By Yoro & Talla

0.8% of direct funding in West Africa goes to local organizations. This isn’t a flaw in the system—it’s the design.

In 2015, world leaders made a pact: to leave no one behind. The SDGs laid out a vision of a world free from poverty, hunger, and inequality—a world where every community has the chance to thrive.

But with five years to go, entire regions are being left in the shadows. Nowhere is this clearer than West Africa.

As actors who work at the intersection of research and community action, we are seeing painful paradoxes unfolding. West Africa faces some of the most severe humanitarian and development crises on the planet—Malnutrition, rising numbers of out-of-school children, and the lack of economic opportunities continue to affect millions across the region. Yet the funding response remains a trickle in the face of growing demands.

This underfunding is not an accident of geography or a simple failure of awareness. It is the direct result of a calculus within the international community: the measure of a region’s political and operational attractiveness. In essence, it’s a system that funds not only based on need, but on perceived stability, ease of operation, and geopolitical interest.

Why do crises in some regions—Ukraine, Gaza, or sudden natural disasters—trigger rapid, massive global mobilization, while the chronic, structural crises facing West Africa are met with weary resignation and underfunded appeals?

When Urgency Depends on Where You Live

We are seeing over and over again that crises are not created equal in the eyes of many donors. A crisis in Europe mobilizes with breathtaking speed, layered with geopolitical urgency and media saturation. A devastating earthquake or tsunami triggers a global impulse of solidarity, often with clear, short-term recovery goals.

West Africa suffers from a different, more debilitating diagnosis: chronic complexity. Its emergencies are not shocks, but layered, interlocking crises of governance, conflict, vulnerability, and economic fragility that defy simple solutions. & this complexity reduces political and operational “attractiveness”.

The data speaks for itself. For West Africa, financing received represents only 7% of total finance needs, and a mere 18% of adaptation needs. Even as communities grapple with alarming rise in malnutrition, out of school children and lack of employment opportunity, the funds needed to help them remain systematically insufficient.

Why Local Organizations Struggle to Access Funding

This calculus extends to who gets funded, and here the system reveals its most troubling challenge. Donor requirements for reporting, auditing, and compliance are stringent, often designed for larger, mostly not locally led, and limited community-rooted initiatives.

We are seeing a near-total exclusion of the very actors who are most effective. A statistic that we would like to highlight: in West Africa, only 0.8% of direct beneficiary funding goes to local and national institutions. Organizations with the deepest trust, cultural knowledge, and community roots are systematically sidelined as “too risky,” while responses are outsourced to entities that may lack long-term community connection.

It’s vicious cycle: less funding means increased fragility, which lowers attractiveness and leads to less funding. To call this an “accident” or an “oversight” is to kid ourselves.

The 0.8% figure is not a mistake; it is an outcome. The gap is not a coincidence; it is a consequence.

We must challenge a funding model that values logistics over communities and stability over solidarity. We must:

• Fund locally, flexibly, and for the long term: Channel resources directly to community-led organizations, accepting different—not lower—standards of evidence rooted in trust and local knowledge. The goal must be to turn the 0.8% into 80%.

• Reframe “risk”: Donor risk is financial and reputational. Community risk is starvation, violence, and death. We must rebalance this equation, seeing investment in complex crises as a moral imperative, not a poor portfolio choice.

• Demand equity in empathy and investment: We must consistently ask why our collective humanity responds so selectively. The energy and resources mobilized for other crises prove the capacity exists. It is a matter of will and priority.

For us, it’s about building a world where your chance to thrive doesn’t depend on your country’s geopolitical leverage or how camera-ready your suffering is.

The underfunding is not by accident. It is by design. And that is a design we must urgently, collectively, and courageously challenge.