“What difference can I make in the world? I care, but I don’t have a lot. Surely £1.25 can’t make any kind of difference?”
Many of us have asked these questions in moments when the scale of social, environmental, and economic challenges feels overwhelming. When problems seem so large, it’s easy to believe that small contributions don’t matter.
But what if your £1.25 doesn’t move through the aid and charity system as usual? What if it moves differently – placing trust and decision-making power directly in community hands, so that it can have up to 40 times the community impact of money flowing through traditional, highly intermediated funding models?
Over the past decade, international aid has been accompanied by growing commitments to transparency, partnership, and locally led development. Donors, governments, and civil society organisations increasingly emphasise the importance of shifting power closer to communities and ensuring that funding reflects this ambition. At the same time, public expectations around accountability have intensified, with greater scrutiny of how aid resources are used and who ultimately controls them. Annual giving surveys show that giving to charity in the UK is lower than ever before, with 1 in 5 last year highlighting that they don’t trust charities to spend their money wisely.
Are they right to be suspicious? These are really difficult issues to discuss. They’re even more difficult to research, because there are no publicly available records for how money flows from global to local in charities working in global development. Transparency only goes so far.
So, for example, we might get a break-down of how funds are spent, but not where they are spent. One large household name charity, for example, clearly highlights that for every £1 it spends, 42 pence goes towards humanitarian emergencies and 37 pence towards longer-term development projects. But there is no mention of where these projects are designed, implemented, monitored and evaluated and how much of this money is invested in doing these things here in the UK, rather than reaching local organisations that are implementing them and the communities in which they are implemented.
One source of data that allows us to explore this question is the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)’s D-portal. IATI is a global initiative to improve the transparency of development and humanitarian spending. All organisations receiving bilateral or multilateral funding are required to report on their spending through this, including International NGOs.
We’ve dug into this data to examine how government and intergovernmental funding is received, spent, and transferred by large international NGO programmes. The aim is not to challenge the value of international aid, but to better understand the financial architectures that underpin it and to consider what those architectures enable or constrain in practice.
We examined transaction-level data reported through IATI by a household-name international NGO across a range of countries and programme types. This data allows us to trace how funds are received, spent, and transferred in practice. While individual projects vary, the overall picture that emerges is consistent, pointing to structural patterns in international aid delivery rather than isolated project-level decisions.
Across the programmes reviewed, incoming funds broadly align with declared budgets, typically ranging from several hundred thousand pounds to multiple millions per programme. Expenditure data indicates that funds are actively spent over the project lifecycle. However, closer analysis shows that the proportion of funds transferred to local implementing partners varies sharply, clustering into three distinct patterns of financial control.
In the first group of programmes, partner disbursements account for only a small fraction of incoming funds. Pass-through ratios range from around 2% to 15%, meaning that between 85% and 98% of funds remain upstream with the international organisation and its national or regional structures. These programmes are typically medium to large in scale, often exceeding £1 million in incoming funds, and frequently operate in complex humanitarian or conflict-affected contexts.
One representative example is a large emergency response programme in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Incoming funds totalled approximately £3.08 million, administered through the organisation’s UK and intermediary offices. Around £457,000, or 15%, was transferred to local implementing partners in-country, while the remaining 85% was recorded as expenditure by the international organisation itself. Although local actors were central to delivery on the ground, financial control remained largely outside the recipient country.
A second cluster of programmes shows a markedly different distribution of funds. In these cases, between around 65% and 70% of incoming funds are transferred directly to local implementing partners. These programmes tend to be smaller to mid-sized, typically receiving between £350,000 and £1.7 million, and appear to be structured in ways that allow for more direct financial transfer.
An illustrative example is a programme implemented in Ghana, which received approximately £364,000 in incoming funds administered through the organisation’s UK and European entities. Around £250,000, or 69%, was disbursed to Ghana-based partners, while the remaining 31% was retained upstream for coordination, compliance, and support functions. In this case, a majority of financial resources were placed under the control of local actors within the recipient country.
These programmes demonstrate that higher levels of localisation are possible within existing institutional arrangements. Their relative rarity, however, suggests that such outcomes depend on specific design choices and donor conditions, rather than representing standard practice. Across the dataset, smaller and mid-sized initiatives are more likely to pass on a higher share of funds, while larger programmes more frequently retain financial control at the international level.
