What do community groups think of USAID's 'locally led' indicators?

When it comes to localization, Ernest Wyson is both hopeful and hesitant. Hopeful because the U.S. Agency for International Development wants half its projects to be community-led by 2030. And hesitant, because Wyson — who leads a coalition of 1,300 community-based organizations in Malawi — has heard USAID say this type of thing before. In the middle of last year, USAID followed up on its promise of local leadership with a group of indicators to measure progress. While the metrics are new, the push for progress is not — and Wyson isn’t yet convinced it will all be translated into reality. “When it comes to localization, they are talking about the successes,” said Wyson, the president of Community Based Organisations Coalition Malawi. “But in the communities themselves, we are there. And we haven’t seen a real change.” At the turn of the century, former U.S. President Bill Clinton endorsed the concept of localization through the Millennium Development Goals; five years later, the Bush Administration followed suit. In 2021, USAID Administrator Samantha Power committed to localization once again. The locally led program indicators, released last fall, were created through consultations with more than 300 local, regional, and international organizations, as a way to help make those promises into reality. To be a locally funded program — and to count toward USAID’s 2030 localization target — a project must employ at least two “good practices” across two different categories. Those categories include funding local partners, investing in local capacity, engaging communities, and creating local partnerships, which emerged after USAID consulted with organizations across the world. “A lot of the focus on localization has been: How do we equip local entities to work with USAID as a donor, without really thinking about what we need to do, as entities, to change ourselves and work more effectively with local organizations,” said Tessie San Martin, the chief executive officer of FHI 360, which received more USAID grant money than any other international nongovernmental organization in 2023. “Those indicators start to get to the heart of, are we actually changing how we do things?” The agency is trying. In recent years, USAID has elevated localization to a new level, bringing the concept back to the forefront of global conversation. It’s also begun piloting its locally led program indicators and collecting data from half the agency’s portfolio to measure how those indicators work. Local experts hope that this new approach — especially given the recent consultations — could be what changes development for good, and finally gets to the heart of effective, sustainable change: local ownership. For many, the process felt like the first time USAID had grounded its practices with input from local organizations. Sophie Kange, the executive director of the Uganda-based organization Together Women Arise, said the fact that local organizations were into the conversation speaks volumes about USAID’s intentions. “It’s a demonstration that they’re actually listening,” said Kange, who also leads a nonprofit focused on women’s empowerment in Western Uganda. “The will is there, and the efforts have been put in place. Those are the baby steps.” Even so, many others wonder how those indicators will translate into action, and what implementation will look like on the ground. Francois Pierre-Louis, a consultant for Faith in Action International’s Haiti projects, worries that USAID’s words won’t be translated into reality, especially based on what he’s seen across the island nation. True localization will mean a seismic shift in the way USAID operates, Pierre-Louis said, and a break in traditional development culture. And he’s not alone in worrying about how easy that will be. “Shifting USAID from top down to bottom up is a huge challenge,” said Gordon Whitman, the managing director of Faith in Action International, a network of faith-based groups that advocates for locally led development. “The risk of the good practices checklist is that it makes it harder to achieve this kind of fundamental change by watering down what locally-led means.” For Whitman, ticking the box on two of 14 good practices won’t necessarily mean a program was designed or implemented with meaningful community leadership. Conducting a listening tour to inform activity design, for example — one of the 14 practices — might not necessarily lead to a program incorporating community input. “If USAID’s goal is to shift power to local communities, it would be better to have a more rigorous and straightforward metric,” Whitman said. Part of his skepticism comes from the fact that USAID isn’t built to fund small. Last year, more than half the agency’s grant money — a whopping $8.8 billion — went to just 20 bilateral and multilateral organizations. The average grant provided by USAID totaled nearly $3.4 million the same year, a figure towering over many community-based organizations’ yearly budgets. “If you look at the list of practices that have been identified, it’s like: yes. They absolutely speak to elements … of what is needed,” said Gunjan Veda, the executive director of the Movement for Community-led Development, a consortium of grassroots organizations. “Really, though, it’s about how it’s implemented.”