5 ways globaldev recruiters can advance localization efforts

Localization. That’s the answer 39% of respondents gave in an ongoing Devex survey on the question of how to fulfill an organization’s Sustainable Development Goal-related recruitment needs. While the development community still lacks a clear definition of what localization is, multiple organizations are trying to implement an agenda that puts local people at the center of their work. The United States Agency for International Development has committed to “shifting more leadership, ownership, decision making, and implementation to the local people” while the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies invests in local humanitarians. Several other organizations and donors have signed up to the Grand Bargain 2.0’s localization commitment. If more locally based people are to be driving development projects and initiatives, this should put the localization agenda into the hands of recruiters and human resource departments. “If you’re trying to become a truly international organization your workforce has to reflect that,” explained Tanvi Nagpal, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “If you’re doing work in India, the work has to be designed and led by people in India.” With that in mind, Devex asked recruiters and NGOs what they would advise in order to enable more local leadership. 1. Fill senior roles with local staff Hiring more local people isn’t going to lead to localization, said Gunjan Veda, global secretary at The Movement for Community-led Development, who believes most INGOs already have in-country staff. The problem lies in hiring them as “subordinates.” “There’s always an expat and then the local staff … who do the groundwork,” Veda said, adding that, “localization and locally led development are about power. It is not about who is in the job but rather about who decides what the job is and how it gets done.” Much of Seed Global Health’s impact and sustainability is dependent on having leadership that has “deep experiential knowledge” of the different contexts the organization is working in, said Dr. Vanessa Kerry, the organization’s founder and CEO. All of its country directors are citizens of the country in question, she said, bar one whose wife and children are from the country. Kerry, who is from the U.S., shared that, to ensure she’s being an effective leader, she asks herself regularly “what can I add that might be different or truly add value, where do I support from behind, and how do we do this together?” Shifting a headquarters’ location is another way to open up more opportunities. Historically, NGOs work has been office-based in the country in which the organization was set up, likely in Europe or North America, said Kerry. But a move overseas can mean more local hires. In 2018, the Oxfam International secretariat began its move from Oxford to Nairobi with hopes it would “help to recruit locally more easily.” Seed, which works in Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zambia, is currently exploring plans to put its headquarters in Africa, Kerry shared. 2. Be less rigid in the hiring requirements Another way to open up more opportunities for locally based staff lies in altering job requirements and assessments, Veda said. As it stands, organizations often look for “locals who are a clone of the expat … who speak a colonial language fluently, who have been educated in, understand, and uphold the dominant colonial paradigms and approaches,” she said Instead, Veda believes that lived experience, fluency in the local language, and an understanding of the local context should be valued more highly. With that in mind, if an applicant’s native language isn’t English, yet they have the experience, a typo in a CV shouldn’t necessarily disqualify a candidate, said Kerry, adding that there needs to be some thought as to what credentials truly matter. “Somebody may have been trained to be a fantastic statistician but didn’t get a master’s degree in statistics. There does need to be some leeway to those pieces,” she said. NGO Recruitment, an Australian not-for-profit recruitment agency, aims to compensate for this by asking employers to consider whether a master’s degree can be substituted with experience. “We do find that there’s a lot of unrealistic, unicorn hunting out there and we need to give people a reality check often,” said Lois Freeke, its Asia Pacific and international recruitment manager. 3. Encourage co-creation The process of co-creation has to move into and be led by low- and middle-income countries, Nagpal said. “When you think about localization you have to think about what’s available on the ground to implement that plan and who made the plan to begin with.” For too long, that hasn’t happened and has led to solutions that may not be what a community needs. “I come from India and all my life, I have seen toilets being constructed all over the country and never being used,” Veda said, adding that this problem arises because local people aren’t part of the design and implementation. “We’ve been following this top down frame of development for the longest time where we’ve believed that people ... need outside experts to come in and tell them how to lead their lives and solve their problems,” she explained. 4. Ensure fair compensation Efforts to nationalize formerly international roles are often driven by potential cost savings rather than commitment to localization, according to the State of Humanitarian Professions 2020 report. “I’ve been part of teams where local consultants are getting paid much less than international consultants and we’re doing the same work,” Nagpal said. Often, the bigger salary is because a person is being asked to move from a context where there may be functioning welfare, great health care, and social security systems to a country where they get the bare minimum, explained Jesuloba Ilesanmi, a former global recruitment consultant at NGO Recruit, Africa’s first Black-owned recruitment agency with a focus on the nonprofit and sustainable development sector. “But that's a choice that you made fully understanding that you were going to a less developed country, so you shouldn't be paid for preferences. What you should be paid for is the role and the functionality of what you're carrying out,” she said. Freeke urged recruiters to do their market research “in order to present an attractive opportunity that will resonate.” 5. Delegate hiring to the regional level Having someone conduct the recruitment process from within the targeted hiring region can also help, Freeke said, as these people are likely to better understand what will appeal to candidates, and which platforms to advertise on. For Ilesanmi, it’s less about the location of a recruiter but their “essence.” “I've spoken to recruiters that are halfway across the continent and their understanding of Africa utterly puzzles me,” she said. “But I've spoken to [others] and…[they] understand it.” Company benefits, as well as the hiring and onboarding process, will also need to be made culturally accessible and translated, Freeke said. For example, people in Japan don’t always take their holidays, making generous holiday packages less attractive. At the same time, if an organization wants a diverse candidate, it has to ensure there’s a diverse hiring panel and recruitment process so that they don’t feel tokenized, she added. While the above steps could lead to more locally led development, for Veda, there needs to be more systemic change if development work is really to be localized. “We have to recognize that our current system is not designed to be locally led and therefore what we need is more systemic change,” she said, adding that, “it requires designing a system that places local knowledge, locals and communities at the center.”