Photo credit: Pramin Manandhar, FHI 360
Three principles — true partnership, transformation, and teamwork — help determine whether a Government-to-Government (G2G) agreement succeeds or fails. A practitioner on the ground across three continents reflects on the operational and diplomatic elements of successful G2G programs following on MFAN’s February 2026 report “Delivering on the Promise of Government-to-Government Assistance: A Roadmap for the U.S. Government International Assistance Pivot.”
Over more than two decades as a lawyer and senior leader with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) living in and working with partner countries, I had the privilege to team up with amazing colleagues and counterparts to build G2G partnerships. Across Africa and Asia, I structured, drafted and negotiated dozens of G2G agreements that entrusted U.S. taxpayer resources to partner-country institutions, and worked closely with government counterparts to navigate the many challenges throughout implementation. I have seen these partnerships succeed, and seen others achieve less than hoped. The difference was rarely about overall policy. It was about the details of design, agreement and execution — and human relationships.
The United States government has stated that it intends to significantly increase G2G foreign assistance. In September 2025, the State Department’s America First Global Health Strategy, called for a greater share of assistance through partner governments and less through U.S.-based implementing organizations. Combined figures for the first proposed Global Health Memoranda of Understanding are more than $2 billion per year. While the documents we have seen neither obligate funding nor provide an implementing mechanism for G2G activities, they express a clear intent to move in this direction. In principle, this is an approach that many development practitioners have long supported. I hope this and future administrations succeed in partnering with countries on G2G initiatives given the enormous promise for sustainably strengthening country systems.
But the gap between principle and practice is significant, and the current moment presents additional challenges. The Administration has effectively eliminated[1] the agency - USAID - that led G2G partnerships for decades, the G2G experts who had designed and implemented them, the relationships that historically supported these partnerships, and the [2] [3] policies, guidance, and knowledge resources developed over decades of implementation experience. This includes taking down the Development Experience Clearinghouse, USAID's previously public archive of program evaluations and lessons learned going back to the 1960s. As the Administration seeks to manage multi-billion-dollar government partnerships, it currently lacks the staffing, institutional knowledge, and operational systems necessary to support effective implementation. The risks of getting this wrong are not abstract — they can be measured in lives, in taxpayer resources that fail to achieve their intended impact, in strained relationships with partner countries, and in diminished confidence in the value of partnership itself.
The development community has a responsibility to ensure that what comes next is built on what we have learned.
The gap between principle and practice is enormous. The current moment makes that gap more precarious than usual.
G2G is not a bold new departure from past U.S. development practice. For decades, USAID's Handbooks provided extensive policies, procedures, and templates for directly financing programs through partner governments. Indeed, G2G was once a central feature of U.S. foreign assistance. However, the 1990’s reduction-in-force eliminated the staffing needed to manage it responsibly, and programming shifted toward more contracts and cooperative agreements with third-party implementers.
In 2005, the United States signed the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, committing to channel more assistance through host government systems. Building on that commitment, USAID career staff in 2009 recommended this approach, an effort embraced by incoming Administrator Raj Shah through the USAID Forward initiative. Mission funds flowing through local systems increased from 9.7 percent in FY 2010 to 16.9 percent by FY 2014 — a 73% increase and nearly $500 million in additional annual funding.[1]
In 2012 Congress added Section 7031 to annual Appropriations establishing requirements for direct government-to-government assistance. USAID adopted ADS Chapter 220 providing modern guidance on the use of partner government systems. The Agenc yalso developed the Public Financial Management Risk Assessment Framework, equipping Missions with a rigorous tool for assessing fiduciary capacity and designing risk mitigation plans. The Government Accountability Office found that USAID's G2G assistance policies generally reflected federal accountability standards.
Since then, G2G has continued to be a priority across administrations, albeit with different emphases and approaches. During the first Trump administration under USAID Administrator Mark Green, I was part of the core team revising G2G policy to reduce burden and increase usage. The Biden Administration continued to advance this agenda through Administrator Samantha Power’s localization initiative. By 2024, USAID maintained robust G2G partnerships, including with Benin, Georgia, Ghana, Honduras, Jordan, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Pakistan, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda.
The institutional knowledge, policy frameworks, and operational experience supporting these partnerships were built over decades and continued to evolve as practitioners incorporated new lessons and safeguards. If the United States intends to continue partnering directly with host governments, it will be important to draw on these experiences and apply the lessons learned from past successes and challenges.
