Take our builders survey by July 15
Plus: A tribute to USAID & the Global Prosperity Institute's take on Unlock Aid and the "abundance" movement
Dear Unlock Aid community,
Earlier this summer we shared our plans to publish our State of Builders Report. The global operating environment for social innovators, entrepreneurs and frontline organizations has shifted dramatically this year. We want to understand how we can best support your work moving forward.
We’ll use the report to illustrate how how organizations are adapting in light of major disruptions to funding for solutions in global health access, food security, education, livelihoods, and other sectors. Cuts to U.S. international assistance have been the starkest, but many other international funders have pulled back, too.
So far, we've spoken with more than 35 entrepreneurs, funders, and other allied organizations, giving us rich insights on what is working now. We're about to start synthesizing what we've heard into something that's actionable for CEOs, philanthropy, investors, and policymakers.
We want to hear from you.
If you are the CEO or an executive at a for-profit social-benefit corporation, non-profit social enterprise, or other likeminded organization, please fill out this survey by close of business on July 15, 2025. It should take between 5-10 minutes.
Link here: https://forms.gle/aehDEH1NwzVnVGm8A
We're particularly interested to understand:
How has your organization been affected in the wake of major funding disruptions?
How can a collective like ours be of most value to you right now?
Do you perform a high-impact service that is more cost effective and financially sustainable than approaches traditionally supported by aid donors?
We'll be publishing a preview for participants soon. Your feedback will help shape the ways we show up for our community through the rest of 2025 and beyond.
Please complete the survey by July 15, 2025: https://forms.gle/aehDEH1NwzVnVGm8A
A tribute to USAID
We'd be remiss not to acknowledge that last Tuesday marked the last day of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), before its formal merging into the U.S. State Department.
Since its founding in 1961, USAID has been on the frontlines of solving some of the world's most complex challenges. It is credited with saving millions of lives, helping dozens of countries to develop their economies, and investing to build a safer, more prosperous, and democratically-free world. Along with the agency's closing, thousands of USAID employees and agency partners also lost their livelihoods and in some cases their careers, including both inside and outside of the United States.
When we started Unlock Aid in late 2021, we set out to improve and modernize the way the United States invests around the world, including via agencies like USAID. We've had sharp critiques along the way, but our goal was always to help make U.S. international assistance more adaptive and fit for the future.
We are grateful to the thousands of USAID personnel and partners who have dedicated their careers and life's work to making the world a better place. Thank you for your years of dedicated service.
As we work to build what’s next together we want to ensure your voices are heard.
Please fill out our State of Builders report survey today: https://forms.gle/aehDEH1NwzVnVGm8A
To Progress,
Unlock Aid
P.S. Two weeks ago, the Global Prosperity Institute (GPI) published an essay about our work, comparing Unlock Aid's advocacy to elements of the U.S. domestic "abundance" agenda. As policymakers consider the future of U.S. international assistance, the essay effectively captures some of our ideas on the way forward. We have reprinted the GPI essay, with their permission, below.
(US) Abundance > (US) Aid
USAID is gone. Unlock Aid has been thinking about this day for a while.
Jun 25, 2025
On January 24th, hundreds of organizations around the world received a Stop Work Order from USAID instructing them to pause all USAID funded or USAID related operations. About a month later these orders became full blown contract terminations. USAID as we knew it had ceased to exist.
No one really knows what will replace USAID, if indeed it will be anything. But Unlock Aid has done more thinking than most about Day Zero for the aid world. Along with the usual criticisms of waste and administrative bloat, Unlock Aid has long championed ideas that the US policy world now groups under the “Abundance Agenda”—breaking bureaucratic bottlenecks, reforming procurement, unlocking investment in innovation, and reducing dependence on entrenched contractors. For the sake of the world’s poor, it’s an agenda worth considering.
Unlock Aid: USAID’s Bête Noire (you know, when USAID existed)
Unlock Aid emerged in 2021 determined to “rebuild public institutions for the 21st century.” From the outset it positioned itself against USAID’s contractor heavy model. USAID was the beating heart of the industrial aid complex. The alliteratively named Beltway Bandits and other international contractors capturing 80-90% of the agency’s budget. Local implementors made do with crumbs from the table. USAID officials often bristled at Unlock Aid’s tactics and critiques and the group quickly became something of a bête noire for the agency.
