What do the British public really think about shifting the power?

We’ve been underestimating the British public. The data proves it.

Here’s an uncomfortable question for anyone who works in this sector: what if the biggest barrier to changing how we tell stories about development was never the public, but us?

Not their appetite. Not their attention span. Not some imagined resistance to nuance. Us. Our comfort with a formula we knew was tired but kept reaching for anyway because it had always worked, or because we told ourselves it had.

Back in 2023, we commissioned some research to test that discomfort properly. Nothing glamorous about that sentence, I know. Organisations commission research all the time and most of it goes nowhere near a headline. But this one landed differently, and it has not stopped mattering since.

Working with the Development Engagement Lab at UCL and the University of Birmingham, we asked what the British public thinks about who should lead international development. Not a quick poll or a single focus group, but a rigorous mix of qualitative and quantitative research – in-depth conversations alongside nationally representative surveys – drawing on a wide range of voices across the British public. What British people actually think, in their own words, and at scale.

What came back was too good, and frankly too inconvenient, to file away. The public is more open to locally-led development than we have ever given them credit for. And because the data held up, we wanted to do something braver with it than publish a report and move on. We wanted to test it in the wild, with real money and real campaigns on the line, and bring others along to do the same.

That is how the Shifting the Power Communications Lab came about. Comic Relief brought together six other organisations (Christian Aid, Save the Children, WaterAid, ADD, Age International and Plan International UK) and gave each a small grant, expert coaching and genuine license to experiment in live fundraising campaigns. This was not a research report intended to end up on a shelf or people’s desktops. It was seven organisations agreeing to test new narratives with real audiences and real money on the line, and to be honest about what happened.

What we found

In 2023, 34% of people told us local development organisations should take the lead, with organisations from countries like the UK playing a supporting role. Another 33% wanted equal partnership between UK and local organisations. Only 8% thought UK organisations should be in charge.

We retested the public attitudes research in December 2025, half expecting the numbers to have softened. They had not. The findings held, and in places they had strengthened.

By 2025, support for local leadership had risen to 37%, equal partnership sat at 27% and the UK-in-charge model had crept up slightly to 11%, although still the preference of a small minority. Two years of genuine turbulence in the aid sector, and polarisation at an all-time high, and the public’s core instinct had barely moved.

The public also has clear views on why; 57% think local organisations are more knowledgeable about what their communities actually need. On effectiveness, a quarter said local organisations were more effective outright, and another 25% said both were equally effective, which means half the public already rates local organisations as at least as effective as their UK counterparts. UK organisations still score better on accountability and transparency in people’s minds, but even that gap is narrower than we may like to believe.

Long-term impact, capacity building and local expertise

The researchers weighed two models against each other across five dimensions. The traditional model is the current, largely UK-led approach to aid, where funding and decisions sit mainly with UK organisations and delivery runs through familiar structures of reporting and accountability. The Shift the Power model flips that, putting local organisations in the lead on decisions, priorities and how funding is used, with UK partners playing more of a supporting role. The two dimensions that mattered most to people were value for money from the traditional model and capacity building from the Shift the Power model, followed by strong reporting and monitoring, then locally-led decision-making.

The public is not picking a side between old aid and new aid. They want value for money and capacity building. That is not a contradiction. That’s a clear steer on what to build.

Then there is the message testing, which is where things get properly interesting. Researchers tested 54 different messages with the public, covering every aspect of the Shift the Power model. The number one ranked message read: “We need to empower and uplift local communities in developing countries, so that they become self-sufficient in decision-making and funding development projects.” Not a mention of crisis. Not a single image of need. Just capacity and self-sufficiency, and it topped the list. The sixth-ranked message followed the same thread, telling people that local organisations should determine their own priorities and how aid is spent.

The pattern held across all 54 messages. Anything emphasising long-term impact, capacity building and local expertise performed well. Anything built around abstract talk of power, hierarchy or the wider colonial history of aid switched people off, even among audiences who broadly supported the underlying principle. People are not rejecting the politics. They are rejecting how we have chosen to talk about it. Tangible, outcome-focused language about sustainability and effectiveness beats conceptual language about redistributing power, every time.

These messages don’t land the same way with everyone either. Reform UK voters, for instance, responded more positively than the general population to the message that aid should go directly to local organisations, 69% compared to 58% among the public overall.

Messengers mattered just as much as the words. The control group here was simply asked how likely they were to donate to an international development organisation with no prompt at all, and they reported an average propensity to donate of 31%. Researchers then tested seven messenger types against that baseline, and only two beat it with statistical confidence: the aid “beneficiary” or community member, at 38% propensity, and the frontline worker, at 42%. Every other messenger performed no better or worse than the unprompted control. Not celebrities. Not UK spokespeople. Not institutions. The people closest to the work, speaking for themselves, are the most effective messengers.

And through the Comms Lab, we saw all of this borne out in practice, not just in theory. Locally led storytelling outperformed celebrity-fronted content, even in live fundraising campaigns. Sit with that for a second. That is the headline that should give the whole sector pause. We have spent decades treating crisis and pity as the only reliable route to a donation.

Why this matters beyond fundraising

There is a wider cost to getting this wrong, and it is not just reputational. Africa No Filter’s research on the cost of media stereotypes shows that biased media coverage, dominated by conflict, poverty and corruption, inflates the perceived risk of doing business in Africa. This distorted narrative is estimated to cost African economies up to US $4.2bn a year in inflated borrowing costs alone. This is money that could be going into education, healthcare and infrastructure, lost because of a story the world keeps telling about a continent which does not reflect its reality.

Our sector has played a part in that story. Every time we default to the familiar narrative of need, crisis, distance, we reinforce a version of the world that has real economic consequences for the people we claim to be supporting.

The Comms Lab and the DEL research findings tell us we do not have to keep doing this. The public is ready for something more honest, and there is a genuine cost to not making that change.

Where this leaves us

None of this points to a single perfect message. What it gives us is a set of principles to work from: authenticity, respect for local expertise, clarity about impact, and confidence that the public can handle a fuller, more honest picture.

Support for locally-led development is not unconditional. It is strongest when we can show it is effective, accountable and built for the long term.

This is the thinking behind Comic Relief’s Shifting the Power programme, our ten-year initiative with the FCDO and partners across Ghana, Zambia and Malawi. It is built on the belief that the communities closest to the challenges are best placed to lead the solutions, and that those of us in the UK have a responsibility to reflect that truth honestly in how we speak to the public.

We took a risk in 2023 by asking a question we were not sure we wanted the answer to. The answer turned out to be more hopeful than we expected. The public was ready before we were. Now the only question worth asking is whether we are finally going to act like it.

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