What does handing over a programme to government require?

The international development sector spends a great deal of time designing programmes but sometimes considerably less time designing their endings.

This gap is where a lot of otherwise good work quietly falls down.

Handover, transition and sustainability planning are standard features of project documentation across the sector. In practice, they are often treated as a programme’s final chapter rather than a thread woven through it from the start. The result is a familiar pattern: an implementing organisation builds something effective, reaches the end of its funding and attempts to transfer ownership to a government or local institution that was never structurally prepared to receive it. Sometimes this works. More often, it doesn’t and the programme winds down, taking its gains with it.

Earlier this year, Can’t Wait to Learn completed the full handover of its Ukraine digital learning platform to the government of Ukraine – technically, legally and operationally – the first time a contextualised version of the platform has been handed directly to a partner-government. The platform is now embedded within Ukraine’s national education infrastructure, administered by Ukrainian government institutions and owned by the state. More than 250,000 children have learned through it to date, a quasi-experimental study run, and full alignment to the curriculum of Ukraine. The goal is never reach, it’s long-term incorporation into practice.

That outcome did not happen because of a well-managed transition at the end of the programme. It happened because of decisions made at the very beginning, from both the government and teams at Can’t Wait to Learn which is hosted by the War Child Alliance.

Here are three lessons from that experience that we believe could be of value to other organisations looking to support government system change.

1. Sustainability planning as a design requirement, not an exit activity

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ministry of Education and Science reached out to War Child and Can’t Wait to Learn within weeks. Not with a request to receive a product, but with a question: can we build this together? An agreement was signed in July 2022. From that point, every decision about content, data governance, technical architecture and institutional ownership was made jointly with government counterparts.

This is not how most programmes are designed. More commonly, an implementing organisation develops its approach, informed by consultation, adapted to context, and then works backward from a finished product to identify which government body might eventually take it on.

That sequencing creates a structural problem. By the time handover conversations begin, the intellectual property, technical systems and institutional relationships are already organised around the implementing organisation, not the government.

Transferring ownership at that point means unpicking dependencies that were never intended to be permanent but have become so by default.

The question of who will own this when we leave, should be asked before a single action was taken. In Ukraine, that question shaped the architecture of everything that followed. Programmes that ask this question late will find the answer increasingly difficult to act on.

Luke Stannard, the director of Can’t Wait to Learn, explains:

The goal was never simply to deliver an EdTech tool to support learning during a crisis. It was to build something the Ukrainian education system could own, sustain and grow.

2. Government is not a single entity, treating it as one often ends in failure

The assumption that “the government” is a unified actor also undermines a sustainable handover. In most contexts, it is not. Ministries are rarely unified bodies, it pays to understand that architecture and that is, in CWtL’s experience, best led by a national team. Authority over content, technology, finance, data and professional development often sit in different institutions with different mandates, different political relationships and different capacities. A programme that negotiates a handover agreement with a single ministry counterpart may find the agreement does not bind, or even reach, the institutions that need to sustain the work.

In Ukraine, the handover required three separate government institutions, each receiving a distinct piece of the infrastructure, to sign sub-agreements to the original agreement which was updated to reflect this growing complexity.

This structure emerged from a sustained effort to understand how the Ukrainian government works. By exploring who holds formal authority over what, how decisions move between institutions and where legal instruments need to be anchored. Intellectual property, server credentials and technical documentation each moved through specific legal instruments, not a single agreement.

That complexity was not a complication to be managed around, it was the actual work to get done.

For any programme seeking genuine government ownership, mapping the institutional landscape early, and designing governance structures around it, is as important as designing the programme itself. Solutions designed for an idealised government structure tend not to survive contact with the real one.

3. Sustainability must be funded, but current funding structures often work against it

Building genuine government ownership takes years of relationship, co-design and institutional negotiation. It cannot be compressed into a handover phase, and it requires funders willing to support that process.

In Ukraine, the work that made handover possible began in 2022, and involved sustained investment in joint content development, legal transfer processes, government capacity and teacher training infrastructure – much of which produced no immediately measurable “reach” figures. The anchor funders that supported this, a group of supportive, flexible donors, understood the investment they were making was in a process as much as a product. That kind of funder patience is not yet common enough in emergencies.

For bilateral donors and government funders shaping ODA education and development portfolios, the implication is structural. Programme design frameworks that require fully scoped deliverables at the point of award, or that define success primarily through reach and output metrics, actively discourage the early government partnership that makes ownership possible. Longer programme cycles, flexibility to negotiate scope with government counterparts as understanding develops, and success metrics that include institutional capacity alongside reach figures make a material difference to what the sector can achieve.

The simple question worth adding to any programme design or funding review is: if we stopped funding this, what would remain, and who would own it? If the honest answer is the implementing organisation, the programme has not yet solved the problem it set out to solve.

A different definition of success

Ukraine is not a template. Every context has a different government, a different institutional landscape and a different relationship between civil society, the state and international partners. But the underlying logic applies broadly. Programmes that treat government leadership as a design requirement from the outset are more likely to produce that outcome.

The children of Ukraine did not need a workaround. They needed a platform built with them, owned by their government and designed for their future. Now they have a long-lasting one – not because the handover was well-managed but because the programme was well-designed from the start.

For INGOs, funders and policymakers across the sector, the deeper question is whether we are willing to define success the same way: not by the reach of what we build but by what remains when we leave.

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