Navigating the next frontier: Doing more with less in West and North Africa

As 2025 comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on a period marked by disruption but also quiet progress. I stepped into IDinsight’s West and North Africa (WNA) region mid-year as Regional Director, inheriting deep partnerships across the region. In the past months, I have watched these relationships evolve in the face of fast-changing global realities.  

This year, the global funding squeeze became very real for West and North Africa. The OECD bilateral ODA to sub-Saharan Africa fell by 16–28% between 2024 and 2025. The education sector is already feeling the shock: UNICEF warns of a 24% drop in global education aid (US$3.2 billion) by 2026, with West and Central Africa potentially seeing 1.9 million more children out of school, and MENA – including Morocco – another 1.4 million. In Morocco, foreign grants to associations fell from roughly MAD 765 million in 2024 to about MAD 580 million in 2025, shrinking the resources many civil society groups rely on for rural health, girls’ education, and livelihoods programmes. In Senegal, community-level HIV and reproductive health services have already begun to contract as US and UK–backed programmes scale down, with outreach workers reporting reduced coverage and growing risks for women and key populations. Governments are trying to cushion the blow: Morocco is raising health and education spending to around MAD 140 billion in its 2026 draft budget, while Senegal has approved a 990.75 billion CFA education budget for 2026, representing 14% of government spending. These are not marginal tweaks: governments have always been the primary investors in their own development, and in this new funding reality they are taking even greater ownership of outcomes. The real opportunity now is to pair this strengthened sovereignty with smarter, evidence-driven spending, using data to ensure every domestic franc and dirham goes further, even as traditional aid becomes less predictable.

In this challenging context, our WNA team in Dakar and Rabat set out to do something simple but ambitious: help leaders make better decisions by harnessing the data they already have and the powerful new tools emerging everyday.

In practice, that meant helping partners do more good with fewer resources – strengthening their resilience by using evidence to navigate extremely tough trade-offs after sudden aid cuts – and embedding our teammates within government agencies to inform decisions at scale. 

Across WNA, we saw inspiring examples of governments adapting to do more with less. In Morocco, we worked with the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) to turn its core data platform into an actionable tool for provincial officials to target scarce resources to the services communities need most. In Senegal, even amid a three-month pause in U.S. government funding early in 2025, our partnership with MCA-Senegal II[footnote]Millenium Challenge Account Sénégal phase II.[/footnote] shaped a learning agenda for a $600 million nationwide electrification program, ensuring this once-in-a-generation investment yields insights on how new power access improves inclusive growth and livelihoods. In Togo, we worked with the Ministry of Health to optimize contraceptive distribution, expanding reach without increasing costs. And in Sierra Leone, we partnered with the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security to strengthen monitoring for the Feed Salone strategy, so leaders can use real-time data to decide which districts and value chains to prioritize, and adjust farmer support programs as they learn what is working on the ground.

We also shared WNA’s lessons at the continental level. At the Africa Food Systems Forum in Dakar, our team joined over 6,000 leaders to explore how evidence, digital tools, and innovation can bolster food security. We saw firsthand how data partnerships and youth-led solutions can turn big ideas into practical, scalable outcomes for farmers and families.

This year brought increasing focus on investing in local teammates, working across Arabic, French, English, and local languages, and increasingly drawing on experts from the very communities where we work.

West and North Africa is already driving the next frontier for social impact.

Governments are pairing tighter budgets with a stronger demand for rigorous, decision-focused evidence to make hard choices about where each franc, dirham, or leone can have the greatest effect. For us, that means moving beyond one-off studies to helping build durable evidence systems inside public institutions, so governments themselves can drive and scale-up what works. It also means working within an ecosystem of innovators who are using AI and data in ways that are transparent, inclusive, and rooted in local realities. In Senegal, for example, the Ministry of Education is working with organizations such as Libraries Without Borders and Agence Française de Développement to pilot AI tools that support bilingual teaching; elsewhere in the ecosystem, initiatives like Institut de Sangalkam and the AISTEAM conference series are building AI-education hubs and training teachers. Alongside these efforts, our own collaboration with ARED and the Gates Foundation on bilingual Teaching shows how such innovations can be impactful when they are coupled with careful evaluation.

With the right investment and guardrails, WNA is emerging as a place where people-centered, tech-enabled social impact is taking concrete shape.

Through these shifts, we remain convinced that better data, used well and owned locally, can help build more just and resilient societies. Thank you to our partners for your support and collaboration in 2025. We look forward to building on this foundation together in 2026.

Sincerely,

On behalf of IDinsight’s West and North Africa Region

I also invite you to dive into our Year in Review 2025 for insights into IDinsight’s impact across the world.