The International Aid sector has been facing an existential crisis since the Trump administration abruptly pulled the rug of the U.S.’ substantial aid assistance from under it. The fact that other nations have also been cutting their contributions’ level has not helped matters.
Before the crisis, Community-Led Development (CLD) had become one of the aid sector’s most popular buzzwords, alongside localization and sustainability. What will happen to the actions being taken to move power to communities, now that many Global North and Global South organizations are facing their potential demise and fighting for their survival? Will we see a repetition of performative actions to shift power while maintaining the business-as-usual power dynamics? Or, will we see the transmutation of international aid into a sector of global solidarity where power is decidedly shifted to communities? Only the future will tell.
For now, it is worth examining the problems with and the beauty of community-led development.
The Problems with Community-Led Development
The lack of definition and authentic commitment to this practice.
The problem with Community-Led Development is that it is like this charismatic new student in high school. Everyone talks about their relationship with her, and says that they know her well, while rare and few are those who have even had a meaningful interaction with her.
Before January 2025, just about every organization providing ‘field’ services to communities in the Global South, purported to be committed to CLD. However, the reality of their community involvement too often amounted to some hasty consultations with local organizations, as opposed to meaningful project co-design, fully local project implementation, or community driven decision-making.
I was once invited by a prominent INGO to discuss a community -led development project for Haiti. At the meeting, I was the only Haitian in the small, select group that was asked to work on the project design. When I asked why a community group wasn’t tasked with designing the “community-led” project, it was (to say the least) not well received. The truth is that many community-led projects are created in plush conference rooms in the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia by INGO technical experts with the input of people who “understand the context”. Even when some of the projects’ ideas originate from local groups, they need to be approved by donors abroad at their headquarters.
Its simplicity of purpose
The problem with Community-led development is its simplicity of purpose. It starts and ends with communities and defies the elaborate silos of the aid sector as it starts with community needs and self-determination and ends with communities’ self-sufficiency and long-term sustainability.
The current donor driven structure of the aid sector balks at CLD’s deceptive simplicity. I say deceptive because authentic community-led development is not as simple as it seems. It requires trust, inclusion, transparency, humility and a genuine appreciation of community stakeholders’ equal humanity, valuable knowledge base and strong leadership capacity.
Nothing is easy about authentic community-led development. It is messy, time consuming and often unpredictable in a way that repels most culturally inflexible Global North organizations and institutions, as well as Global South stakeholders blinded by their class prejudices. It is hard work on yourself and with others, and there are times throughout the development of the very diverse network of the Haiti Community Foundation, when I truly understood why expats and INGOs preferred not to navigate the challenging maze of local communities.
The need for consistency and release of control
If community-led development requires trust, the keeping of this trust requires consistency. You are either in or you’re out. A lack of consistency will create a breach of trust that can destroy your credibility along with any level of the community’s confidence in your commitment to fairness.
I have worked on participatory community-led projects during which funders, scared by some issues that the projects faced, wanted to take over and deviate from the community-led consensus-driven process. I was able to convince them not to undermine the project, but I know that few people tend to resist and question funders’ "strong recommendations”, as they know that taking stands often leads to punishment from loss of funding to being blocked and blacklisted.
The lack of committed funding
While many donors and philanthropists profess to support Community-Led Development, few deeply invest in it, despite many studies that document its benefits. Why? The comfort with the status quo, the fear of risk and the discomfort with local and national organizations that they see as always lacking the ‘right capacity’. All these factors are mixed with a dose of (should we say it?) racism. Aid is dominated and controlled by a majority of White and Global North institutions that are both reluctant to give out control, and unable to dismiss their bias towards Global South leaders and organizations.
Moreover, people and institutions follow the money. Case in point, in the wake of the U.S. government’s anti-DEI and anti-social justice mandates,many INGOs have been quickly complying and dismissing some of their stated core values along with their long-time social justice programs. They are prioritizing funding from an administration that is against their very “raison d’être”.
The Beauty of Community-Led Development
Its potent power for structural change
Community-led development brims with power, the untapped power of communities coming into their own through collective vision, action and a full sense of ownership. These efforts are not properly amplified or invested in, so we lack insight into just how much community-led development is happening. But, make no mistake, there are many around our global communities who we can learn from.
Thirteen years ago, when the Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF) hosted representatives of the Haiti Community Foundation Initiative, we saw what communities labelled “poor” were motivated to do when they held a sense of ownership: address vital problems that their communities faced, raising resources from within their communities in innovative ways. In Haiti, while there can be serious security problems for aid providers, our foundation never faced the same when dealing with post-disasters’ relief, because we worked with leaders who prioritized the most impacted members of their communities. We also saw communities lifting barriers that blocked our projects, when other organizations’ projects stalled because these organizations did not truly work “with” communities.
You cannot work for communities without them. They may take what you offer, but they will only be fully engaged if they have real ownership and are able to lead their community’s development with you. Co-creation is a magic wand.
Its nuanced complexity
Some ask "who is the community and who gets to decide?" A question for ages. The reality with community-led development is that it is nuanced in many ways, and the cookie cutter approach to development keeps failing all of us.
Communities have layers. We must understand and respect that. When the Haiti Community Foundation’s Regional Planning Committee worked on the regional planning of the Grand ’Anse region from 2013 to 2015, a lot of planning and strategy went into the holding of intersectoral group convenings. The Committee had strong opinions on what each locality’s top three priorities were going to be. They kept them to themselves to listen and learn in a respectful way. We realized through these convenings that community leaders systematically identified the root causes of their issues. In Fond Cochon, a hard-to-reach commune, water was not their first priority as we had thought that it would be. It was the construction of three strips of roads that, if tackled, would significantly ease access to water, health care and markets for the citrus fruit and vegetables that they cultivated.
The solutions to our complex world require integrated and contextualized approaches, processes and solutions. It also requires a servant leadership approach that helps us all to leverage communities’ power as opposed to only exercising our own. There is no escape from this reality.
Its pathways for our societies’ survival and reconstruction
The level of inequality in our world is pointing at a return to feudalism. Eight people own half of the world's wealth. Migration has exponentially increased over the past few decades. Climate change and war have become a major factor of this migration. “According to the latest available estimates, there were 280.6 million global migrants in 2020—representing close to 4 percent of the world’s 7.8 billion people”. Extreme capitalism and extreme right regimes that focus on dominance and exploitation are driving our world to its destruction.
Community-Led Development and the values of solidarity, equity, inclusion, justice, mutual aid and collective action that it promotes is the antidote to this toxic culture. These are not empty words but values that, if we have the courage to embrace them, hold the power to guide us to our salvation.
Interested in learning more?
Join us for a webinar on April 3, 2025 - focused on Community-Led Development in Haiti. Register here now!
Contributing Author
Marie-Rose Romain Murphy
Born and raised in Haiti, she is a social entrepreneur who has helped to launch several programmes and organizations including ESPWA, Inc. (Economic Stimulus Projects for Work and Action), a Haitian-led organization focusing on the long-term development of Haitian organizations working in Haiti. She’s also the Co-Founder of the Haiti Community Foundation, Haiti’s first community foundation. She has more than thirty years of experience and a strong track record in community development, human services, humanitarian projects, philanthropy, marketing, executive leadership, and social entrepreneurship. Her core interest is the creation of viable and sustainable pathways of development for low-income individuals, marginalized communities and developing countries. She provides thought leadership in anti-racism, localization, decolonization, aid restructuring and community-led structural change.