Chapter 14: Exiting and Handing Over¶

On November 8, 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, which Filipinos call Yolanda, crosses the archipelago. On the island of Panay, about two hours' drive from Iloilo City, the community of Santa Rita, in the municipality of Anilao, has some 300 households. Most lived from small-scale fishing near the coast: enough to eat, and a little money from the surplus sold at a nearby market. The typhoon swept the boats away.

Clubs in South Wales, tied to the region by an old Group Study Exchange, decide to help with their Philippine partners. With Inner Wheel and Rotaract, they raise about $100,000 once matching funds from the district and the Rotary Foundation are counted. The Rotary Club of Iloilo becomes the host club. Together, they choose to fund boats, engines, and sets of nets for some fifty families, about 17% of the community.

The plan does not stop at the boats. It calls for reviving the cooperative, which will own the boats and will have to make enough profit to repair and replace them, perhaps add more, and fund a few school scholarships. The Iloilo club teams up with the University of San Agustin, which brings business expertise and training. The municipality and the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources advise the project from start to finish.

At the end of 2018, five years after the typhoon, the 55 boats are officially handed over to the Santa Rita fisherfolk association, with Rotarians from both countries present. One of the beneficiaries sums up the wait: "Typhoon Yolanda took away everything nearly six years ago. It's only now that we are able to go fishing daily again because of the Rotary project." Another talks about the training they received, which taught them to make their activity sustainable, "so that we don't only work for today, but for the coming years."

On handover day, the project does not end. It changes owners.

What the scene teaches¶

The article that tells the Anilao story is a firsthand account, written by a Rotarian from the sponsoring club in the magazine of Rotary in Great Britain and Ireland. It gives no catch or income figures, and no evaluation of the project was found for this book. So we do not know whether the cooperative repaired its boats. But the way the project is built teaches three things, each verifiable in the source.

The exit was written into the project. As the article describes it, the project said who would own the boats (the cooperative), who would pay for their upkeep (the fishing profits), who would train the managers (the university), and who would advise (the municipality and the fisheries administration). Four questions, four answers, and none of them is called "Rotary."

Ownership is the heart of the exit. What a grant transfers is assets, accounts, responsibilities, far more than some abstract skill. In Anilao, the official handover covers boats, to a named association. Note, too, that the source speaks of the cooperative in the plan and of the fishermen's association on handover day, without saying whether they are the same body. That vagueness is exactly the question an exit plan must settle in writing.

Recovery is long. Five years between the typhoon and the handover of the boats. An exit strategy that assumes a twelve-month project does not describe the reality of an economic recovery; it describes a budget cycle.

The principle: the exit is prepared on day one¶

Three ways to exit¶

Among the humanitarian references on exit strategies is a practical guide published in 2005 by C-SAFE, a consortium of three international NGOs, including CARE and World Vision, backed by USAID, which itself builds on a 2004 technical note from the FANTA project. It defines exit as the withdrawal of all externally provided resources from a program area, and the exit strategy as the plan that organizes this withdrawal without compromising the goals achieved, so that progress continues. It adds a point that heads off a misreading: "The purpose of an exit strategy is not to hasten the exit." Exit has no value in itself; it serves to make results last.

The guide distinguishes three approaches, which this book renders as follows.

Approach	What it means	When it fits
Phase down	fewer resources, taken over by local organizations	a step before the other two
Phase out	leave without handing the activity to anyone	when the aid was not meant to last
Phase over	hand the activity to a local institution	the rule for a recovery project

For a club, phasing out outright is the exception: a one-time cash transfer, a single distribution. Anything that must outlive the project (a credit fund, a cooperative, a marketplace, a training center) calls for phasing over, often preceded by phasing down.

Set the criteria at the start¶

The sources agree on timing. The April 2008 guidance note of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee's Cluster Working Group on Early Recovery (CWGER) calls for clear exit criteria to be defined "at the beginning" for each recovery program. The C-SAFE guide puts it more bluntly, as a lesson drawn by its participants: a detailed exit plan "really should be developed at the 'Entry' point." The Minimum Economic Recovery Standards (MERS) call for designing activities so that exit is "a natural and clear transition," and specify that grants must be time-limited.

