Earlier this month Samantha Power, United States Agency for International Development’s administrator, made a landmark speech with a number of key pledges for her agency. The most prominent was a commitment to increase funding to local partners to 25% within the next four years. Currently, around 6% of the agency’s funding goes to local partners.
Power’s ambitious plan has been welcomed by the development community, but with a note of caution. Ten years ago Raj Shah, a previous administrator, made a similar pledge, but later backed away from it in the face of opposition from within Congress and the NGO community.
One of the key entities campaigning to strengthen the USAID focus on localization is the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, known as MFAN, which promotes more effective and accountable U.S. foreign assistance.