The U.S. Agency for International Development’s local development agenda is a welcome push for the aid community to reflect on our goals and why we collectively do this work. The mantra has long been to “work ourselves out of a job,” but that has never been a practical proposition for companies built or reliant on their global development practice — we want to keep our jobs, after all.
Instead, we should be considering how we can work ourselves into a different job. One where global knowledge and expertise is shared across countries equally, not just from north to south; where clients are those who recognize a need for improvement, and they can access the expertise to support that improvement from whichever organization is best placed to provide it. It’s less about where the money comes from and more about meeting recognized needs.
This transition has headwinds. The global aid community tends to favor linear solutions — vaccines prevent disease, better seeds grow better crops — but sustainable change is not so straightforward. Localization requires us to embrace complexity and ambiguity even if it means success is harder to measure.