In April 2026, the International Geneva Welcome Center (known as “CAGI”, its French acronym) published the results of a survey of 108 international NGOs based in Geneva.
The findings are sobering for anyone running or working in one of these organizations.
They also help frame a broader conversation that The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) and others have been having with partners about how to keep delivering when money is tight.
Our take-aways from the CAGI report
The headline is that the drop appears structural rather than temporary. The ways NGOs have traditionally worked from Geneva are becoming harder to sustain.
Where revenue fell in 2024-2025:
- Half of responding NGOs saw overall revenue decline, and more than 40% of those lost over 20%.
- Public funding, the first or second revenue source for more than half of respondents, took the heaviest hit. 70% reported cuts from governments and international organizations.
- The humanitarian and human rights sector was the most affected, with 63% reporting revenue losses.
How NGOs responded in 2025:
- About one quarter significantly reduced or ended programmes.
- Close to half implemented staffing measures, including 25% that cut permanent positions.
- Cost containment fell hardest on events and conferences, administration, field operations, advocacy, and communication.
- Almost one in four NGOs does not have reserves to cover three months of Geneva operations.
What NGOs expect next:
- 35% expect further revenue decline in 2026.
- Nearly half expect financial and operational constraints to persist for three to five years.
- Nearly 80% of organizations that regularly host delegations expect reduced capacity to bring them to Geneva in 2026.
- More than 95% still see Geneva as their anchor, but about one in four plans to reduce Geneva staff or relocate some positions.
What NGOs say would help, ranked by share that flagged each option:
- Over 90% would value access to pro bono or subsidized professional services.
- 84% want support on fundraising and revenue diversification.
- 75% rate networking and partnership facilitation as very useful or most useful.
- 62% want shared services and pooled resources.
- 37% point to knowledge sharing platforms and communities of practice.
- One third want support on strategic planning, organizational resilience, and digital transformation.
Reading the report as a manager
For a busy NGO manager, three practical conclusions stand out.
- The funding contraction is not a short-term shock to ride out. Plans should assume that constraints persist for several years.
- The model built around flying people to Geneva, running workshops, and relying on full in-house support functions is under real pressure.
- There is genuine sector appetite for collaboration, peer exchange, and shared infrastructure, which means partnering is often more realistic than rebuilding capacity alone.
A different conversation about capacity
Underneath the funding crisis sit two older questions that do not go away when budgets shrink.
One is the implementation gap, where good policies and evidence fail to translate into consistent results on the ground.
The other is the need for approaches that can move fast, reach scale, deliver measurable results, at lower cost by virtue of scale and sustainability.
Sounds like an unlikely “unicorn”?
Sounds too good to be true?
Here is what we explained in a briefing to 153 organizations in June 2025: what TGLF has been working on over the last decade is a package of interventions to support locally led change on a global scale, and, almost as a side effect, a way of doing more with less, sometimes a lot more with a lot less.
The starting point is a simple observation from a health worker in Nigeria who took part in a TGLF programme: “I did not realize how much I could do with what we already have”.
This is relevant for Geneva NGOs because it reframes the question.
Instead of asking how to reproduce shrinking workshop budgets, it asks what becomes possible when practitioners are connected to each other and supported to act on the knowledge that already exists.
What TGLF actually does, in plain terms
TGLF describes its work as research, development, and implementation of new ways to learn and lead.
In practice, this has taken the form of structured peer learning networks that connect practitioners, often health workers and the organizations they belong to, across many countries at the same time.
A few concrete examples help explain the approach.
- In Nigeria in 2024, working with Gavi, the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, and UNICEF, TGLF connected 4,300 health workers and more than 600 local organizations across all states in two weeks. Within four weeks, participants had produced 409 peer-reviewed root cause analyses. By week six, some were reporting credible vaccination coverage improvements in conflict-affected northern regions. Total cost was roughly equivalent to 1.5 traditional workshops for 75 participants.
- In Côte d’Ivoire in 2021, with Gavi and the Ministry of Health, 501 health workers from 96 districts were recruited in nine days ahead of the national COVID-19 vaccination campaign. 82% later said they would continue using the approach, and 78% said they no longer needed support from TGLF to do so.
- With Save the Children, a climate change and health policy brief was converted into a peer learning course accessed by more than 70,000 health workers, built in three days with initial results expected within six weeks.
- During the early COVID-19 period, a digital network of more than 6,000 frontline health workers generated 1,200 ideas and 700 peer-reviewed action plans within ten days.
The documented comparison with conventional approaches is consistent across these very different cases.
A January 2020 study found that health workers using structured peer learning were roughly seven times more likely to report credible health improvements than a comparison group using conventional approaches for technical assistance, capacity-building, or training.
Comparative costing suggests around a 90% reduction compared to these traditional methods, driven mainly by scale and sustainability rather than by cutting quality.
Why this may matter for Geneva NGOs beyond global health
Most TGLF work to date sits in global health, humanitarian response, and climate and health.
The underlying approach, however, speaks directly to several pain points in the CAGI survey.
- On reduced capacity to convene in Geneva, TGLF’s model shows that it is possible to bring thousands of practitioners into deep, structured engagement without travel, per diems, or venues, with human facilitation absorbing about 85% of the budget and travel reduced to around 5%.
- On the gap between policies and implementation, which 84% of NGOs implicitly name when they ask for help with strategy and fundraising, the method takes existing guidance and turns it into something practitioners study in order to decide what they will do, not simply read. As Sadki puts it, “learning happens not simply by acquiring knowledge, but by actually doing something with it.”
- On pooled services and shared infrastructure, which 62% of NGOs say they want, TGLF’s platform and network were designed so that additional topics and countries can be added at marginal cost, which is why a single country-priced programme can cover more than 50 countries.
- On sustainability when external funding drops, which is at the core of the CAGI findings, the emphasis on embedding networks inside existing government and civil society structures, rather than running parallel to them, is a deliberate response. In Côte d’Ivoire, most participants continued to engage without further support, which is unusual for donor-funded capacity work.
Three ways to engage, without overstating what is on offer
TGLF works primarily through co-funding partnerships, with flexible arrangements depending on partner capacity.
For an NGO manager, three entry points are worth considering.
- Joining an existing programme as a partner. Current areas include immunization, measles, climate change and health, mental health and psychosocial support, non-communicable diseases, neglected tropical diseases, and women’s leadership in health and humanitarian response.
- Using the model to bridge a specific policy-to-implementation gap your organization already owns, for example a strategy or guidance document that is not translating into consistent field action. TGLF can build such an intervention in a few days and share initial results within four to six weeks.
- Testing the approach on a concrete current problem, with a six to eight week horizon from start to documented results, using the network to connect your staff to practitioners who have dealt with similar issues elsewhere.
A question worth sitting with
The CAGI survey makes clear that the sector is not going back to the financial architecture it had before 2024.
The underlying question raised by the current period remains: are we willing to question how we work, including our own governing assumptions, in order to keep delivering on our missions as resources shrink?
For Geneva-based NGOs weighing staff cuts, office relocations, and programme closures, that question is not theoretical.
It is the one that the next three to five years will answer, one decision at a time.
Reference
Centre d’Accueil de la Genève Internationale (CAGI) (2026). Navigating uncertainty and a rapidly changing global context: A survey of NGOs in International Geneva (Centre d’Accueil de la Genève Internationale (CAGI)). Retrieved from: https://www.cagi.ch/wp-content/uploads/2026_SurveyNGO_results_report_ENG.pdf