The U.S. Agency for International Development acknowledged that it still has “a long way to go” in meeting Administrator Samantha Power’s ambitious localization target of spending a quarter of its funding to local organizations, according to a report detailing its progress the agency released Monday.
The report, titled Moving Toward a Model of Locally Led Development, said that the agency provided $1.6 billion of direct funding to local organizations in the fiscal year to the end of September 2022 — around 10.2% of all eligible funding.
At the end of 2021, Power set a target for a quarter of the agency’s funding to go to local organizations by 2025, although the agency later clarified that this referred only to direct funding awards that “presumably could go to local partners,” which only covers around $16 billion of the agency’s nearly $48 billion budget in fiscal year 2022.
About the author
Omar Mohammed
Omar Mohammed is a Foreign Aid Business Reporter based in New York. Prior to joining Devex, he was a Knight-Bagehot fellow in business and economics reporting at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has nearly a decade of experience as a journalist and he previously covered companies and the economies of East Africa for Reuters, Bloomberg, and Quartz.