There is broad consensus among practitioners, partners, beneficiaries, and academics that success in a G2G program depends on genuine partnership: mutual respect, shared vision, aligned incentives, agreed objectives. Aspiration and reality could sometimes be far apart — for reasons that are important to understand.
Real partnership requires two-way agreement — both parties should come to the table with flexibility. One of the often-cited reasons we never fully achieved G2G partnership is the earmark problem. In many countries, USAID mission staff arrived at initial design meetings with a budget already shaped — sometimes rigidly — by Congressional earmarks and directives, Administration initiatives, and Washington managed priorities that did not align with the partner government's own priorities or development strategy.
Where strategic alignment existed — like in Rwanda, where the government's health sector agenda and USAID's earmarks reinforced each other - G2G flourished. Where that alignment was absent, we expended enormous effort on what amounted to negotiating compliance with U.S. conditions rather than genuine co-design.
Earmark reform should be grounded in greater flexibility to align with partner countries while respecting Congress’ primacy in budget decisions: That means entering discussions with a blank slate, but not a blank check. Encouraging Congress and other Washington, D.C. stakeholders to move away from detailed earmarks, directives and initiatives will require establishing a different basis for their budget decisions: long-term strategies that align the partner country’s development strategy with U.S. national security strategy and priorities. [4] [5] That may mean more consultation earlier on strategy, rather than retro fitting sectoral budgets to country strategies that Congress hasn’t seen.
Recommendation: The Executive Branch should present multi-year country and regional strategies to Congress and request multi-year and non-earmarked funding aligned with those strategies. This is not to the exclusion of some central sectoral accounts that need to remain global, such as disaster assistance.
Even with alignment, the most reliable predictor of G2G program success, in my experience, is the presence of genuine champions inside the partner government: senior officials with the political standing and savvy, the personal vision, and the sustained will to make the program work. Transformative G2G partnership is asking for significant change, disrupts establishment, adds burden and accountability, and won’t succeed without leadership. Champions are needed who own the vision for change and will fight for it internally, repeatedly, against the institutional forces arrayed against it.
I spent countlesshours in conference rooms and coffee shops with a young and dynamic Deputy Minister of Justice in Armenia. He was politically well-connected and had the support of senior leadership to drive reform. More importantly, he had a clear vision of what those reforms could mean for his country. After each round of negotiations, he returned to make the case to senior officials — many of whom stood to potentially lose influence or authority if the reforms succeeded — and persuade them to support meaningful reforms. He did this not because Washington demanded it, but because he believed these reforms would strengthen Armenia’s institutions.
Thanks in large part to his leadership, we reached agreement on 13 key democratic policy reforms that the Government of Armenia committed to pursue. Yet even then, implementation of reforms through G2G agreements depended on champions in the right places. The OECD's monitoring of anti-corruption programs in Armenia found that one USAID direct grant to the Government Anti-Corruption Council, only 15 percent of funds were used in three years — attributed to insufficient political will. By comparison, the same report found our partnership to reform judiciary transparency was successful due to the leadership of the Council of Court Chairmen.
Recommendation: At the beginning of the relationship, U.S. development experts must conduct initial planning meetings with the relevant Ministers, forging a shared vision and identifying the champions -usually at the Deputy Minister level - with the authority and will to succeed.
On the other side of the table, a key indicator of true partnership is whether the host country is contributing to the shared objective. Every USAID bilateral agreement required 30% partner government cost-share for direct assistance, and every G2G agreement I negotiated included a host country commitment to co-investment.
Such commitments must be concrete to be realizable. A statement of intent is a placeholder that defers the hard conversations until it is too late to design solutions. Host country contributions must be negotiated with specificity up front and reflected in the country’s budget, normally approved and appropriated a year in advance. Otherwise, they become an after-the-fact accounting exercise to allocate credit for expenditures that would have been made without the U.S. contribution. There is no additionality, no meaningful change. This approach also fails to do the hard work necessary to have a transition plan from the start. More than moving numbers from one column to another in a budget table, transition planning requires understanding about what operational efficiencies, tough tradeoffs and increases in revenue will be needed to make that funding available and supporting capacities such as Public Financial Management (PFM) and Domestic Resource Mobilization (DRM) that are necessary to make that transition happen.
