USAID rolls out 7 principles for strengthening local organizations

The U.S. Agency for International Development has launched a policy outlining the principles governing how it will strengthen the ability of its local partners to tackle development challenges. The Local Capacity Strengthening Policy, released Wednesday, is a key plank of USAID’s drive to increase its engagement with local organizations in response to a series of pledges on localization made by Administrator Samantha Power in a speech at Georgetown University last November. The policy is a high-level document outlining a vision for how USAID wants to work with local organizations, expressed through a series of principles for effective programming and equitable partnerships. USAID has so far received a broadly positive response from within the development sector for the policy’s tone, language, and ambition. But experts expressed caution about whether the principles can actually be put into practice, given the difficulty of changing longstanding USAID processes. The principles are: • Start with the local system. • Strengthen diverse capacities through diverse approaches. • Plan for and measure performance improvement in collaboration with local partners. • Align capacity strengthening with local priorities. • Appreciate and build on existing capacities. • Be mindful of and mitigate the unintended consequences of our support for local capacity strengthening. • Practice mutuality with local partners. The policy also includes an implementation plan to show how USAID wants those principles to be put into practice. But in a public call Wednesday to launch the policy, USAID officials said that more is needed to be done to define what success would look like, how implementation would be achieved, and how USAID itself might be held accountable for others on its progress against its goals. “I read the policy last night and it was excellent. … It was a milestone for the agency. If they actually implement this it would be terrific.” --— Justin Fugle, head of policy, Plan International The policy makes some substantial revisions based on feedback USAID received after it published a draft version in February under the name the Local Capacity Development Policy. It received more than 600 pages of response, including 40 standalone reports, prompting USAID to release a separate summary of feedback. Among the changes was a name change to reflect that plenty of capacity already existed in local organizations. On Wednesday’s call, USAID leaders spoke about the importance of strengthening locally led organizations. Mark Meassick, USAID’s deputy assistant administrator at the Bureau for Development, Democracy and Innovation, recounted how in Kenya and Uganda, where he had worked, decades of capacity-building training had not produced results. He said the agency saw progress only when local partners were empowered and learned by mentoring, network building, and by doing and failing. “I hope the policy will help us break the perpetual cycles of capacity strengthening, rinse and repeat over and over, allow us to get out of our local partners' way, see them implement policies, and see real locally led sustained change,” he said. NGO experts who attended the call praised USAID’s positive response to feedback and said the consultation process has been a model of effective work with partners. “I read the policy last night and it was excellent,” Justin Fugle, head of policy at Plan International, told Devex afterward. “It was a milestone for the agency. If they actually implement this it would be terrific.” Jenny Russell, senior director of policy and advocacy at Save the Children, said “the million-dollar question” was whether the policy could actually be implemented as intended. She said the policy document contained only three pages of information about how it might actually be put into practice, and that more information was needed. “I'm actually having trouble translating the principles in this document for where they want to make real practical change,” she said. “Where do you want to be at the end of this administration? What is the practical change you want to see coming out of the policy? And I feel that is still a little bit foggy to me.” Jenny Marron, senior director of public policy and government affairs at InterAction, the membership body for U.S. NGOs, said that she felt a key next step would be to see the agency’s forthcoming Acquisition and Assistance Strategy. The strategy was also released in draft earlier this year, but has been subject to significantly less consultation.