On March 20, Moira Faul, Executive Director of NORRAG and Katherine Milligan, Visiting Lecturer at the Graduate Institute, addressed the International Geneva community about the implications of Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) funding cuts in education and the leadership capacities we need to cultivate to face a prolonged period of stress and collective activation.  

Here are key takeaways from Moira Faul: 

Traditional sources of ODA are strained and significant overall cuts of 25 % - 50% are expected in 2025 - 2026 as the United States reduces and in some cases eliminates its ODA contributions, as European countries shift priorities from ODA to defence, and as Asian countries reevaluate their ODA spending in light of these developments. 

The Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC), Switzerland’s bilateral development agency, has announced significant cuts from 2025 onward to multilateral agencies including the Global Partnership for Education, UNAIDS, UNESCO, UNDP, UN Women, and UNICEF. 

SDC has also announced significant funding cuts to the education sector to the extent that any Swiss organisation that was receiving funding for promoting basic education, such as the NORRAG center, are no longer receiving that money. As of the 1st of January 2026, there are some NGOs that are fundamentally going to disappear, others that will have to refocus and others that will continue in a very different way.

« We are in active conversations with policy makers, researchers, and educators across the NORRAG network, which spans nearly 6000 members in 180 countries, half of whom are based in the global south. And we are hearing versions of the same story from the immediate cuts in USAID: refugee education programmes are closed, clinics are shut, school feeding programs are eliminated. Thousands of local people in so many countries are now unemployed; tens of thousands of people using these services are already negatively affected, and after the next wave of cuts in European donor funding, hundreds of thousands and possibly millions more. If we want to decrease poverty, we cannot defund education ».

A word on “Reparations”: when slavery ended, the British government paid reparations … to the slave owners! And the debt incurred to fund this compensation was only fully paid off by British taxpayers in 2015. The following chart shows how aid flows into Africa make up a very small proportion of the money flowing out; and the same is true for countries in Latin America and Asia. We need to start thinking more in terms of justice than charity.

Here are key takeaways from Katherine Milligan: 

We are in the transition phase between the crumbling of our existing international development system and the creation of the emergent system. Naming this transition period between collapse and rebirth helps us visually locate where we are on this disorienting and non-linear journey (see the Two-Loop Model by the Berkana Institute). It also sparks many questions: instead of “holding on” and “powering through,” what do we need to let go of from the old system of international development?  How do we contribute to the emerging system of international development? And what leadership capabilities do we need to embody in this transition period?

The harmful ways that agencies are being dismantled, people are being dismissed, and vulnerable communities are being abandoned create a sense of moral injury for many of us who have devoted our careers to international development. Moral injury refers to sustained and enduring negative moral emotions such as guilt, shame, contempt and anger that results from the violation or betrayal of deeply held moral values. 

In addition to the moral injury, many of us feel our livelihood, our identity, and our worldview is under threat - which means that our individual nervous systems are being activated to varying degrees.  When activated by the perception of threat or danger, our amygdala takes over and mobilizes our body and emotions to respond. For the most part, those responses happen outside of our conscious awareness and might manifest as unwarranted aggression, chronic mistrust, shaming, selective mutism, numbing, paralysis, or denial, to name a few. As leaders, we have a moral obligation to cultivate a deeper awareness of our default responses when we feel threatened or are in an activated state.

The collective threat is not just activating our individual nervous systems; it is also provoking a collective activation. We can see those same responses manifesting in our team dynamics, in our institutional reactions and policies, and even at the level of the “international development system” as a whole. Resourcing ourselves for a period of prolonged collective activation starts by cultivating a calm nervous system, which allows the people around us to feel safer and function better. That safety and co-regulation ripples outward to the groups, organizations, and systems we are a part of.  

After Moira’s and Katherine's introductory remarks to a standing-room-only audience, members of International Geneva participated in a collective sense-making discussion.

Learn more about NORRAG here: https://www.norrag.org 

Read Healing Systems in Stanford Social Innovation Review here: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/healing-trauma-systems

Follow the Graduate Institute here: https://www.graduateinstitute.ch