A robotics group offers ideas to 'shift power' to drive localization

Most efforts to move toward localization, or locally driven development, have failed. Despite growing calls for money, and agency, to be channeled directly to organizations in low- and middle-income countries, there is resistance to change among many of the large international NGOs that have benefited from having more centralized control.

WeRobotics, a not-for-profit organization that seeks to “democratize” access to drone technology through its Flying Labs Network, believes its approach could offer a way forward.

In the hope that other groups will shift power and resources toward locally led organizations, WeRobotics has shared details of its “inclusive networks model,” which has brought about the creation of individual Flying Labs — members of the Flying Labs Network that apply emerging technology to sectors including sustainable development, humanitarian aid, and public health — across more than 30 countries since 2016.

While just 5% of funding from international organizations directly reached local and national groups in 2020, WeRobotics transferred 38% of its revenue to Flying Labs that year.

Last week, WeRobotics featured a new report during an event on the sidelines of the Skoll World Forum. It highlighted the Flying Labs Network’s model, which seeks to “shift power with proximate leaders and redefine what it means to be an expert.” But to make this shift toward locally led development, larger INGOs need to convince a range of stakeholders, including staff members and management, to transition away from decades of top-down approaches and restructure their operational and financial models.

WeRobotics says organizations can pursue an inclusive networks model by bringing together various existing groups committed to a common purpose and supporting them through a decentralized power structure and shared governance model.

The organization used a report from the Overseas Development Institute on localization “as the journey towards locally led practice” to analyze its process and share what it has learned.

The idea behind the inclusive networks model is to foster open collaboration that allows local organizations to grow and learn collectively, according to the report.

Uttam Pudasaini, executive director of Nepal Flying Labs, has been working on drones for crisis mapping, disaster response, and public health since a 2015 earthquake in Nepal. But his organization would not be where it is now without the support and know-how that he receives from the Flying Labs Network, he said. When faced with a challenge, like a current project involving a medical drone, Pudasaini can get in touch with other Flying Labs that have tested similar technologies to learn from their failures and successes.

“When we try to start things from scratch, there is a lot of resources that’s required. But the flexibility of Flying Labs’ model helps you to tie up with existing organizations, and then you can scale up easily,” Pudasaini said at the event last week.

This collaborative approach resonates with Tania Cheung, a senior network development adviser at Start Network — a global network of aid agencies that identifies localization as one of the ways to transform humanitarian response.

“For too long the internationally-led humanitarian sector has sought to mold local organizations in our own image – our ways of working, our compliance systems, our ways of being ‘accountable’ to communities,” she said in an email to Devex. “Local organizations have been increasingly pushing back against this colonialist approach to partnership and funding, and it’s time they are listened to.”

Start Network is shifting from a centralized network of largely international NGOs to a “decentralized, dispersed, decolonized” network of locally led humanitarian hubs worldwide, she said.

Still, while there is growing interest in localization, many of these efforts fail to actually shift power, which is why WeRobotics is also promoting what it terms a “power footprint model.”

INGOs “tend to have a disproportionate amount of power” — or authority, control, and influence — compared with local and national organizations, said Patrick Meier, executive director at WeRobotics.

Organizations tend to ignore their so-called power footprints, considering projects successful even when they exacerbate their power, he said at last week’s event.

Meier wants INGOs to make their power footprints visible and shift toward “a more equitable distribution of power that favors locally led practice.”

WeRobotics is working with INGOs to develop practical metrics to measure their power footprints, he said.

Barriers to shifting power from international to local organizations include “centralization, organizational culture and inertia, path dependency, politics and ego,” Meier told Devex in an email.

Truls Neubeck, a development strategist at Save the Children Sweden, acknowledged the “gap between ambition and reality” in terms of the organization’s vision for localization.

“We see risks of how to continue to provide all the resources and knowledge and know-how from Save into this new landscape where the local actors are the lead,” he said at last week’s event.

Even as the world changes, organizations like Save the Children may be hesitant to change, Neubeck said, because they want “a predefined outcome” that makes them “sure of success.”

Tyler Radford, executive director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, or HOT, said he found Neubeck’s remarks to be a helpful articulation of the tension facing INGOs.

“Many larger INGOs have a very long history of successful implementation,” he said in an email to Devex. “Will the big INGOs be able to re-envision themselves as networks, as movement-spreaders, as advocates for a cause, while actually being comfortable with lower overall operating budgets and less direct responsibility for implementation of programs?”

To make this transition, INGOs must trust that solutions can be recommended, developed, and carried out by people on the ground who are wrestling with specific problems, Radford said.

HOT is in the midst of its own evolution, with scaled-up support for local communities, to map an area of 1 billion people in the next few years, he said.

The organization takes inspiration from the model of the Flying Labs Network, which learns from its member organizations worldwide and comes together for core functions like fundraising, Radford said.

For INGOs to become networks, they need to shift how they set goals, make plans, and develop programs and projects — starting with the needs of the people they aim to serve, he added.

As organizations like WeRobotics, HOT, and Start Network pursue their own models for localization and collaborate with other groups seeking to do the same, it remains to be seen whether ambitious ideas like the power footprint project will actually work in practice.

“Given that the initiative seeks to reduce the power footprint of the powerful, will there be sufficient political will amongst the international agencies to engage genuinely in the process?” Cheung of Start Network said. “It will likely require an initial coalition of the willing to pioneer the process and generate enough momentum to bring it to the mainstream – and hopefully not dilute any of its principles along the way.”