5 trends shaping global development in 2022

Dutch engineers have a stoic expression which translates to “living with water.” It’s the right perspective for professionals tasked with keeping a country below sea level from washing away. For global development, global health, and humanitarian professionals, a similar sense of context is essential, especially at a time like this.

So what is the context shaping up to be like this year? Reviewing our reporting and considering many conversations with leaders and practitioners last year, there are five major trends worth highlighting as we begin 2022.

1. Market dynamics push localization

Localization has been the “new” story for two decades now — it traces back at least to the 2005 Paris Declaration. There’s no arguing there’s something novel about the latest move toward localization. But the context has changed in important ways that are likely to propel efforts to get more money and decision-making to the local level this time.

Deep down, the pushback against local project leads, local NGO boards, and truly local decision-making has been accountability. It goes like this: How can precious aid dollars be safeguarded without Western leadership, international field visits, and firm control over accounting and compliance? But technology increasingly makes accountability possible without physical presence and distant oversight, and, for the first time, the COVID-19 pandemic proved it.

What’s more, local organizations are increasingly getting the chance to prove they can both get better results and be accountable. That’s because of the growing scale of private philanthropy and the desire to maximize the impact of philanthropic spending. Foundations are pushing like never before to get funding in the hands of truly locally rooted organizations and social entrepreneurs.

This is creating a market dynamic that is new to the long-standing localization effort. As more grant dollars shift to local organizations, they can invest in the infrastructure needed to bid on and win larger and larger grants and contracts. They gain past performance credentials and relationships with funders that make them more competitive in the market for development business.

This market dynamic is self-fulfilling: Private philanthropy will prepare more locally rooted organizations to compete for government funding from the likes of USAID as it tries to promote localization. International NGOs are responding to these pressures by shifting more operational and technical roles to the field — thus opening up more leadership and training opportunities for local professionals, more budget and decision-making to country offices, and more subgrants to local organizations.

The bottom line is 2022 could be a break-out year for localization, especially if development leaders can come to broad consensus about what localization really means and what it aims to achieve for people. Regardless of the legal structures that count as “local,” an era in global development where communities have a leading voice in their own development efforts, leaders of these efforts actually live in the community and are a part of it, and those leaders design the strategy and approach for development work would be a true shift decades in the making.

2. Climate reshapes the development narrative

Development has long suffered from uninspiring and non-intuitive nomenclature. The broadest term our community tends to use — simply “development” — is quickly confused outside 1818 H St. or such places as belonging to the real estate, technology, or human resources fields.

Conversations of developing countries and ending poverty can quickly take on a paternalistic and even colonial undertone. The closest we’ve come to a universally relevant rallying cry and narrative is arguably universal health coverage, but even in the midst of a pandemic, support for global health is woefully inadequate.

Climate change is beginning to alter all this and there are early glimmers that it may come to reshape the entire development narrative. For one thing, the world’s largest donor region — the European Union and its member states — are laser-focused on climate as a top issue and that is translating in its development policy.

As but one example, Germany’s new development minister Svenja Schulze is the former environment minister and plans to make climate the core focus of BMZ. Climate is fast becoming a cross-cutting theme across all multilateral development bank and bilateral aid agency work too: Just try finding a report or project that doesn’t mention climate. Humanitarian work has also adopted the language of climate given how central drought, water shortages, and crop failures are to conflict and refugee crises.

There’s an even more powerful reason climate change is reshaping the global development narrative: It’s not an “us” and “them” proposition. Of course we know that it’s the poorest who are suffering the most. But that doesn’t change the fact that climate is a planetary issue relevant to all people. Even voters in high-income countries can connect viscerally to the climate in ways that go beyond charitable intentions, soft power, or great power rivalries.

So demonstrating how injustice and inequality are linked to climate change may be proving a more powerful narrative than traditional humanitarian appeals. The political salience of climate is what makes it likely to reshape how we talk about global development efforts and create a true movement around them.

3. Billionaire giving grows and disperses

Billionaire philanthropy has become more controversial than ever. But it’s not going away — in fact, every indication is that it will continue to grow and disperse this year.

There are a couple of key factors at play. One is the dramatic rise in billionaire wealth during the pandemic (as but one indicator, the broad stock market index S&P 500 was up 90% over the last three years). Wealth has grown among relatively younger, technology-oriented billionaires who are increasingly interested in philanthropy.

It has also grown for the world’s older billionaire philanthropists like Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg, who are already giving away billions each year and now find they have to give more to follow their planned giving models. For many, they literally can’t give away the money fast enough as their wealth grows faster than their giving.

More billionaires are signing the Giving Pledge — there are now 231 signatories from 28 countries — and some of those, like MacKenzie Scott, are already giving significant sums. Others, like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, find themselves more and more in the spotlight as their wealth grows while their giving doesn’t.

These new entrants and growing sums from established philanthropists, plus the divorce of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates increasing the focus on their personal philanthropic vehicles, is leading to a wider dispersion of philanthropic power.

