Earlier this month, USAID Administrator Samantha Power made two significant commitments targeting localization. First, within the next four years, 25% of all funding would go to local partners — a leap from the current 6%. Second, by the end of the decade, 50% of the agency’s programming would be led by local communities — from design, prioritization, implementation, to evaluation.
The U.S. Agency for International Development provided around $21 billion a year of funding in the fiscal year 2020 through a mixture of grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts. The first two groups are collectively known as assistance funding. Different datasets suggest that assistance funding accounts for between $14 billion and $15 billion of agency spending.
This analysis looks at how much of that assistance funding goes to local organizations based in lower- and middle-income countries. The analysis also looks at where the agency delivered the highest proportion of local funding, and who the top partners were.