Aid Alone Won't Get Us There
Localisation is usually discussed as a funding problem: not enough money reaching the right actors. That’s true in the acute phase of any crisis, and aid, fast, flexible, and unconditional, is exactly the right tool for that phase. The problem isn’t aid itself. It’s what happens after.
Donor budgets are finite, and every donor is weighing genuinely competing priorities across many countries, sectors, and crises at once, generously, but within real limits. That’s not a criticism of any donor, it’s simply the reality of managing a fixed pool of funding across far more need than any single budget can cover. But it does mean a country still relying on aid for a problem it’s had for decades carries a risk that usually isn’t visible until a competing priority elsewhere has already drawn that funding away.
One clear illustration of this sits in mine action, a sector this piece returns to a few times, but the same pattern shows up just as clearly in health financing, infrastructure, and elsewhere. Several countries that came out of conflict in the 1990s are still relying heavily on international funding for demining decades later, national contributions in some cases make up only a fraction of the total. As global funding has increasingly gone toward more recent conflicts, support for what one UN Mine Action Service spokesperson called “smaller and older” mine action projects has been shrinking. It isn’t that these countries did anything wrong, or that donors have done anything wrong by responding to new and pressing needs elsewhere. It’s that the system was never designed to notice when a country needed to transition off aid, only to keep responding to wherever need was greatest, whatever the sector.
Three countries that made the shift
Croatia’s own mine clearance work, left behind by the 1990s war, was for years funded largely as a standalone humanitarian problem. From 2016, that changed: clearance was folded into Croatia’s EU Cohesion Policy funding, the EU’s structural investment mechanism for member states, tied to the country’s own regional and economic development plans rather than run as a separate humanitarian grant. More than €176 million flowed through that route, the pace of clearance accelerated sharply, and in March 2026, Croatia declared itself fully free of landmines. It now trains other countries, including Ukraine, rather than receiving that support itself.
Rwanda built the same principle into its health strategy from the outset. Its latest national health plan is embedded directly in the country’s own Vision 2050 and national budgeting process, with an explicit goal of reducing dependency on external funding. Under the previous plan alone, maternal mortality fell by half.
Vietnam shows what the far end of this journey looks like. It graduated out of the World Bank’s concessional aid window entirely in 2017, and is now targeting $5.5 billion in credit-based loans for infrastructure this year alone, part of a $38 billion pipeline through 2030, tied to its own growth targets.
Three sectors, three continents, the same underlying pattern: national ownership of the work, financing tied to actual results rather than activity, and a sector no longer treated as separate from the rest of the country’s development.
Worth noting, though: graduation like this rarely happens for a country all at once, across every sector, in the same year. A country can shift decisively at the macroeconomic level while a specific sector within it, mine action being a common example, is still waiting for the same transition, sometimes for reasons as simple as which ministry or budget line that sector happens to sit under. This isn’t a flaw unique to any one country. It’s a reminder that graduation has to be pursued sector by sector, not assumed to follow automatically once it happens somewhere else in the same economy.
The tools behind that shift
None of this happens through goodwill alone, it happens through specific financing instruments, and they’re already proven at scale, across sectors well beyond mine action. The International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm) turns future donor pledges into cash today by issuing bonds on international capital markets, contributing more than $5.2 billion to Gavi since 2006. African Risk Capacity (ARC), a form of drought insurance for governments, has disbursed over $206 million across more than 656 million people, paying out automatically rather than waiting for a crisis to be assessed. And the World Bank’s Program-for-Results (PforR) instrument, the mechanism behind Croatia’s transition, finances a government’s own systems directly, tied to results delivered, with 221 active operations worth $68.4 billion as of March 2026, spanning health, education, infrastructure, and beyond.
Why this also matters for who gets funded
These instruments don’t just change how money moves, they change who decides where it goes. Rather than an international agency running its own procurement, the country’s own government becomes the one contracting for delivery, using its own systems. In principle, that opens the door to national and local organisations being funded directly, rather than through an international intermediary, whatever the sector.
In practice, the evidence is more honest than that. A World Bank review of PforR’s own track record found the instrument has often been used more to strengthen central government accountability than to genuinely decentralise opportunity outward, a shift in who controls the money doesn’t automatically become a shift in who receives it. Roughly a tenth of all PforR financing goes specifically toward building the procurement and financial management systems needed to use the instrument well. That’s a real cost, but worth holding up against the alternative: many international bodies, particularly those headquartered in cities like New York or Geneva, carry overhead costs of up to 30% before a dollar reaches the ground. Spending a tenth of financing on building a country’s own lasting systems compares favourably with spending three times that simply to keep an international structure running.
That capacity has to be built deliberately, though, not assumed to follow automatically from the financing shift. A government that gains control over its own procurement without capable local organisations ready to deliver simply keeps the money closer to the centre instead. This is why ImpactRoot treats funding graduation and local organisational strengthening as one piece of work, not two separate agendas, in whichever sector we’re working in. Done apart, neither reliably delivers the outcome. Done together, each makes the other work.
The open question
Croatia, Rwanda, and Vietnam show that this model works. Donor attention will keep moving toward wherever need is greatest, that isn’t going to change, and it shouldn’t. The only real protection, in any sector, is building both the financing model and the local capacity to use it, well before a competing priority makes the choice for you.
Often the barrier isn’t political unwillingness. It’s a missing layer of translation. A ministry knows what its sector needs. A development bank knows how PforR or a similar instrument works. What’s usually missing is someone who sits close enough to both to turn a sector plan into the kind of disbursement-linked indicators, results frameworks, and monitoring systems a financing instrument can actually trust, and the local institutions capable of delivering against them.
There’s a harder question sitting underneath all of this, too. A great deal of money is spent each year on capacity building in exactly these countries, and much of it goes to international organisations that rarely challenge the status quo of how aid flows. It’s worth asking, diplomatically, whether that work is consistently aimed at the things that actually lead to graduation, national systems, national procurement, national ownership, or whether it more often keeps pace with what those same organisations’ own strategies ask of them, work that keeps aid funds flowing to them rather than work that reduces the need for it. This isn’t a question of bad faith. Few institutions find it easy to challenge the system that funds them, and fewer still are asked to. But the countries this money was meant to reach are the ones who lose out either way.
That’s the gap we work in
This is the thinking behind ImpactRoot’s work on alternative and innovative finance, and why it sits alongside our work on local capacity strengthening rather than apart from it. Aid remains exactly the right tool for the emergency it was designed for. The real risk isn’t aid itself, it’s a sector leaning on it long after that emergency has passed, without the local capacity in place to take advantage of what comes next, and without anyone whose interest lies in getting the country there rather than keeping it dependent on the help.
Mine action happens to be one sector we know from the inside, not from a case study, a useful lens rather than the limit of where this applies. Having spent years in it before founding ImpactRoot, watching what changes once a sector’s funding model shifts into a country’s own development planning, and how much that shift depends on local institutions being ready for it, is a genuinely personal illustration of a pattern that holds well beyond it.
Sources: International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm); African Risk Capacity (ARC) Group; World Bank Group, Program-for-Results; European Commission, “Clearing the Past: Croatia’s way to a future without landmines” (2026); Rwanda Ministry of Health, Fifth Health Sector Strategic Plan (2025); Reuters, “Vietnam targets $5.5 billion in foreign loans for 2026” (2026); The Independent, “Donor fatigue guts demining in Asia, as active conflicts draw away funding” (2026); Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor; Oxford Government Outcomes Lab, “Embedding long-term sustainability in the World Bank’s Program-for-Results instrument” (2022).