But Unlock Aid’s founders are no Rand Paulian small government zealots who look to slash budgets for the sake of ideological purity. Rather they argue that USAID has shortchanged the world’s poor by adherence to rules that shut out innovators, kept communities away from decision making, and paid Washington salaries instead of funding local solutions. Long before billionaires entertained themselves over a weekend by feeding government departments into a woodchipper, Unlock Aid was agitating for more humane change.
The Abundance Agenda and Unlock Aid
At its core Unlock Aid wants more for the world’s poor. More results, more decision-making power, more progress, but not necessarily more aid funding. Those aims pre-date the recent popularisation of the Abundance Agenda but overlap neatly with the main critiques as they have recently emerged in US policy debates. Abundance thinking has been promoted by writers such as Matt Yglesias, think-tanks like Stand Together, and more recently by the New York Times Best Seller Abundance written by Derek Thompson, a journalist at The Atlantic, and NYT omnipresent columnist Ezra Klein. The core idea of the movement: stop fighting over a fixed pie of resources and create more pie(s)! Remove chokepoints so societies can create more—more housing, energy, health care, and growth—through lighter regulation and faster innovation.
Abundance, the book and the movement, lists the ills of American life and plots a course out of zero-sum politics and resource fights. Unlock Aid has long been singing from this hymn sheet. Its homepage pledges to build a system “on the principles of abundance … decentralizing decision-making power and resources to communities closest to the hardest problems.” Their 2023 listening tour manifesto repeats that a “vision of abundance” should anchor any redesigned US development model. Unlikely that Musk was reading this in 2023, but redesigned the US development model he has nevertheless.
The links to abundance are more than rhetorical flourishes. The first ever policy paper in 2021 talked about how procurement red tape stifled progress, argued for increases in focus on innovation to create more public goods, and challenged decision makers to move away from over-reliance on legacy government contractors. They got these views in Foreign Policy in May of the same year and when they aren’t low key trolling Marco Rubio with ads in his hometown paper, Unlock Aid continue to publish ideas and policy platforms. A few choice abundance inflected themes recur:
Moving “Beyond Aid” so the U.S. invests globally to expand supply. Unlock Aid isn’t looking for more money necessarily. Just moving beyond grants towards growth capital, echoing abundance writers who emphasize market-scale solutions. Their roadmap pushes compacts, co-investments, unlocking diaspora remittances (which dwarf official development assistance), and leveraging innovative finance instead of the classic project, aid-driven approach.
Cutting red tape and increasing state capacity. This mirrors US domestic abundance calls for permitting reform. Unlock Aid’s blueprint would let local firms bypass thousand-page solicitations via short concept notes, for example. Many of Unlock Aid’s proposals also deal with ways to enhance government agencies’ abilities to better respond to challenges, such as by recruiting a new generation of talent into federal agencies.
Localization. A shared insistence on decision making where problems occur and thinking critically about solutions that consider who is the long-term “payor,” whether it be via markets or host country governments rather than perpetual reliance on U.S. taxpayers and U.S. aid industry contractors.
Embracing innovation. Both the US domestic abundance movement and Unlock Aid call for ramped up public investments in innovation, both to propel the impact of existing, proven social innovators, and to unlock new science and technology discoveries such as to curb disease outbreaks and increase global food security.
Unlock Aid is an America-focused organization that works expressly through pulling and pushing on the (somewhat rubbery) levers of American politics and policy. They hope their platform has enough pro-small government pro-private sector fare for the Republicans and more than enough cosmopolitan internationalism for the Democrats.
The king is dead, long live the king
For too long African development, as viewed from the US and Europe, was focused on aid. The newly emerging abundance agenda is a step away from this mindset. Its very nature is about creating more. Something the private sector – and capitalism writ large – is very comfortable with. Charting a new abundance infused course where once there were DC-based bureaucrats contracting out four-year fixed programs to DC-based consultants is an agenda The GPI can get behind. Governments of Low- and Middle-Income Countries Just Don’t Have Enough Money. Only tax revenues, not aid from USAID or anyone, will be able to be enough to change that.
The implosion of USAID will hurt where aid dollars were overrepresented. But aid was never going to be the rising tide that lifted whole countries. With a bit of creativity and realizing that aid is, at best, a catalyst or a force multiplier for local solutions, the USAID aid apocalypse could clear the way for something much better. Or it might just be a humanitarian disaster zone and a generational stain on the US’s reputation. Fingers crossed that Unlock Aid—with their ideas, verve, and desire to see the welfare of the world’s poor improve as their sole focus—and allies can forge something anew.