The Demise of the Human Rights Funding Model

Cash used in a 2016 human rights funding experiment in Mexico City

The new US administration has heavily curtailed foreign aid, and many European donors are following suit. The foreign aid sector is collapsing, and some of the hardest hit groups are those working on liberal norms such as human rights, gender rights, and democracy.

I hate to say "I told you so," but about ten years ago, my colleagues and I started worrying about the human rights sector's heavy dependence on Western government money.

All of our fears have come to pass, and then some.

The Ethiopian Canary in the Mine

Our first major piece on the issue - a 2015 article in the Review of International Political Economy - was co-authored with Kendra Dupuy and Aseem Prakash. We looked at the consequences of new and highly restrictive government regulations for foreign funding of NGOs in Ethiopia. The ever-intrepid Kendra Dupuy traveled to Ethiopia a few years after the government had published a 2009 law specifying that groups working on politically sensitive topics, including human rights and democracy, could not receive more than 10% of their funding from foreign sources.

She learned that in 2011, one year after the law's implementation, the total number of registered NGOs in the country had dropped by 45%, from 3800 to 2059.

The decline among human rights groups, however, was far more profound: In 2009, roughly 125 registered Ethiopian groups said they focused on human rights. By 2011, only 12 or 13 such organizations remained in existence. A 90% drop.

The human rights sector in Ethiopia had been all but wiped out because it was almost entirely dependent on foreign money. When the government banned those funds, the sector died.

Later, Kendra, Aseem, and I tracked a wave of government restrictions on foreign aid to local NGOs, and found that the number of countries following Ethiopia's example was growing exponentially. We published those results in World Development and warned that if current trends continued, local NGOs would be increasingly choked off.

But ... The Public Likes Human Rights Ideas! A few years later, my colleagues David Crow, Shannon Golden, Archana Pandya, and I published new work on public support for human rights organizations and issues, relying on large-N opinion surveys in multiple countries.

Our research was motivated by a central question: Was the lack of local financial support for human rights activities due to the public's disinterest in, or even dislike for, human rights ideas? After all, many scholars had argued that human rights were a Western import with few genuine supporters in non-Western, low-income countries.

An early version of our findings appeared in 2016 in the Review of International Political Economy, and a later, more developed version appeared in 2017 in our co-authored book, Taking Root: Human Rights and Public Opinion in the Global South.

Our surveys told us that public support for human rights ideas in four low or middle-income countries - India, Mexico, Morocco, and Nigeria - was quite high. We also found that public trust in human rights organizations was reasonably strong.

And yet, those same surveys also indicated that very few people had ever donated money or participated in the activities of local human rights organizations.

Our surveys of NGOs around the world, moreover, told us that most local human rights groups in low and middle-income countries were mobilizing funds from foreign sources, typically from international agencies and individual European or North American governments.

We hypothesized that these groups had emerged in an era of comparatively abundant foreign aid for liberal causes and had never been forced to develop the skills, human resources, and social ties required to raise money from their co-citizens.

Charity was alive and well in the developing world, but local donations tended to flow to traditional religious organizations rather than the "modern" or "liberal" groups working with international-style discourses and activities. Soup kitchens and aid for orphans, not modern advocacy groups writing policy papers.

But Would Citizens Donate? A Unique Survey Experiment

In a third round of research, my colleagues and I conducted representative surveys among adults in Mexico City and Bogota to see whether ordinary people might, in theory, donate money to human rights groups if asked.

With the help of a grant from the Open Society Foundations, we gave people cash as a reward for answering a lengthy survey. Later, we offered them the opportunity to confidentially donate some, all, or none of that money to a human rights group. We varied our descriptions of the rights group to emphasize different qualities, such as efficacy, financial trustworthiness, and impact on the lives of specific individuals. Jose Kaire, David Crow, and I published those results in 2017 in Open Global Rights, an online journal. Together with Archana Pandya, we also produced a short video summarizing our findings.

People would donate money if asked, we learned, but it particularly helped if they were reassured that the rights group in question was trustworthy.

The Open Societies Foundations then funded us to work with Mexican and Colombian organizations on strategies for raising local funds, but later pulled back. They didn't want local groups to think the foundation was planning to abandon them.

The Current Collapse

Fast forward to 2025. Donald Trump and his colleagues have disbanded USAID and cut off funding to most, if not all, human rights-related work around the world. European governments are following suit, shifting their spare Euros to rearmament and defense.

Unfortunately, the dangers my colleagues and I identified ten years ago have materialized beyond our worst fears.

Human rights became a global discourse in the 1980s and 1990s, as my colleagues Howard Ramos, Timo Thoms, and I showed in previous quantitative work. These human rights ideals then infiltrated international discussions of war, peace, diplomacy, trade, development, aid, investment, and more. For a time, it seemed as if everyone was going "rights-based," aligning their corporate and governmental rhetoric with the ideals of international human rights law.

Our research shows clearly that those ideas do have popular support. The local groups promoting them, however, gravitated too quickly towards the easy money made available by Western governments, UN agencies, and international charities.

As a result, what appeared to be a global movement of local civil society groups rested, in fact, on a very narrow and geographically distant financial base.

Now, that money is disappearing as we speak.

Fifteen years ago in Ethiopia, 90% of local human rights groups disappeared when the foreign aid spigot was cut off.

In a few years, scholars will tally the results of the Trump tidal wave and are likely to learn that a similarly disastrous culling has occurred among local rights groups worldwide. Perhaps not 90%, but certainly more than 50% will have disappeared. What Next?

If the human rights world wants to rebuild, it will have to do it entirely differently, from the ground up, using different methods, language, and human resources.

Local people will need to be persuaded to give small amounts of money to groups working in their immediate environment, focusing on the issues they care most about.

Gone are the days of foreign funders parachuting in with the latest "best practices," logframes, and international talking points.

Gone too will be the army of fundraisers and "external evaluators" who knew how to talk to American and European donors, or with the bureaucrats working for UN agencies and international charities.

This army of international consultants and local partners will have to be replaced by a new cadre of local fundraisers and mobilizers, people who know how to pitch the issues to their co-citizens in persuasive ways that resonate with local priorities, beliefs, and discourse.

The human rights world of the 1990s and early 2000s is gone. Human rights ideas may still be popular in many countries, but human rights organizations, agendas, and working methods will have to be entirely reinvented.

The contemporary human rights system has died, not because its ideals were too "Western," but because the financing model was wrong-headed.

Every disaster creates opportunities. Now, perhaps, a more locally grounded, locally financed, and more sustainable human rights world can finally emerge.

About James Ron

James Ron is an international research consultant who worked in higher education for 22 years. Before that, he was a journalist and a human rights investigator. You can learn more about James on his website and LinkedIn profile. To read his scholarly articles, please visit James' ResearchGate and Academia.edu profiles. To learn how other scholars have used his work in their research, visit his Google Scholar page. You can read James' social science blog here and his personal blog here. Folow him on X at https://x.com/james_ron01