As aid budgets contract, development actors are increasingly turning to local community contributions and diaspora resources to finance public goods in fragile settings. Drawing on programme documentation, campaign-level data and text analysis of campaign narratives, we examine 173 closed crowdfunding campaigns hosted on two digital platforms which combine local community contributions, diaspora donations and donor matching funds for public projects across Somalia and Somaliland. Across campaigns, communities have agency over project selection and fundraising, yet donors determine how much communities are expected to finance, and which forms of collective action receive more favourable matching terms. These cost-sharing rules vary substantially across programmes, from fixed splits or tiered schedules rewarding project scale and inter-clan cooperation. Among projects of similar size and sector within the same programme, however, higher community shares are not associated with proportionally larger amounts raised, but with a lower likelihood of meeting fundraising targets. Raising community shares may therefore leave more projects underfunded rather than compensate for declining donor support. By revealing the gap between how much donors expect communities to contribute and how much they actually mobilise, a vital contribution is hereby made to debates on informal taxation, development finance and the political economy of community co-funding arrangements in fragile settings.

Ana Isabel López García is Assistant Professor of Global Migration in the Department of Politics at Maastricht University. She holds an MPhil in Latin American Studies and a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford. Before joining Maastricht University, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz.