the lives of vulnerable Nigerians.
Judith-Ann Walker holds a PhD in International Development, from the ISS, the Hague; is a member of the Presidential-High Level Council on Women and Girls (P-HiLAC), Nigeria; and the Executive Director of the dRPC. [email protected]
