ALMOST half of Christian Aid’s staff could be made redundant under proposals, announced on Tuesday, to channel resources to local partner organisations instead.
“Our job in many cases now is to add our weight to waves of change being created by other people, not necessarily creating the waves ourselves,” the charity’s chief executive, Patrick Watt, told the Church Times.
Five regional hubs will coordinate the organisation’s work overseas in place of the current international network in 26 countries. The new model, which is subject to a consultation period, would see a reduction in staff from a little over 700 to about 400.
On Tuesday afternoon, Mr Watt said that the country offices were expensive and sometimes led to “siloed working”, whereas regional hubs in Bogotá, Abuja, Nairobi, Amman, and Dhaka would allow for projects to cut across borders more effectively.
Christian Aid would be “stepping back” from direct delivery of humanitarian and development projects to focus instead on regional partnership work. “We sometimes started to behave a bit like a local organisation our selves, and kind of cannibalised space and capacity that we should be supporting for national organisations,” Mr Watt said. “We sometimes started to behave a bit like a local organization ourselves, and kind of cannibalised space and capacity that we should be supporting for national organisations.”
It was an approach that had worked well in Gaza and Ukraine in recent years, allowing the charity to be more agile in how it used donor funds, Mr Watt said. More than £20 million was being spent on programmes in Ukraine.
Last year, the then Archbishop of Canterbury visited a project in Odesa, in southern Ukraine, which is run by a local charity but receives funding from Christian Aid (News, 23 February 2024).
Under the proposals announced on Tuesday, this dynamic with local partners will become the norm in all of the 26 countries in which Christian Aid operates, continuing a trajectory that the aid sector has been on for some time.
Headcount at Christian Aid had already been reduced by about ten per cent, owing to a reduction in “direct implementation” of programmes, according to last year’s report.
Explaining the further cuts being proposed, Mr Watt said that the restructuring would leave the charity with about 350 core posts, and a further 50 reliant on specific funding.
UK-based jobs would be reduced along with those in the current country offices, he said, and, going forward, many posts, including those in strategic leadership, could be based in the UK or any of the regional hubs.
Many of the jobs that remained would not be earmarked for specific people, and would be open for applications. It was important, Mr Watt said, to ensure that “anybody who does leave leaves well.” Changes would come into effect in the autumn.
Last year, the report Shifting Power in Aid outlined Christian Aid’s progress in moving towards more locally led work — as set out in the charity’s strategic framework for 2019-26, and in line with agreements made with other aid organisations.
“With a programme presence in many previously colonised countries, we recognise that we are part of a wider aid system that is both a reflection of unequal power, and often reinforces that inequality,” the report said.
At the start of this year, the current chair of Christian Aid, the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, wrote that “in the future, responding to the power of the prophetic voice, I can see us playing more of a convening, connecting, and catalytic role, linking the local to the global and supporting wider movements for change” (Comment, 3 January).
“This will require more of the capacity and capability we have built up inside Christian Aid to be located in our partners, creating opportunities to shift power to people living in poverty, so that they can make their voices heard and create their own opportunities for a life free from poverty,” Bishop Mullally wrote.
The UK’s recent cuts to the international aid budget, from 0.5 to 0.3 per cent of GDP (News 28 February), were not a decisive factor in Christian Aid’s decision to restructure, Mr Watt said, but they validated the decision to be a “majority voluntary-funded organisation”.
The reduction of institutional funding coincided with the shift towards “more intentionality about the voice and the agency of affected people”, Mr Watt said. It was part of a changing landscape in the aid sector. “I think the reality is that aid plays a relatively smaller role in the world than it did 20 or 30 years ago. There are fewer aid-dependent countries,” he said.
“In some ways, I think the aid sector is having to catch up with [this changing picture] and recognise that we’re just one relatively small, albeit important, part of a much bigger network of actors trying to create a more just world.”
