How use of language can breathe life into localization

There are increasingly strong calls to advance locally led development — the process of shifting power and resources to the communities where development work takes place. However, progress has been limited despite ambitious promises, including at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in 2016.

In 2021, the U.S. Agency for International Development set the ambitious target to channel a quarter of its funds toward local organizations, but new data from June reveal that just 9.6% of the agency’s eligible dollars made it to local groups last year, down from 10.2% the year prior.

While others are looking to not only shift resources but also staff — the United Nations Population Fund is moving a quarter of staff positions from its New York headquarters to Nairobi by 2025, and Oxfam wants to ditch the term “headquarters” all together — the structural inequalities in the aid system can only be addressed by building trust, explained Moses Isooba, the executive director of the Uganda National NGO Forum, an independent national platform for NGOs in Uganda. “What needs to be addressed is the inherent bias about treating southern [development] actors as a risk,” he said.

Devex spoke to Isooba about what it will take to truly advance locally led development, why language plays a key role in upholding current power structures, and why he helped develop a new lexicon that can help INGOs and donors do away with problematic language.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

While the movement to advance locally led development has been around for years, the majority of funding is still channeled through what you call “the INGO and aid industrial complex.” What’s needed to change this?

The INGO and aid industry complex needs to acknowledge and respect that communities are not beneficiaries, but co-investors. When it comes to development, it is not only money that counts, it's also important to appreciate that communities also have community assets. This could be in the form of money, knowledge, skills, or relationships. Once INGOs start to pay attention to these community assets, the system will start deploying community voice and community power. That’s what we need for change to happen.

What do donors and organizations in the global north often get wrong about localization?

We find ourselves in this situation because of what I'm calling the "trust deficit.” What we see increasingly — whether it's with bilateral donors or multilateral donors — is how they look at the southern actors as a risk. We've just been running a campaign called “Too Southern to be Funded,” which brings out the lack of trust and the assumptions about risk. You also hear things like “There is no capacity.” But the trust deficit and the assumptions about risk are not about technical issues around capacity, or the actual capability of southern actors to deliver — there is just an inherent bias in the system.

INGOs and the aid industry need to overcome this bias. Then, they need to make every conscious and deliberate effort to grow trust. Trust just doesn't come all of a sudden. As they say, trust comes on foot, but trust leaves on horseback. We need to make sure that we develop that trust.

Why is meaningful language change — including doing away with development jargon and creating space for local languages — a prerequisite for systems change?

Development is something that’s done in English, Spanish, and French. Yet, language sets the terms of relational engagement. If we are going to have the systems change that we want, we need to start by changing the language, reinventing the language, and removing these old hints of colonialism, in line with the decolonization agenda.

There are certain phrases and terms that we still use that mark the agenda of Western domination: poor countries, beneficiaries, and developing world. There is a subtleness in the way that we need to move away from this dichotomy of poor countries versus rich countries, beneficiaries versus providers. It introduces the binary between the West and Africa and presses a hierarchy on it, and the hierarchy is, of course, superior and inferior. The reason why we must pay attention to the language and address this binary is that it’s going to raise serious questions about the whole aid industry. Already the fact that someone is white and comes from the north means they come with power and privilege, and the fact that they speak English only reinforces that power.

We need to move away from the development jargon and not address communities as beneficiaries. These communities are investing their time, they are not beneficiaries, but co-investors. And just by accurately calling them co-investors, that in itself starts changing the dynamics. It's a bold statement that transforms development.

You have developed a lexicon that provides alternatives to words that are commonly used in global development and which are problematic. Can you tell us more about this lexicon and how you would like to see organizations use it?

Part of our work is to build a language grid, a set of words and phrases that we think are potentially pejorative, and that need to be changed. Instead of “global south,” you could say “majority world.” Instead of “capacity building,” say “capacity sharing,” and instead of referring to summer, please state the month of the year — those are just some examples.

This language grid will help to make sure that these words are identified and flagged. We are now working to socialize this lexicon. To help INGOs and donors identify this language, we are developing an intelligent website that uses artificial intelligence to actually help decolonize language. So a donor or an INGO will be able to feed a text like a report into the site, and then all those words will quickly be flagged and the tool will determine the document’s “toxicity level.”

Localization is seen as a key approach to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. How can we leverage locally led development strategies to accelerate progress on the SDGs?

If we are going to remain truly wedded to the mantra of leaving no one behind, then the first thing that we need to do is to address the issue of language. The SDGs are written by people seated in New York, and if we are going to be able to accelerate progress, the first thing that we need is to translate this into local languages. Everybody wants access to quality education and zero hunger, but the everyday work of many communities is not calibrated against indicators, people just need to understand and appreciate it in the language that they speak.

The local actors need to be the epicenter of accelerating the SDGs. We need to move away from New York, from our capitals, and start working at the subnational level with the decentralized governments and be able to work with the community structures. That, to me, is being able to breathe life into localization because you are starting to appreciate the community assets. If we are going to be able to accelerate development, the national NGOs and the communities also need to be in this ecosystem. By leveraging these community assets, by extension, we start to build citizen agency, a community voice, and community power.

The type of storytelling used to communicate social impact has itself been shaped by the external interests of the development sector. How can organizations use ethical storytelling to address these underlying biases?

We have to unlearn the way stories are being told because many of us have been socialized into the system of telling stories the way that northern actors want to hear [them]. So when we tell our stories, we're telling them to an audience in New York, in Berlin, etc. But instead, we need to be telling the stories for our people, not for somebody in the northern capital. And then the stories must be told to show impact for our people, not for somebody in London or New York. Once we manage to do that, we'll be able to tell stories that display dignity.

Dig into Roots of Change, a series examining the push toward locally led development.

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