Whenever Julia Sanchez, the Canadian secretary general of ActionAid, fires up her computer, it’s always a few hours off the time zone that governs her current home base in Canada. 

She’s been waiting to set up shop in ActionAid International’s global headquarters: a squat, blocky office that sits on a palm-lined avenue, across from a row of whitewashed gated mansions and a condo tower riddled with spacious balconies — the type of ritzy commercial district found in cities the world over. Except it isn’t headquartered in Europe, or Australia, or North America. 

“I have my computer set to South Africa time — which I’ve been doing for the last 16 months to try to pretend I’m there,” Sanchez tells Future of Good. “But I’m not.” Since January of 2004, the humanitarian aid giant has been headquartered in Johannesburg. ActionAid boasted it was the first major INGO to set up its headquarters in Africa, a gesture of its commitment to a more equitable relationship with the communities it serves in the Global South. 

Moving its international headquarters to Johannesburg, while a big step, was only a small detail of a far more comprehensive shift in the way the U.K.-founded charity considers the Global South. ActionAid has been slowly extricating itself from its INGO past to a less centralized, more representative federation of locally-run humanitarian aid organizations for nearly two decades. 

“This project was very much about shifting power from the North to the South and empowering local actors in the context of the federation,” says Sanchez in an interview with Future of Good. 

Ensuring equal representation for dozens of ActionAid programmes across the globe was only the beginning. Try as it might, ActionAid’s Global North members are still trying to wean themselves off of paternalistic attitudes towards its Global South colleagues, even as the vast majority of growth among the federation’s membership has come from African and Asian countries. That’s because one of the most prevalent power imbalances between ActionAid’s membership today is over fundraising potential — and the organization is still figuring out how to correct that. 

‘Internationalizing’ ActionAid

In its first 30 years, ActionAid’s structure resembled that of the typical Global North INGO: a humanitarian organization, headquartered in a Global North city (in its case, London) that oversaw education and child welfare efforts all over the world. Many of its senior staff members came from the Global North, although it did employ Global South country directors and staff in its regional offices. Then, in 1998, ActionAid hired Salil Shetty, an Indian who’d served as country director for the organization’s India and Kenya offices, as its CEO. 

According to a report from the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University on ActionAid’s transition, Shetty was among a group of senior ActionAid staff — many of them country directors in the Global South — who argued the organization needed to think about more than just foreign aid and charity when addressing the problems of global poverty. It needed “moral and intellectual power”: a way to gain the trust and legitimacy within the Global South, and be held accountable by the poor and marginalized populations it served. “A British-owned organization (perceived in the south as a “foreign NGO”) could not possibly advance ActionAid’s ambitious aspirations,” the report read. The board of trustees eventually agreed. 

So in 2003, ActionAid International was founded as a federation composed of six nationally-run ActionAid member organizations, each with their own board of directors. While the ActionAid federation’s members meet annually through a general assembly, they function as members of a federation rather than local offices of a U.K. based organization. Sanchez says there are now 30 affiliate members of the ActionAid federation, including Kenya, Brazil, and India. At general assembly meetings, each member-organization can vote on matters affecting the entire ActionAid federation, from the decision to move into a new country to internal policy. But prospective member-organizations are still required to fit the ActionAid model in order to be considered.

Joining the club

When ActionAid country offices apply for membership, Sanchez says they need to adhere to about 28 different policies. It must conform to requirements on everything from its governance structure to programmatic expectations to accountability measures. The country office then goes through a two to three-year period as an ‘associate’ member, a transitional period where it receives limited voting rights, before eventually becoming a full-fledged ActionAid affiliate. 

These full-fledged members have the right to nominate candidates to the international board, to propose motions at ActionAid’s general assembly, and get two votes each. ActionAid affiliates have country directors, but they report to their own national board — although they are required to keep ActionAid’s general secretariat in the loop. Perhaps most crucially, full affiliate members have the right to vote on whether or not to admit new members into the ActionAid federation itself. 

Not all countries where ActionAid operates are full affiliate members — 16 of the 46 countries ActionAid operates in, including Palestine, Senegal, Haiti, and even South Africa are country programmes administered by ActionAid International’s headquarters in Johannesburg. Sanchez says some of these offices aren’t even in the process of transitioning to membership. This could be for a variety of reasons: political instability or economic volatility within their country of operation or difficulty securing local fundraising. “It’s harder to get them to stand on their own two feet,” Sanchez says of these countries. 

ActionAid’s goal is to transition all of its countries of operation into full affiliate members. In the process, however, many prospective members are still subjected to bureaucratic control over how they conduct their operations. In former ActionAid country programmes, country directors are accountable to both the general secretariat and a national board with a gradual handover of operational control from the former to the latter. 