In Georgia, we had the opportunity to fund significant infrastructure reconstruction following the Russian invasion. We took a firm stance that we would not fund construction until the government secured the necessary land and allocated funding for longer-term operation and maintenance in its budget, which gave the Deputy Minister the leverage she needed to secure these contributions from her government and the longer-term sustainability of our investment.
Recommendation: G2G project design and approval documentation and agreements should provide specific and detailed planning for host country contribution, including long-term finance plans and corollary DRM/PFM efforts.
The goal of G2G assistance is not to subsidize government services in perpetuity. It should aspire to be transformational — to support governments accountably changing their own sustainable development path.
In development discipline, a ‘theory of change’ is a foundational component of program design. However, in practice it is sometimes reduced to a statement of inputs and outputs. Transformational development requires truly interrogating — in partnership with the stakeholders who own it — what is needed to achieve the desired change. Often the answer is policy.
Ghana faced a persistent challenge with so-called “school leavers,” children who stopped attending school and, once behind, were unable to reintegrate. The solution was a systematic approach to engaging and supporting these students, which would face political resistance and significant startup costs. Working alongside the Ministry of Education and the United Kingdom (UK), we spent weeks consulting with teachers and communities, to design a proposal with a clear theory of change: if the Parliament passed the necessary revisions to the education authorization and the Ministry adopted the necessary policies, USAID and the UK would split-fund the startup costs to get the new program up and running. The Government of Ghana would commit to funding the operation of the programming once established. Our support was conditioned on the necessary policy reform and was the leverage the Minister needed to pass it. This partnership significantly - and sustainably - improved access to basic education for this most vulnerable population of students.
Recommendation: Every G2G project should have a central theory of change that explicitly addresses any policy changes needed to sustainably achieve the change, in addition to other key components such as resources and capacity.
Every G2G program includes some capacity building, often a supplementary component attached to a program whose primary purpose was service delivery. In reality, the relationship should be reversed. In a transformational G2Gprogram, capacity building should be the core objective. Service delivery is the means through which capacity is built and tested.
A consequential design choice in any G2G program is whether to build genuine government capacity or to create a parallel structure that substitutes for it. When faced with weak government systems, donors often require partner governments to hire outside contractors to manage program funds and compliance, creating a Program Implementation Unit (PIU).While this approach can accelerate implementation, it also draws talent and resources away from the government office that should eventually assume ownership of the program.
We took a different approach in Afghanistan. When we negotiated the direct G2G agreement with the Ministry of Public Health to deliver maternal and child health services, we required that Afghan civil servants — on regular civil service salaries, through the Ministry's own human resources systems — run the program. We provided outside technical experts to help strengthen internal procedures and train ministry civil service staff, and shadow them as they implemented the program for the first time, but we deliberately avoided creating a parallel implementation unit. This approach was slower in the early stages, and it required more intensive technical assistance than a PIU model would have — however, it built real institutional capacity in the Ministry of Health. Access to basic health services grew from 9 to 87 percent of Afghans living within a two-hour travel distance of a facility, and child mortality fell by approximately half.[2]
Recommendation: G2G projects should be designed to operate through official government systems and personnel wherever feasible and use external contractors and technical advisors to build capacity and provide support – not to perform core government functions on the government’s behalf.
For years, we worked to expand the use of results-based financing (RBF). Rather than paying governments for documented inputs, donors pay a fixed amount for verified results. The theory was sound. Freed from administrative burden, partner governments could focus on achieving outcomes. They bore the risk of cost overruns and captured the benefit of efficiencies.
One of the earliest applications of this approach was the Fixed Amount Reimbursement Agreement (FARA) between USAID and Liberia’s Ministry of Health. CGD analysis found that results were encouraging: No drop in service delivery or key health indicators, and the Ministry showed stronger stewardship and more effective management. Critically, the relationship was reoriented from donor-recipient to genuine partnership.
However, RBF requires both donors and partner governments to be willing to accept the risk — and when results are not achieved, consequences can affect vulnerable populations. Although supported conceptually, leaders on both sides may lack the risk appetite - and RBF can be pushed to become cost-reimbursement by another name. Efforts shift to fine-tuning cost estimates of results up front to eliminate any risk. Inputs can be classified as ‘results’ to justify payment. Practitioners must design contingency arrangements that protect vulnerable populations if results and payments are missed, so that RBF remains a credible option. Our experience found that hybrid approaches worked best. This included combining a base level of cost reimbursement, so governments weren’t at risk if they failed to achieve their full target, while also structuring some payments around higher level results. Similarly, authorizing partial payments on a pro rata basis — paying for the percentage of the target received — enabled us to maintain focus on results while avoiding catastrophic consequences if we failed to fully achieve a particular target.
