Inside USAID's new 'locally led' indicator

When Samantha Power, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, outlined a “new vision for global development” in November 2021, her announcement that the agency would direct a quarter of its funding to local organizations by 2025 garnered much of the attention. But that goal was accompanied by another target, which USAID partners have been eager to learn more about. Power pledged that by the end of the decade, half of USAID’s programs would “place local communities in the lead to either co-design a project, set priorities, drive implementation, or evaluate the impact of our programs.” It has taken a while for the agency to develop a more specific framework for what exactly that commitment entails. The unhurried rollout is largely by design, according to Sarah Rose, USAID’s senior advisor for localization. It has involved an extensive consultation and qualitative analysis process aimed at sifting out the key characteristics of local leadership — and then distilling them into indicators that can be used to assess USAID’s projects. The result — or at least the first iteration — is a Locally Led Programs indicator that USAID released in October. It is framed around 14 different “good practices,” grouped into four different categories. For a project to be considered locally led, it must employ at least two of those practices, across two different categories. Rose spoke to Devex about how USAID will use the locally led indicator, where the agency currently stands when it comes to locally led programming, and how this new tool relates to the broader localization agenda. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. How did you settle on two indicators being the criteria for local leadership, and what level of ambition does that represent in comparison to how USAID operates today? We picked two — and across two different categories — with the idea that if USAID and an implementing partner is doing a couple of these different things across a couple of different kinds of categories, that is an indication that locally led development and local leadership is a key part of the programmatic approach. But let me just underscore something here, too. The locally led programs indicator, it's not a policy. It's not guidance. It is an indicator. If an activity is doing a couple of these 14 things, it is likely that USAID and the partner team is really being intentional about working together to put local actors in the lead. Do you know where USAID stands today in terms of the percentage of its programs that are locally led? We are just closing out the data collection of the first pilot project so we don't have any data to share on that yet. We have a progress report that we anticipate will come out early next year. And in that progress report, we will have a lot of information and analysis on the data that we collected during this pilot process of the locally led programs indicator that will accompany the reporting that we will also do on our direct local funding indicator. I do want to underscore that this is definitely a pilot. We have a built-in intentional space for learning and for adaptation. We started to collect data from about half of the agency's overall portfolio. That includes about a third of missions covering all geographic areas, as well as about half of the portfolios of three of our pillar bureaus, Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, Global Health, and the Bureau for Humanitarian Affairs. Those were the three participating pillar bureaus that are going to report on half of their portfolios. Who is principally responsible for assessing and reporting back on whether activities are locally led? At this time, there is no expectation that any implementing partners will provide reporting for this indicator. This is completely done by staff based on existing materials and understanding of a program that they have. How are you ensuring that this isn’t about checking the boxes on these “good practices,” but actually doing things that have a significant, meaningful bearing on the way that power operates in the delivery of these projects? The focus needs to be on not just doing a practice, but rather knowing what good practices for elevating local leadership really fit with a particular project — and then doing those practices well in a way that really does elevate that local agency and decision-making over the programming that we have. An important complement to tracking these practices is ensuring that staff have a sense of the full array of practices and tools at their disposal as well as the features of the local systems to inform the practices that mission staff might adopt for any given activity. USAID has been providing central guidance as part of rolling out this indicator, this pilot process, to be able to support these practices. But really almost all of the practices that are included in the locally led programs indicator are drawn from existing agency efforts to incorporate local leadership into programming, including practices that are promulgated, for instance, by Local Works and the New Partnerships Initiative. These teams, in particular, have case studies and they have guides for missions on practices like local capacity strengthening and being accountable to local communities. These teams can also offer technical support to help these things happen. These are obviously all good practices. We also hear stories about practices that inhibit local leadership in development — things like local organizations being treated unfairly during proposal development processes, or information asymmetries, or burdensome reporting requirements. Is there a corresponding list of “bad practices” that USAID and its partners should avoid? This locally led programs indicator is a set of 14 good practices. This is not a comprehensive overview of all of the ways that USAID as an agency could act to advance locally led development. It is a menu of options to think about which might be applicable at certain times. Advancing locally led development is really about the process in which local actors set their own agendas and solutions, bring capacity, leadership, and resources to bear to make those solutions a reality, and there's a lot of ways that that can happen. Thinking about the broader change towards localization, that involves things like broader systems and cultural change as well. One of the things that we are working on is messaging to staff to limit reporting requests to just those that are required in regulations as a way to help reduce the burden of reporting, not just on the local partners, but all partners as well. Update, Dec. 22, 2023: This article has been updated to clarify when the Locally Led Programs indicator was released.