Scaffold to Bridge the Delivery Chasm
I was about to board my flight to Greece when I received a text message from GBPG’s geopolitical advisor, Jason Blazakis. He asked me a simple question: what was I planning to write about for my Midsummer blog? As I settled into my seat on the plane, I looked down at the book in my hand, FinTech Wars by James da Costa. It struck me how much the development sector could learn from the fintech world: lean structures, rapid execution, performance-driven delivery, innovation, and the ability to adapt quickly to changing environments. The fintech sector succeeds because it is forced to focus relentlessly on results, efficiency, and implementation. Too often, the development sector does the opposite. That led me to think about the biggest hurdle preventing meaningful reform. In many respects, the answer is structural. It would be transformative if the United Nations system and the multilateral development banks provided scaffolding for capable SMEs and specialist firms to perform at scale, particularly in implementation and advisory services. There is an enormous pool of agile, technically competent organizations outside the traditional industrial development complex and the legacy aid architecture shaped by large institutional contractors and the old USAID ecosystem. The landscape is changing rapidly, but many systems have not changed with it. This is where firms such as Global Best Practice Group can rise to the challenge. Organizations like GBPG are designed to be agile, technically specialized, delivery-focused, and capable of operating across complex governance, procurement, infrastructure, financial management, and institutional reform environments. The future of development delivery will increasingly depend on firms that can combine deep technical expertise with speed, adaptability, and practical implementation capacity rather than simply scale and bureaucracy. The second issue weighing heavily on my mind was procurement integrity and delivery accountability. When donor funds are transferred to recipient institutions, do donors truly know whether procurement processes are being conducted correctly? Do they know where the contracts are going, who is receiving them, and whether the work is being awarded to the most capable organizations? These are not abstract governance questions. They sit at the heart of development effectiveness. In that respect, the concerns raised by the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States Scott Bessent are valid: where are the contracts going, who is benefiting, and are the best firms being selected? These questions are uncomfortable, but unavoidable. As the aircraft lifted into the sky over Europe, it became increasingly clear to me that these two issues, creating genuine space for agile SMEs and ensuring transparent and accountable procurement, represent the chasm standing directly in front of the development sector. Until they are addressed seriously, it will remain extraordinarily difficult for the sector to become truly performance-driven, delivery-focused, and capable of meeting the demands of a rapidly changing global environment. The international development sector has been living through its most disruptive moment since the end of the Cold War. In the space of barely twelve months, the financial architecture that has underpinned global aid delivery for decades has been fundamentally weakened, not through gradual reform, but through abrupt political decisions that allowed for no proper planning, no orderly prioritization, and no managed transition. It created a vortex of chaos but through this can there be an opportunity? The numbers are stark. The United States, which funded roughly 47% of the global humanitarian appeal in 2024, effectively dismantled USAID in 2025, cancelling 83% of its programs, terminating over 5,300 contracts worth $75.9 billion, and ceasing operations entirely by July 2025. Global humanitarian funding plummeted from approximately $24 billion in 2025 to around €11.7 billion in 2026, according to the UN Financial Tracking Service. The OECD estimates an overall decline in overseas development assistance in 2025 of between 9% and 17%, with health funding potentially dropping by up to 60% from its 2022 peak. The Lancet projects that if current trends continue, the aid cuts could result in 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030. Source: OECD, 2026. And the United States is not alone. The United Kingdom is reducing its aid budget to 0.3% of GNI by 2027/28, the lowest level since the 1997 to 1999 period,[1] with cuts expected to reach £6.5 billion annually by 2027/28. Germany and Canada have announced their own reductions. The OECD’s preliminary 2025 data has confirmed the sharpest single-year decline in official development assistance in the modern era.[2] Across the 31 UN agencies impacted by U.S. withdrawal, the funding loss has been sudden, severe, and in many cases existential. A Moment to Reform, Squandered? There has long been a broad consensus that the international development system needed reform to seize the moment and make things work. The UN’s own Secretary-General launched UN80 as a reform initiative. Taxpayers in donor countries have grown increasingly skeptical about value for money. The perception is, not entirely without foundation, that too much aid is absorbed by institutional overhead or to support underperformance rather than reaching those who need it. And, frankly, this has been shaping political decision-making for years. As such, the criticism, in part, is justified. Parts of the UN system operate with long-term or repeatedly renewed contracts, waiting for the monthly salary and benefits that are not meaningfully linked to performance, with many immensely talented individuals shackled. by politics and bureaucracy. You can, it seems, tread water for years in ways that would be impossible in the private sector, where you must demonstrate results and generate returns. Whether that comparison is fully fair or not, it is increasingly shaping public sentiment in donor countries, and it is shaping the political decisions that flow from that sentiment. But what has happened is not reform. It is demolition. What is worse, there was no blueprint for genuine reform in the first place. The UN80 process, which should have been an opportunity to drive efficiency and accountability, has been overcome by the fiscal crisis and is now focused overwhelmingly on cost savings rather than structural improvement. Two decisive key drivers for reform must be to
