SASA: the US$6.5 million scale-up swept away by the closure of USAID

I met Grace Kim in Kinshasa on the 15th, as planned. She had looked at what our Integrity Clubs and EduCheck had achieved in South Kivu and Kinshasa, and her advice was clear: given the size of that impact, we should not apply for a pilot, but propose our innovation under DIV’s Transitioning to Scale portfolio – the stage for approaches that have been piloted and tested and are ready to spread to new places.

The evidence was there. With the Global Partnership for Education, CERC had set up Integrity Clubs in 150 secondary schools and trained 2,250 students aged 14 to 19 – among them 396 girls and 44 students at risk of exclusion – to monitor their schools with EduCheck. It had trained 138 principals and 278 teachers. The students’ advocacy had fixed one problem in three that the students identified (classrooms, toilets, water), and school officials had agreed to extend the approach across the whole Province of South Kivu. Read more: Scaling up Integrity Clubs: from South Kivu to Kinshasa with the Global Partnership for Education.

Before it went to USAID, the proposal was reviewed by the Ministry of Education, which gave three pieces of feedback that shaped SASA:

These choices built on what the clubs had become since the memorandum signed with the education authorities of South Kivu. Read more: A memorandum of understanding to bring Integrity Clubs into every school.

With US$6.5 million for 2025–2027, SASA was to bring Integrity Clubs and EduCheck to every secondary school in four provinces, including South Kivu, North Kivu and Kinshasa, under a new agreement with the Ministry of Education to incorporate them in all secondary schools of the selected provinces. Programme coordinators were planned in South Kivu, North Kivu and Kinshasa. For a model that began in 2017 in 20 schools in Uvira, it was the step from a project to a national system. Read more: From 20 schools in Uvira to a national model: the story of the Integrity Clubs.

SASA was one casualty among thousands. On 20 January 2025, the new US administration froze foreign aid for 90 days, and USAID’s partners received stop-work orders. On 10 March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 83% of USAID’s programmes – some 5,200 contracts – were cancelled; the remaining programmes passed to the State Department, which absorbed the agency on 1 July 2025.

The United States had provided about 40% of the world’s humanitarian funding in 2024. In 2025, its humanitarian spending fell by about three quarters, and international humanitarian assistance as a whole was some 30% lower than in 2022, according to ALNAP. The United Nations launched a “humanitarian reset” and cut its appeals to the most urgent needs. A study published in The Lancet estimated that USAID’s programmes had prevented 91 million deaths between 2001 and 2021 – and that the cuts, if maintained, could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, 4.5 million of them children under five.

For NGOs, the blow was immediate. In a global survey by Accountability Lab and Humentum, 64% of respondents had USAID projects terminated, more than half had to lay off or furlough staff, and about a third said their organisation was at risk of closing. In a survey of 246 NGOs by the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA), two in three had received stop-work orders, which meant programmes shut down and staff laid off overnight.

For CERC, the closure took away SASA’s US$6.5 million for 2025–2027 – the largest commitment in its history, some four times its average annual budget for each of the three years. The coordinators planned in South Kivu, North Kivu and Kinshasa were never recruited, and the secondary schools of the four provinces never received their Integrity Clubs and EduCheck.

In the same weeks, the fall of Bukavu in February 2025 forced CERC to close its office there; funding difficulties then forced it to close its Kinshasa office too. The team now works remotely, and CERC’s four apps – EduCheck, HealthCheck, GovCheck and UNCAC Tracker – keep citizen monitoring going where the team can no longer go.

What was built remains. The Integrity Club model, tested in hundreds of schools and refined with the Ministry; EduCheck, run by CERC and open to every student and parent; a proposal that passed USAID’s scrutiny at every stage; and an organisation whose governance came out of due diligence stronger. CERC is looking for partners to take SASA to every school. Read more: After a difficult 2025, CERC works on remotely and keeps its partnerships.