Have foundations met their local funding commitments?

Two years ago, more than two dozen philanthropic foundations committed to prioritizing local leadership across their development efforts. But today, only one of those foundations has published data on their progress, according to a new analysis by Publish What You Fund. “We need a little bit more humility, and more people to come forward and say: this might not be perfect, but this is how we figured it out,” said Gary Forster, the chief executive officer of PWYF. “What we seem to be facing right now is very little insight into all of that.” PWYF, a nonprofit organization focused on aid transparency, has long called for donors to increase the transparency of their data. In their latest report, PWYF found the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation was the only organization to do so in a publicly accessible way, with the foundation stating its funding toward locally led organizations rose from 15% in 2019 to 35% in 2024. In December 2022, the U.S. Agency for International Development published a Donor Statement on Locally Led Development, which committed both private and public grantmakers to channel more resources directly to local groups. Twenty-six foundations signed the statement. Despite that, PWYF has found that there continues to be a lack of publicly available progress updates, standardized reporting, public grant data, and overall transparency of those commitments. And with the Trump administration’s rapid dismantling of USAID, the commitments of philanthropic organizations have never been more critical to localization’s success. “So many of these metrics are held behind closed doors,” said Anita Kattakuzhy, the director of policy at the Network for Empowered Aid Response, or NEAR, a coalition of civil society organizations from the global south. “It’s important that philanthropy can show bilateral donors what’s possible, and the more public they are about their progress and their ambitions, the more possibilities there are to build much wider systemic trust.” PWYF’s report is the latest of many that the organization has published, with another recent analysis focusing on how well five of the biggest bilateral donors were doing on localization. That report found USAID was the only prominent donor nation to publish the targets, strategies, and evidence to back up its localization commitments. In this report, PWYF states that just two foundations — the Hilton Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation — have announced a specific target for localized funding, both of which have declared their desire to achieve or surpass the same goal previously set by USAID: 25% of eligible funding directed toward local organizations by 2025. Foundations have pushed ahead on that target — and in 2023, the Council on Foundations found that 13% of money flowing from the largest 1,000 foundations based in the U.S. went directly to local groups from 2016 to 2019. That percentage surpasses even that of USAID, which channeled 11.2% of eligible funding toward local organizations in 2024. But even so, PWYF notes that the raw data for the foundations’ report is paywalled by Candid, the nonprofit that worked with the Council on Foundations to compile the analysis. The organization looked at other ways to measure transparency, from whether organizations reported to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Aid Transparency Initiative, or IATI, to whether foundations had a live database of current grants, to whether they had an indicator to report progress on local funding. Fourteen foundations received a “no” for each one of those categories. For Natalie Ross, the vice president of membership, development, and finance at the Council on Foundations, the lack of transparency doesn’t necessarily mean foundations are failing to localize funding. “What I don’t see from the foundations who made commitments is a desire to be untransparent,” said Ross. “I think it’s a realization that it’s a complicated question of how to be more locally led, and it’s not so simple to answer with a single data point.” It’s an issue that both foundations and bilateral donors have tangled with since localization efforts began. USAID has its own definition of what makes an organization local, as does PWYF. The same can be said for foundations, many of which are trying to figure out what to calculate, and how to calculate it. “What if you’re working with a U.S.-based diaspora organization that’s doing work in their home country?” said Ross. “What if you’re working with a locally led, locally registered faith-based group that is also a chapter of an international faith-based organization? When are they local and when are they not?” PWYF listed three recommendations to improve foundations’ accountability: Adopting recognized open data standards; maintaining up-to-date, publicly available databases of current and past grants; and committing to local funding targets. “USAID may no longer be in the picture, but everyone signed this donor statement as an independent organization,” said Forster. “If we don’t see progress here, and if people aren’t disclosing how they’re performing or what the problems are, it makes you wonder what the future of the localization push is.”