The C-SAFE guide gives a benchmark, specific to the US food aid programs it studies: for a one-year recovery program, write the exit strategy within the first six weeks; for a five-year program, within the first six months. This is neither a general standard nor a Rotary rule, but the order of magnitude is useful: the exit is written at the start, not in the last quarter.

Three families of criteria¶

When to exit? The guide proposes three families of criteria, which can be combined.

A time limit. Every program, whether relief, recovery, or development, has a duration set by its funding.
Results achieved. The impact indicators of the monitoring plan (Chapter 13) can serve as exit criteria. A footnote in the guide flags the perverse effect: beneficiaries have sometimes avoided acquiring assets so as to stay on distribution lists. A badly chosen exit criterion rewards dependency.
Benchmarks. Measurable steps in the handover: a management committee trained, an account opened in the cooperative's name, a first financial year closed without support, a maintenance contract signed.

The guide also warns that funding cycles do not always match needs. Its example: the harvest would be the right time to exit, but the donor's fiscal year does not allow it. A club knows this constraint by another name: the Rotary year. A president changes every July 1; a fishing season or a harvest does not. The livelihoods guidelines of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) draw a direct instruction from this: do not design an exit strategy that ignores seasonal factors.

Budget the exit, and what comes after¶

An exit costs money. The C-SAFE guide asks you to draw up the budget for the exit strategy, including the cost of each exit activity and of monitoring, and points out that these activities often require funding to strengthen local partners and to monitor after the project ends. It recommends exiting in stages, site by site, to apply the lessons of the first sites to the next ones, and keeping in touch with communities after the handover.

Finally, it makes an admission: since funding almost never provides for coming back after the end, exit strategies are "rarely evaluated." To find out whether an exit succeeded, it proposes three questions, to be asked a year or two later: have the effects been sustained or expanded? Do the activities continue, in the same form or another? Do the systems put in place still work? A club that budgets a follow-up visit two years after the handover will be able to answer. Most projects will never know.

When reconstruction stops¶

A recovery project is not the only thing that ends. Reconstruction itself ends, and with it a whole economy.

In Aceh, after the December 2004 tsunami, the government reconstruction agency operated until April 2009. As early as 2007, the multi-donor fund that financed a large part of the effort found that the restoration of productive sectors had focused mainly on physical assets, and warned: "Once the reconstruction is no longer driving the economy, the economy in both regions is likely to stagnate and further drive up unemployment, unless economic recovery and development receives strong support now."

Construction sites employ masons, carpenters, haulers; they keep materials suppliers, canteens, and equipment rental firms busy. The day the last site closes, that demand disappears. In Nepal, an organization that had trained masons for reconstruction acknowledged afterward that they had few job prospects once the project was over, because livelihoods beyond reconstruction had not been planned (Chapter 7). In the Philippines, in Tacloban, families that received monthly transfers from February to July 2014 saw their income fall back by the same amount at the end of the program, except those that had started a business (Chapter 4).

The lesson applies to your own project: the end of your funding is, for the beneficiaries, a small end of reconstruction. What must replace it is prepared while it lasts.

A successful closure: Re:START¶

In Christchurch, the container mall on Cashel Street (Chapter 9) was never designed to last. It opened on October 29, 2011, eight months after the earthquake, run by a trust that grew out of a committee of merchants and property owners. In 2014, its northern part moved across the street to make room for construction, with a public grant. On January 31, 2018, after 2,000 days in operation, far longer than planned, it closed to make way for what some call its natural successor, a covered market.

No independent evaluation says how many Re:START merchants survived, and this book gives no figure for it. But the shape of the exit is instructive. The closing date was not set in advance: it followed a criterion, the availability of a permanent site to take over. That is the difference between an exit set by a calendar and an exit set by a result. In a recovery, the second is almost always the right one, provided the criterion was written down from the opening.

What does not survive, and why¶

Evaluations describe exit failures more often than successes. Three mechanisms keep coming back.

