Recursos
Cuando se agote la ayuda: la construcción de la infraestructura que los movimientos feministas necesitan para perdurar
In a new piece for Alliance magazine, our CEO Giselle Carino makes the case that aid collapses are not one-off shocks. They are built into a financing system that keeps decision-making far from the communities most affected.
When aid disappears, it is usually described as a shock. Giselle Carino argues the opposite. Writing in Alianza magazine, she says these crises “are not unusual; they are recurring features of a global financing system that civil society organizations have been forced to navigate for decades.”
The pattern is familiar to anyone working in sexual and reproductive health and rights. Priorities are set through donor strategies, geopolitical interests, compliance frameworks, and short funding cycles, not through the long-term needs and knowledge of local organizations. The Global Gag Rule has been reinstated along partisan lines since 1984 and was expanded to all US foreign assistance in 2025. More than 80 percent of USAID contracts and grants were terminated, including almost all family planning grants. UNFPA, WHO, UN Women, and UNAIDS lost key funding. Several European governments have shifted budgets toward military and domestic spending.
“Ultimately, these disruptions aren’t exceptional; they are features of the system,” Carino writes. The answer, she argues, is to invest for the long term in the infrastructure that lets feminist organizations keep their impact going beyond donor cycles.
What that looks like in practice
Fòs Feminista’s ecosystem approach supports partners to strengthen financial management and data systems, design social enterprise models that generate earned income, access affordable commodities, and draw on a range of capital, from grants to low-interest loans.
- CIES, Bolivia. After Bolivia expelled USAID in 2012, CIES lost roughly a quarter of its budget. With support from Fòs, it expanded a social enterprise model that uses income from its comprehensive clinics to fund free services for the people facing the most barriers to care. In 2025, CIES provided 3.9 million sexual and reproductive health services, covered 90 percent of its organizational costs from earned income, and redirected nearly $2.5 million of surplus into contraception and youth programs.
- Fundación Unimédicos, Colombia. Unimédicos pairs paid ultrasound services for urban clients with mobile tele-ultrasound for rural communities, migrants, and areas where health infrastructure is limited. In its 2025 pilot, it delivered more than 1,600 ultrasounds in 10 months. About 70 percent were free, and paid services already cover around a quarter of the cost of those free scans.
- INNOVA Health Supplies. Co-created by Fòs and five partners, this regionally governed social enterprise sources and distributes affordable sexual and reproductive health products. When USAID and UNFPA cuts disrupted supply chains, INNOVA helped partners keep essential products available without interruption.
The localization gap
Carino also names a contradiction in the aid and philanthropy sectors: “the language of localisation has advanced faster than the funding practices required to make power shift in practice.” Short funding cycles, low tolerance for risk, and reluctance to fund operating costs still cast civil society as implementers rather than decision-makers.
Why it takes an ecosystem
The piece is clear about limits. Social enterprise is not a universal solution. It depends on functioning markets, purchasing power, and political stability, conditions that fragile and restricted settings often lack. “These are not risks that individual, often resource-constrained organizations should be expected to navigate alone,” Carino writes.
This is where alliances matter. They provide shared expertise, political intelligence, and flexible capital. When some partners build financially sustainable models, resources can move toward partners working in contexts where grant funding will always be essential.
Carino does not argue for replacing philanthropy. She argues for a different kind of it. Innovative finance “should not be positioned as a permanent substitute for public responsibility, philanthropic funding, or the flexible grant-based resources that rights-based organizations need.” The larger task is a financing architecture where public funding, philanthropy, earned revenue, and movement infrastructure work together.
Read the full article, “Navigating sustainability when aid runs out,” in Alianza magazine. Full access requires an Alliance subscription.