What happens when the funding ends?
Designing lasting change in the fight against illicit financial flows
By Lina Lozano, DAI
Lina Lozano draws on three years of implementation experience on a program tackling illicit financial flows (IFFs) in Latin America to explore what it takes to build solutions that endure beyond the life of a program. To sustain impactful measures against IFFs, we must ensure that public servants, institutions, and regional partners have not only the tools, but also the mandate, capacity, and incentives to continue using them. Sustainability is what turns technical assistance into enduring institutional progress and what ensures that the gains made today continue to strengthen democratic governance, accountability, and security in the years ahead.
The massive scale and impact of illicit financial flows
Illicit financial flows, as defined by the World Bank, mean money that is illegally earned, transferred, or used. This may be because the underlying acts are themselves illegal, such as drug trafficking, corruption or tax evasion, as well as funds that are illegally moved across borders or used for illegal purposes, including the financing of organized crime.
The scale of the problem is enormous. Global Financial Integrity (GFI) valued the global ’market for crime’ at between USD1.6 trillion and 2.2 trillion annually in 2017. Updating this figure is inherently difficult—illicit flows are deliberately concealed, cross multiple jurisdictions, and constantly evolve to evade detection. What is clear is that the problem is growing: in 2025, the drug trade alone is estimated at between USD840 billion and USD1.44 trillion. And the consequences are transnational: in the United Kingdom, organized crime costs the economy at least £47 billion a year, while in the United States, drug trafficking and money laundering generate hundreds of billions in illicit revenues annually. Around the world, every dollar lost to corruption or money laundering is a dollar diverted from healthcare, education, and public security—deepening inequality and eroding citizens’ trust in the state.
Latin America: a global hub of illicit financial flows
Latin America is currently experiencing a rise in illicit economies. Drug trafficking reached a record high of 3,708 metric tons of cocaine production in 2023.
The political environment compounds the challenge in a region characterized by high levels of political instability and corruption. Peru alone has had eight presidents in ten years, several of whom have been imprisoned for corruption. Ecuador and Colombia have experienced extreme political violence, including the assassination of presidential candidates. These are not isolated events; they reflect a broader pattern of institutional fragility and democratic erosion that make sustained reform significantly harder to deliver and maintain.
Crucially, these flows do not remain within the region: illicit profits move through international financial systems, ending up in banks and assets in developed economies or passing through offshore financial centers. Because criminal economies are transnational, the risks and harms they generate cannot be confronted by any single country in isolation.
Without deliberate attention to sustainability from the outset, even strong technical interventions remain externally dependent and struggle to outlast donor funding.
So what is being done?
In response, governments including the United Kingdom and the United States, alongside multilateral organizations such as UNODC, have invested heavily in multi-year governance programs to combat illicit finance across Latin America and beyond. These programs have introduced sophisticated methodologies, investigative tools, technologies, and training aimed at strengthening institutions and improving cross-border cooperation. They have also supported efforts to strengthen legal and institutional frameworks, enhance coordination between countries, and build the capacity of public institutions to detect, investigate, and respond to illicit financial flows.
Are these efforts working?
Despite significant investment, progress is often limited and short-lived. The problem is rarely that programs are technically weak—the methodologies and tools introduced are frequently relevant, innovative, and well-designed. Rather, the challenge lies elsewhere: sustainability is treated as an exit activity rather than a core design principle. Leadership transitions are frequent and unpredictable. Incoming administrations may deprioritize—or be unaware of—initiatives developed under previous leaderships. Political polarization discourages continuity. Technical staff often lack the incentives or institutional support needed to champion new practices over time. All this means that new methodologies rarely become embedded in formal institutional processes in ways that allow them to survive beyond the program that introduced them.
Without deliberate attention to sustainability from the outset, even strong technical interventions remain externally dependent and struggle to outlast donor funding. Drawing on implementation experience from the Tackling Illicit Financial Flows (TIFF) programme, implemented across three countries in Latin America between 2022 and 2026, the following three principles offer practical lessons for donors, program managers, and MEL specialists designing or overseeing long-term governance interventions.
Applying three key principles can yield more lasting impact
1. Political Economy Analysis and Systems Thinking
Addressing IFFs requires an understanding of the political economy of organized crime. Embedding technical assistance requires a clear grasp of institutional incentives, power dynamics, and leadership priorities. Tools and methodologies will not take root where there is no internal demand for them. Over three years, TIFF worked with more than eight directors of Financial Intelligence Units and multiple Attorneys General from different political lines. To navigate this, TIFF applied a political economy approach to identify opportunities, build institutional ownership, and sustain reform. This included:
Aligning activities with the work plans and priorities of both incoming and outgoing leadership.
Co-designing methodologies with technical teams to build ownership from the start.
Monitoring leadership transitions to anticipate and manage political risks.
Leveraging diplomatic support from donor-country embassies to reinforce the relevance of new tools during periods of change.
Despite multiple leadership changes across counterpart institutions, this approach enabled key activities to remain relevant and continue—because they were anchored in institutional priorities, and not the preferences or idiosyncrasies of any single individual.
2. Solutions are more likely to last and get stronger when institutions –– not external partners –– become the drivers of knowledge and practice
For change to last, public institutions must be able to understand, value, apply, and replicate the tools they adopt. Continuous and strategic communication with leadership and technical teams is encouraged to ensure that results are visible and recognized internally.
This has included:
Demonstrating the practical benefits of new methodologies through real cases.
Supporting technical teams to integrate new tools into institutional work plans.
Encouraging institutions to lead their own training, dissemination and replication efforts.
Communicating results at high levels to reinforce institutional relevance.
3. Institutionalization is not a single action, but a network of political, legal, operational and relational mechanisms that reinforce each other
A key lesson learned is that sustainability is strongest when tools and methodologies are embedded across the system. This requires multiple, reinforcing mechanisms:
Administrative acts
Where appropriate, institutions need to be supported to formalize methodologies and tools through administrative acts such as resolutions or directives. These measures ensure continuity despite turnover and political change and protect any new tools.
Partnerships and governance structures
Solutions are far more likely to endure when institutions collaborate with each other and with external partners. Examples of this kind of collaboration include:
Inter-institutional agreements and governance mechanisms for coordination.
Informal coordination structures when formal agreements are politically sensitive or slow.
Partnerships with donors, universities, and knowledge management centers to continue, scale, or replicate tools.
To conclude: it's a long-term horizon
Countering illicit financial flows is long-term, politically sensitive work. It unfolds in environments marked by leadership turnover, shifting government priorities, institutional fragility, and limited trust between actors. In these contexts, lasting impact cannot be treated as a final phase or an exit strategy. It must be deliberately designed into programs from the outset, shaped by political realities, and reinforced at every stage of implementation.
For donors and practitioners, the challenge is not simply to demonstrate results within a funding cycle, but to ask harder questions from the very beginning: Who will carry this work forward? What incentives will sustain it? And how will it survive inevitable transitions? When these questions are embedded into program design, technical assistance becomes more than a temporary intervention — it becomes a foundation for lasting institutional reform and a stronger return on investment.
Lina Lozano is a MEL and Change Management Specialist with more than 13 years of experience supporting institutional and behavioural change across complex governance programmes in Latin America. She specializes in using evidence, learning and political economy insights to help institutions adopt, institutionalize and sustain new practices. Her experience spans FCDO-, USAID- and IDB-funded programmes, combining MEL, change management and stakeholder engagement to turn technical assistance into lasting institutional change.