The asset with no owner. The C-SAFE guide notes that many community facilities built under food for work programs were later left to fall apart, because the community did not feel enough ownership to maintain them. It distinguishes the activity from the exit strategy: in Zimbabwe, World Vision rehabilitated fifteen cattle dip tanks with 360 workers; the rehabilitation was the activity, while training the management committees and supporting local veterinary services formed the exit strategy. Building or buying is not exiting.

The artificial collective. In Leyte province, after Haiyan, a project of the International Labour Organization (ILO) entrusted farmer associations with farming contour-planted plots. The independent evaluator judged that group farming was unlikely to continue after support ended, and that the sites would be abandoned. But on half of the 24 sites, progressive farmers were already applying the technique on their own land. What survives is what people adopt for themselves, not what the project organized for its own sake.

Support that leaves with the project. The final evaluation of CARE's program after Haiyan, which restarted hundreds of collective enterprises and women's businesses, rates sustainability as "expected," anticipated rather than measured. It warns that technical, marketing, and financial support to businesses "is projected to diminish without the support of facilitating partners," and recommends multiplying local business support providers. It names the possible relays: the Department of Social Welfare and Development and its livelihoods programs, the Department of Trade and Industry's one-stop business support centers, local cooperatives.

A reference study on sustainability after exit, carried out by Tufts University for the FANTA project and published in 2015, could not be consulted for this book (the review that cites it refers to a 2016 summary). Its framework is known here only secondhand, through a 2025 review devoted to health programs: four components to sustain after exit, motivation, resources, capacity, and linkages. This book says no more about it and cites none of its results.

What the Rotary Foundation requires¶

The Rotary Foundation has made sustainability an eligibility condition. The global grant Terms and Conditions, in their July 2026 version, define it this way: "Sustainability is the capacity for outcomes to be maintained locally and to serve the community's continuing priorities." The Six Steps to Sustainability sheet uses the same definition and breaks it into six headings: know the community, encourage local ownership, provide opportunities to learn, buy local, find local funding, measure your results.

The Foundation's Code (October 2026 edition, section 33.070) spells out what projects must cover. Two of its six dimensions bear directly on exit: funding, since communities must be able to keep the project going "without ongoing financial support from The Rotary Foundation or other Rotary sources"; and motivation, since they must take ownership of the project when it is completed. The same section recommends monitoring that confirms the improvement, "ideally for three or more years."

The community economic development area of focus guidelines (April 2024) are more direct: "The Foundation won't consider projects without a clear plan for sustainability." They ask for a two- to four-year plan showing how the community will replenish funds after the grant, and add in parentheses a sentence every club should reread: "The Rotary Foundation and clubs cannot provide indefinite support."

Three rules in the July 2026 Terms and Conditions make exit concrete:

Nothing belongs to Rotary. The grant cannot fund items that would then be owned by a district, a club, or a member (2.KK). In Anilao, the boats went to the fishermen's association, not to the clubs.
The final report says how results will last. It must explain how the results will be sustained over time (8.Q).
Microcredit requires a written exit plan. The final report of a microcredit project must contain the baseline data, the end data, and "an explanation of the exit plan" (11.N).

These rules can change: check them in the Terms and Conditions in force on My Rotary; Appendix E shows where to find them.

What the club does¶

Who to hand over to¶

The successor depends on what the project created. The table below brings together the cases covered in this book; it does not claim to be exhaustive.

Successor	What it takes over	What to check
Producer cooperative or association	boats, equipment, shared stock	bylaws, accounts, upkeep funded by the activity
Local government or administration	a market, a training center	line in the budget, ownership in writing
Microfinance institution	a credit fund, clients	crisis plan, credit kept separate from relief
Merchants' association	a temporary site, a common fund	closing date and criterion
Local business support provider	advice, training, networking	business model without grants

For a microfinance institution, the MERS give the selection criterion: prefer those with the capacity, scale, and resilience to keep serving their clients in times of crisis, and with procedures to separate their regular financial services from relief activities. For a local government, the C-SAFE guide cites an account from the World Food Programme: in Namibia, after a drought in 1989, the government created an emergency management unit with WFP support, and WFP then closed its office; according to a WFP representative interviewed in 2005, the unit was still functioning.