Recommendation: RBF/FAR opportunities should be pursued where there is genuine commitment to shift risk and pay for higher level results rather than input costs, and designed to manage risk.
Regardless of sector, a G2G program is fundamentally a governance program — and programs that treat every intervention as an opportunity to strengthen governance systems produce something more durable.
I saw this firsthand in northern Ghana, one of the poorest regions in the world. Although the Government of Ghana had expressed commitment to decentralization, concerns about local capacity had slowed implementation. Due to congressional earmarks, USAID lacked funding for a local government capacity building program – therefore, we cut nationwide programs, focused earmarked resources on the most disadvantaged north, and used local municipal and district assemblies to implement the programming. We believed local direct implementation would build governance capacity and have a demonstration effect that would unlock greater national resources. Together, we assessed gaps in policies, procedures and institutional capacity, then designed a program to address them. We negotiated an agreement with the central Government to use their systems to allocate and transfer USAID budgets to the local governments to manage development projects. We trained local officials, supporting them in holding community consultations, managing procurements, overseeing projects, and reporting transparently to their communities on results. The Government of Ghana recently announced 80 percent of its own constitutional allocation is now being transferred directly to local governments to manage.
Accountability mechanisms — independent auditing and M&E — must be integral to program design, not add-ons. External contractors can play an important role, but the long-term objective must be to strengthen local accountability mechanisms: civil society oversight and the capacity and authority of host government oversight institutions. In Liberia, for example, we provided G2G awards to the supreme audit institution to audit our other G2G programs, and they became a key partner in reducing vulnerabilities and strengthening accountability and effectiveness.
Recommendation: Every G2G program design and approval should include explicit governance objectives, with clear plans for strengthening citizen engagement, administrative capacity, transparency, independent auditing, and monitoring and evaluation — the full architecture of government accountability.
Success in G2G is a team effort — one that demands the right skills, the right people, and the right relationships across civil society, partner governments, taxpayers, other donors, and the private sector.
One of the risks of treating development assistance primarily as diplomacy is the tendency to conduct most meaningful engagement in the capital cities — with national ministry officials and elite civil society, in formal meetings, through official communication channels — while the actual program implementation, and people who should own the programs, are often at provincial, district and community levels. Effective G2Gprogramming requires expanding beyond elites in the capital, and having the relationships, language, knowledge and reach to bring affected communities onboard as part of the team.
Nepal illustrated this well. The Mission pursued an ambitious 40 percent localization target and recognized that responsible localization required a strong field presence. It established satellite offices staffed with local community members and representative language skills and conducted roadshows in remote regions to engage broad participation. The programs themselves required exactly the kind of sustained, embedded engagement with local communities that cannot be conducted from Kathmandu, let alone Washington. The only way to close that gap was getting out there: regular field visits, language skills, relationships with provincial and district officials and community representatives, direct observation of service delivery in remote areas that take days to reach. That presence was more expensive and logistically demanding. It was also the difference between learning and adapting in real time and discovering problems only at evaluation — or surfacing in an audit finding.
Recommendation: G2G programs should be designed and managed with meaningful engagement from the communities they are intended to serve. That requires investing in field presence, local relationships, and mechanisms that ensure provincial, district, and community perspectives inform both program design and implementation.
One of the most important and least acknowledged realities of G2G programming is that conditions will not always be met, milestones will be missed, and ambitious programs will encounter challenges that require difficult decisions. The question is not whether this will happen, but whether the team has the trust, flexibility, and mechanisms needed to respond constructively when they do.
I saw this in Liberia. Building on success with the FARA partnership, we developed the first ‘Sector Program Assistance’ in a generation — designed to pay for higher level results, for example, $400,000 for a 5% reduction in maternal mortality, with those supplemental funds to support additional sector programs. Then the West Africa Ebola Epidemic hit. Virtually overnight, the Liberian health care system was completely overwhelmed. The Government had no chance of meeting either FARA or SPA results, which would have meant cutting off funding for the entire system in the midst of a crisis.
We had spent countless hours briefing Congress and answering their questions about the program, building strong bipartisan support. When crisis hit, they were a teammate that understood and was there to help, not a critic on the sideline. We waived statutory requirements and broke earmarks to immediately fund healthcare workers’ salaries. We reprogrammed funds without the 15-day congressional waiting period. With all stakeholders working together, we were able to pivot and respond.
Recommendation: G2G programs should be designed with flexibility built in, including contingency plans, crisis modifiers, and alternative support mechanisms. All stakeholders, particularly political leadership, must be prepared to adapt to failure and crisis.
Successful G2G partnerships depend on active, long term, engaged, highly skilled and dedicated, development professionals in-country. Building a sustainable partnership starts with relationships, trust, credibility, and understanding. Every successful G2G program I worked on depended on an integrated team — mostly local — working in-country over an extended period. These teams typically included sector technical experts, financial analysts, auditors, lawyers, budget experts, data analysts, evaluators, governance specialists, and procurement officers. Each brought expertise that others could not. None was optional.
Managing and monitoring a G2G program requires expertise that cannot be supplied remotely from Washington. The subtleties of implementation — why a particular target is being missed or exceeded, whether a financial discrepancy reflects fraud or a reporting system weakness, whether a government counterpart is genuinely committed or managing a diplomatic performance — are only apparent to people who are present, have relationships that are built over time, and knowledge that accumulates through sustained engagement.
The experience in northern Ghana illustrates this point. To implement funding through local government systems, USAID hired more than 15 additional staff, established a satellite office, and hired outside accounting firms and capacity building contractors. Implementing U.S. government funding through a host government requires substantially greater, different and more complex USG staffing.
It requires more than staffing numbers, it is relationships. Over the course of this work, there were more than a few times when a host government counterpart was faced with a tough decision and asked for us to stand with them. Facing pressure to award a contract, to skirt procurement regulations, to take a bribe, or to succumb to a threat of violence, they did the hard [6] [7] things that changed the way their government worked. There is no substitute for presence.
Recommendation: Successful G2G programs require sustained in-country engagement by diverse teams of local and international professionals with the full spectrum of skills, present in country with close partnership and relationships across the stakeholder community.
The stated emphasis on G2G is the right direction for U.S. foreign aid. Done well, it builds partnerships through which governments serve their people, sustainably, without ongoing donor dependency. The Paris Declaration, USAID Forward, Localization, and the America First Global Health Strategy all point toward the same destination, even if arriving by different routes and for different reasons.
But successful G2G partnerships do not just happen. They require genuine partnership — champions on both sides, aligned incentives, specific commitments, and real flexibility. They require a transformation orientation — building government capacity rather than substituting for it, designing sustainability from day one, treating governance as the core objective. And they require a team — skilled, present, in-country, overtime —that no amount of headquarters guidance can replace.
The current Administration has inherited a credible policy direction but dismantled the institutional capacity needed to execute it. The gap is real. Filling it will require willingness to learn from what USAID built over decades and restored investment in the people, systems and values that make G2G work in practice. The opportunity to write the next chapter in G2G development cooperation success is worth the price.
The price of doing G2G well is high. It requires genuine partnership, a transformation orientation, and a skilled in-country team that no headquarters guidance can replace.
About the Author
Peter Young is a retired USAID development lawyer and senior leader with extensive field experience in government-to-government program design, negotiation, and implementation across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. He most recently served as Deputy Assistant Administrator and Acting Assistant Administrator for Asia.
The views expressed are the author's own.
Key References
• MFAN (2026): Delivering on the Promise of Government-to-Government Assistance
• CGD (2026): Rolling Out the Trump Administration's Global Health Agreements
• GAO-15-377 (2015): USAID Has Taken Steps to Safeguard Government-to-Government Funding
• GAO-14-355 (2014): USAID Has Increased Funding to Partner-Country Organizations
• MSH (2009): A Vision for Health: Performance-Based Financing in Rwanda
• DFID/OECD: Evaluation of Results Based Aid in Rwandan Education
• CGD (2016): Country Ownership at USAID: Enabling and Empowering Liberia's Ministry of Health
• Global Health (2014): Afghanistan's Basic Package of Health Services
• Power of Ownership (2016): USAID Resiliency in Northern Ghana Project
• USAID Forward Archive (2014): Local Systems Progress Data
[1] https://reliefweb.int/report/world/usaid-forward-progress-report-2013
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4136668/