And when it comes to making decisions, Sanchez admits the ActionAid federation’s process can be quite bureaucratic — take the process of whether or not ActionAid should start fundraising efforts in a new country. “To make a decision about an investment, it almost has to go all the way to the general assembly, which doesn’t make any sense,” she says. 

The difference between the current model and ActionAid’s old method of centralized control in London is that ActionAid’s general assembly is predominantly made up of Global South members. So too is ActionAid’s international board, which oversees the whole federation. “Currently, there is one white person on that board,” Sanchez says. “Everybody else is from the Global South.” 

Money talks

Power imbalances continue to exist between ActionAid’s Global North and Global South operations despite the creation of its federation. They just happen to be financial rather than representational. “There was an assumption that, with shifting power and decision-making, there would also be a shift in where resources are captured in order to fund the activities of the federation,” Sanchez says. That hasn’t proven to be the case. 

Roughly 80 percent of ActionAid International’s unrestricted funds — mainly private donations — come from just two countries: the U.K., followed by Italy. ActionAid International also receives a fair bit of money from government bodies like the European Union, Sanchez says, along with the U.K. government and other bilateral donors. Yet institutional support for ActionAid in Global South countries like South Africa is still fairly weak. 

That can lead to more financially lucrative countries within ActionAid’s federation bypassing the general assembly in favour of taking unilateral action. “Sometimes members just get fed up of waiting for a decision to go through all the processes, so they take a shortcut and make decisions outside the formal systems,” Sanchez says. “That especially tends to happen — not solely — but I think we all notice when it’s the members who have the economic power.” 

Establishing mechanisms for effective and accountable decision making at ActionAid that includes Global South affiliates that don’t generate a lot of fundraising and Global North ones that do is something Sanchez believes needs to happen. Currently, she says, the two members who offer 80 percent of ActionAid’s unrestricted funding don’t get elected to the federation’s international board, responsible for approving ActionAid’s mission and overall strategy, because other members don’t vote for them. They vote for African or Asian colleagues instead — and when those European members bring resolutions to the General Assembly, they get voted down. 

“There’s this difficulty, I think, in sharing power as opposed to shifting power,” Sanchez says. “Power has been shifted in a big way with the federation, but now we need to get better at sharing power responsibly and acknowledging where the different power centres are — and economic power is definitely one of them.” Figuring out how to consider the resources of Global North members and the needs of Global South members is still very much a work in progress — but so too is figuring out how ActionAid fits into the broader humanitarian aid world. 

‘Work with us, not against us’

Localization is a hot topic these days, but localization as it is currently envisioned by many INGOs runs the risk of sidelining local non-profits and grassroots organizations in Global South countries. In an open letter from 2020, a group of 146 individuals, grantmakers, and non-profits critiqued the way INGO localization strategies, especially around fundraising in the Global South, can siphon money away from local groups. “It keeps us in a master/servant relationship continuously begging for grants from your institutions, while we remain bereft of core funding ourselves,” the letter reads. “This is not what we need or want.” 

Sanchez thinks this critique is totally fair. In fact, she believes a logical next step for ActionAid is to try and bring Global South NGOs into the federation. “I think it’s an interesting alternative to what we have done in the past, which is just strengthening our country programmes until they’re strong enough to stand on their own two feet and become independent organizations that join the federation,” she says. 

In fact, Sanchez doesn’t believe ActionAid would have undertaken the process of internationalization if it had started today — at least, not the way it was envisioned in 2003. Their current federation model still treats members like children. “Now they’ve grown up and left home, but we’re still kind of connected with the umbilical cord,” Sanchez says. “ They’re still connected to us and we kind of yank them back. It’s very hard to break.” As a federation, ActionAid has also changed its philosophy on how to accomplish its mission of eradicating poverty. 

Over the past five years, Sanchez says, ActionAid has become a lot more committed to supporting social movements rather than traditional charities or non-profits. “Part of our theory of change is that social movements are going to change the world, not NGOs,” she says. “If we are an NGO, the best thing we can do is support social movements because we do have knowledge and resources and access and capacity.” 

‘Renewing our vows’

ActionAid’s next annual general assembly will mark the 50th anniversary of the organization’s founding by British entrepreneur and humanitarian Cecil Jackson-Cole. Sachez hopes ActionAid’s membership will be doing a lot of homework between now and then: talking about decolonizing aid, thinking about what it means to be a member of ActionAid, changing how members work together as a federation. 

Sanchez hopes that in two years time, by the 20th anniversary of ActionAid’s federation, the organization will be able to renew its vows to internationalization, decolonization, and representation in a comprehensive way. Some members are hesitant, she says, while others are eager. Either way, she hopes ActionAid can really rethink the way it thinks about its work. “They will be refreshed vows,” she says, “relevant to the current context and the current world that we live in.” 

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