Six questions before handing over¶

The C-SAFE guide lists six questions to consider before any phase-over:

How strong is the community's sense of ownership/commitment to continue program activities?
To what extent does the community value program activities? What is the level of demand for the "phased over" services?
Do community members, groups and service providers have the knowledge and skills needed to implement the program activities?
Do the local organizations implementing the phased over activities have sufficient institutional and human resource capacity?
Are the organizations responsible for implementing phased over programs resilient to shocks and changes in the political and social environment?
Is there a viable plan to generate the consumable supplies (such as the food or agricultural inputs) that are required to implement activities?

The fifth question takes on special meaning after a disaster. The cooperative that takes over your boats, the credit union that takes over your credit fund, live in an exposed area. They will face the next typhoon, the next flood. A solid exit also prepares the successor for the next disaster, which is the subject of Chapter 15.

The IFRC checklist¶

The IFRC livelihoods guidelines (2010) sum up the stance in three don'ts: do not let the population believe you will stay forever; do not assume you will achieve sustainable livelihoods in a short intervention; do not design an exit that ignores the seasons. Their checklist has ten questions. Five are especially useful to a club:

how long do the groups created by the program need to become self-reliant?
does the exit timetable take the seasons into account?
are clear benchmarks set before activities are handed to partners?
who needs to be informed of the exit strategy, and when?
who owns which assets once you have left? The checklist takes the example of a rebuilt market: does it belong to the municipality, the local Red Cross, or the community?

That last question is the Anilao question. Ask it for every asset your project funds, and get the answer written down.

The local club does not leave¶

The vocabulary of exit was written for organizations that leave a country. Your situation is different. The international partner club exits: its funds stop, its visits grow less frequent. The local club stays put, and its members will run into the beneficiaries at the market for years. This book proposes distinguishing three roles.

What the local club stops doing: managing the project's money, deciding in the successor's place, signing for it, paying for repairs out of its own pocket.
What it keeps doing: visiting, listening, connecting people with bankers, suppliers, buyers; this is the "continued contact" the C-SAFE guide recommends after the handover.
What it keeps hold of: the project file, from one club president to the next, and the monitoring of a few indicators for at least three years, as the Foundation's Code recommends.

The danger for a local club is twofold: leaving too early, like an NGO whose contract is ending, or never leaving, staying on as the unofficial manager of a project that no longer belongs to it. The C-SAFE guide names a third trap, one clubs know well: covering a lack of sustainability by simply finding a new donor to pay for inputs. A second grant to replace worn-out nets is not an exit strategy; it is the admission that there was none.

The pitfalls¶

Pitfall	Why it happens	Remedy
Writing the exit in the last quarter	you think about starting first	criteria and successor in the grant application
Exiting on the funding end date	the Rotary year and the budget require it	benchmarks and seasons; build in a margin
Leaving ownership unclear	it seems obvious	a written handover deed, asset by asset
Creating a group for the project's needs	it is easier to manage	strengthen a structure that existed before
Funding a new donor for inputs	you want to save the project	a model where the activity pays for upkeep
Never going back to check	nothing is budgeted after the end	a follow-up visit planned and funded
Staying in control after the handover	habit, attachment	written roles: what the club stops, continues, keeps

What your club now has in hand¶

This chapter adds the exit plan to the recovery file: the exit criteria and how they combine (time, results, benchmarks), the target date and its seasonal margin, the successor for each activity and each asset, the handover deed, the transfer budget, and the monitoring planned after the end, with the name of whoever will do it.

Heading	Question	Typical example
Criteria	what must be true before leaving?	cooperative closes a financial year without support
Successor	who takes over each activity?	fishermen's cooperative; municipality for the shed
Assets	who owns each piece of equipment?	boats in the cooperative's name
Timetable	when, and in which season?	after the fishing season, withdrawal over six months
Follow-up	who comes back to check, when, with what budget?	club visit at one year and two years

In Anilao, the boats were handed over five years after the typhoon, to a named association, with a university and an administration that had followed the project from the start. We do not yet know what became of those boats; what we do know is that they had an owner. One last question remains, and it closes the loop of this book: once it has exited, what does your club do so that the next disaster finds your area better prepared?