It’s no longer just the Gates Foundation and then everyone else; now there are other donors giving around $1 billion per year and creating a gravitational pull around their strategic approaches. Among the ones to watch in 2022, each with fairly new leaders, are Open Society Foundations (Mark Malloch-Brown), GiveWell (Dr. Neil Buddy Shah), and the Bezos Earth Fund (Andrew Steer).

Another key factor is taxes. In the United States, where over a quarter of billionaires live and where many of the largest fortunes are based, it looks unlikely that billionaires will see their taxes go up in a big way this year. The latest tax proposals in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan did not include wealth taxes, only higher income taxes which won’t cut into the outsized fortunes in question.

But billionaires and their advisers can see the writing on the wall: Given the aging population and widening budget deficits, it’s hard to see a future in which billionaires aren’t taxed much more heavily. So look for more billionaires to increase their giving while they can still get favorable tax treatment and retain control over their fortune.

That’s where reforms like the DAF proposal being promoted by billionaire philanthropist John Arnold become even more important this year. He’s calling for DAFs, or donor-advised funds, to have stricter requirements around paying out their endowments more quickly so that wealthy Americans don’t just park the money for tax purposes in perpetuity (there is around $150 billion currently sitting in DAFs in the U.S.).

This could be just the start of further proposals that will incentivize billionaires to act sooner on their future philanthropic plans, including updated rules around private foundations and limited liability corporations as philanthropy vehicles.

4. Cold War in tech comes to global development

Great power rivalries are back in a big way and there are no signs they are cooling off. That means North American and European foreign aid is increasingly couched in terms of countering China — and sometimes Russia, as we’ve seen in the past few years especially, including with the G-7’s recent Build Back Better World or B3W, partnership.

This context is important, especially when it comes to international organizations like U.N. agencies and multilateral development banks. For leaders of these agencies, the political balancing act gets harder each year. Development finance institutions find themselves at the leading edge of this growing division, as developing and funding deals increasingly come with a foreign policy edge. That’s especially true when it comes to tech-related investments.

In 2022, look for these dividing lines to become starker with bifurcating technology infrastructure between the West and China in areas including 5G, fintech, social media and messaging apps, and crypto currencies.

These may sound like narrow technical areas, but they touch nearly all aspects of development and humanitarian work today. Connectivity efforts, financial inclusion projects, telemedicine, distance learning, and cash transfers can all run up against questions of technology infrastructure and data governance. Development projects that utilize these technologies or directly fund their development or adoption will find themselves increasingly under the microscope.

There are good reasons: As half the world gets connected to the internet — through 5G, satellites, TV white spaces, or other innovative technologies — data becomes enormously valuable.

Personal data can of course be unscrupulously used for commercial purposes; it can also be a hard-to-beat tool for authoritarian governments to squash dissent and root out opposition. Even as development and humanitarian organizations aim to do good, they could well be doing harm if they inadvertently promote technologies that don’t come with values-based technology governance such as personal data protections. Look for these issues to be elevated in 2022.

5. Health systems are back

Imagine a disease that kills millions around the world until focused public health investments beat it back in most countries, especially high-income ones. Yet it remains endemic in many poorer countries around the world.

This isn’t yet the story of COVID-19; it is what’s happened with malaria. Over half a million people still die from malaria every year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Now there’s a newly approved vaccine. It’s not a panacea — it is 30% protective against severe disease. But it’s a new and important tool that stands to save tens of thousands of lives among vulnerable children, and it’s perhaps the first in a line of new innovative vaccines and treatments for a long-neglected disease.

For two years, the broad narrative around the COVID-19 pandemic in low- and middle-income countries has been supply of COVID-19 vaccines. That’s still a critical issue. But the focus this year will land more squarely on the health systems needed to successfully deliver those vaccines and develop vaccines for this and future pandemics, just as it must for the new malaria vaccine.

To change the trajectory of the disease, the new malaria vaccine will need to be seamlessly integrated into childhood immunizations programs, targeted in the most severely affected areas, tracked to ensure booster doses are given years later, and complemented with bed nets, treatments, and mosquito control.

This is the kind of effort needed around COVID-19 too. Think primary health, health worker training, public health education, logistics and supply chain: There’s a chance for a new initiative around these that’s stronger than COVID-19 vaccine efforts have been so far. We saw a similar and important shift as efforts to fight HIV/AIDS matured: PEPFAR and the Global Fund started as disease vertical approaches but landed in systems work.

The fight against COVID-19 will take a similar trajectory and, even with the lost opportunities for the past two years, there is a chance now to convert the massive global effort around COVID-19 into a broader health systems investment. This is the best chance to beat back COVID-19 in LMICs, mitigate and prepare for the next pandemic, and address the many other urgent health needs for billions of people, including ending malaria.

Update, Jan. 5, 2022: This article has been updated to clarify some of the signatories to the Giving Pledge.

Sign up to Newswire for an inside look at the biggest stories in global development.