You manage a $50M humanitarian portfolio. Your mandate: save money and improve outcomes. Ten scenarios. Real trade-offs. No easy answers.
10 scenarios · No sign-up · Get your Grand Bargain score
← X-axis: Cost-efficiency
↑ Y-axis: Local leadership & sustainability
The evidence increasingly shows that funding local and national actors can be more cost-effective, more responsive to context, and more sustainable than heavily intermediated international models — while also strengthening trust and ownership at community level. Where markets function, cash-based assistance often delivers better value than in-kind aid, combining lower delivery costs with greater dignity and choice for affected people.
A decision-making simulation for humanitarian desk officers and program managers. Ten scenarios grounded in real evidence. Real trade-offs between efficiency, local leadership, quality, and donor comfort.
The humanitarian system knows what needs to change. The Grand Bargain — signed in 2016 by 30 major donors and aid organisations — set a clear target: channel at least 25% of humanitarian funding directly to local actors. Nine years later, the actual figure is 0.4–0.6%. The system knows the evidence. It still doesn't move.
This game puts you at the moment of decision — where the conventional choice is genuinely tempting, career-safe, and what your donor expects. The Grand Bargain choice is what the evidence supports. You don't know which is which until after you've made it.
The goal is not to make you feel bad about the system. It is to make the logic of localization and nexus approaches feel real — through consequence rather than argument.
Each scenario is scored on four dimensions. The game shows you two — Cost-Efficiency and Local Leadership — plotted on a BCG-style grid. The other two (Humanitarian Quality and Donor Comfort) appear in the consequence and report.
How many people and outcomes you achieve per $1M. Driven by: local intermediaries, cash where markets work, fewer layers, lower international staffing costs.
How much power, capacity and ownership sits with local actors. Driven by: local NGOs as primary recipients, multi-year funding, integration with national systems.
Technical quality, safeguarding standards, conflict sensitivity. Minimum threshold: ≥3. Below this triggers a quality penalty in the report.
How comfortable a major donor feels signing off. Often inversely correlated with Grand Bargain alignment. The game makes this tension explicit.
The four quadrants of the BCG grid: Grand Bargain Stars (efficient + locally led), Good Intent, Poor Value (locally led but costly), Efficient but Fragile (lean but unsustainable), Aid as Usual (the status quo trap — inefficient and externally led).
Ten contexts: Ukraine, South Sudan, protracted displacement, rapid onset flood, camp exit, portfolio reforms, and more. Each has a budget at stake and a savings target.
Unlike the other Nonprofit Builder games, the scores are visible. This is deliberate — desk officers have the evidence. The question is whether they act on it. Each option shows cost-efficiency and local leadership scores. You choose knowing the trade-offs.
The conventional choice is shown honestly — it often works short-term and protects your career. But the longer-term cost to affected populations, to sustainability, and to the Grand Bargain commitments becomes visible. The grid position shows where this choice lands in the portfolio.
Every Grand Bargain choice adds to your running savings total. By scenario 10 you can see how much of the $10M target you've unlocked — and how much was left on the table.
Your report names your profile (Grand Bargain Pioneer through Business as Usual), shows your portfolio position on the grid, maps your choices to specific Grand Bargain commitments, and provides an honest assessment with three questions for your next team discussion.
Tell us what worked, what didn't, or what's missing.