A third pattern appears in a smaller number of programmes where no partner disbursements are recorded at all. In these cases, pass-through ratios are 0%, meaning that all incoming funds are retained upstream, despite expenditure being recorded and programmes being actively implemented. This occurs even in initiatives described as partnership-based or focused on strengthening local capacity. From a financial perspective, these programmes function as fully centralised delivery models.
One particularly stark example is a large, globally scoped programme with no specific recipient country recorded in the data. Incoming funds totalled approximately £5.52 million, and expenditure closely matched income over the programme period. However, transaction records show no onward transfers to local or national implementing partners. All financial management and spending were recorded at the institutional level within international and UK-based entities, despite the programme operating across multiple contexts.
This matters because the way large international development charities describe where donations go strongly shapes how impact is understood. Donors are encouraged to believe that “spending on programmes” means money reaching communities directly. The transaction-level data shows, however, that a substantial share of these funds remains with UK-based intermediaries, used to manage, administer, and deliver programmes on behalf of others. Only a fraction is transferred to organisations embedded in the communities these programmes are intended to serve.
When we move beyond headline figures and examine how funds actually flow, a clear pattern emerges. Localisation is not embedded by design in most programmes; it is applied selectively, unevenly, and often only when specific donor conditions or programme structures require it. Despite frequent commitments to partnership and local capacity strengthening, financial control largely remains upstream, reinforcing a centralised model of aid delivery that persists beneath the rhetoric of change.
Within the aid sector, it is widely understood that only a small share of each donated pound reaches local organisations directly. Estimates vary, but a commonly cited figure suggests that around 10 pence in every pound flows to actors on the ground, with the remainder absorbed by layers of service delivery, administration, compliance, and risk management. Transaction-level data examined in this analysis aligns with that understanding, with partner pass-through frequently well below half of total project expenditure.
External assessments reinforce this picture even more strongly. Publish What You Fund finds that across five major donors, only 5% of the $5.2 billion in aid expenditure reviewed went directly to local organisations. Read alongside the data presented here, this helps explain why trust is eroding among supporters of global development, and why local actors are increasingly calling not just for better intentions, but for different systems.
At One World Together we’re showing what happens when trust replaces intermediaries as the organising principle of funding. For every £1 donated to One World Together, 83 pence, which the equivalent of 10 of your monthly donations, is transferred directly to community partners with no strings attached. The remainder supports our operational costs. This is not a marginal adjustment to existing practice, but a deliberate redesign of how funding flows.
If impact is understood, in financial terms, as the proportion of resources that communities themselves are able to control and deploy, this difference is significant. On that basis, around eight times more of your donation to One World Together reaches the community level — meaning eight times more financial power sits directly with local organisations than if the same donation were routed through traditional, highly intermediated charity models.
This translates directly into the things that matter: more children supported through school meals, more households helped during crises, and more investment in communities’ ability to organise, plan, and build towards new futures.
There is a further amplifier. Because this funding is trust-based and unrestricted, your money reaches communities without instructions attached for how or when it must be spent. With this autonomy, partners report that each £1 they receive delivers up to five times the community impact of £1 tied to tightly specified projects – not because the money is larger, but because the power attached to it is.
That shift in financial control matters because it determines how communities can act: how quickly they respond to urgency, which priorities they pursue, and whether they can invest strategically rather than reactively. Taken together, a higher proportion of funds reaching communities, and greater freedom in how those funds are used, each £1 donated has up to 40 times the community impact of £1 moving through traditional aid systems.
This is not a claim about the performance of any single charity. It is a comparison between funding models, highlighting the relative power and value of long-term, flexible funding versus short-term, project-restricted approaches.When resources move closer to communities, the conditions for locally led and lasting change become not just imaginable, but possible.
So returning to that question of ‘can my £1.25 really make a difference?’ We’re pleased to show how, at One World Together, your £1.25 is never “just” £1.25. It is a small amount intentionally designed to do disproportionately meaningful work. Every penny works twice: enabling genuine community-led action today, while also helping to build a new funding system capable of driving genuine change that lasts. If you want your donation to place decision-making power directly in the hands of communities – and make every penny count towards community impact- give differently through One World Together.
Written By Shrestha Dhar
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