USAID tops localization efforts as other major donors fall short

For years, donors have pledged to transfer a greater share of resources to local organizations. But according to a new analysis, only one of the five most prominent donor nations has published the targets, strategies, and evidence to back up those commitments: USAID. “USAID is the only agency that has set an ambitious target and a clear way to measure it,” said Sally Paxton, the U.S. representative of Publish What You Fund, an organization that advocates for transparency within the aid sector. “The question was: Has anyone else done that? And I think the answer here is, pretty much no.” PWYF looked at the aid agencies of Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, assessing the publicly available information for each. The report wasn’t meant to compare donors, it stated, but to “show what information is publicly available,” and to illustrate the “different stages of progress” among the agencies. All five of the donor nations selected have committed to localization through various statements, and all five were identified as “more progressive” in their approach to localization, according to PWYF. Even so, the analysis found that the U.S. Agency for International Development was the only donor that published the funding targets, methodology, progress reports, and data to back those endorsements up. That includes the agency’s 2021 commitment to steer 25% of its eligible funds to local groups by the end of the decade, along with the reports regularly published by USAID to track localization progress. Though the agency is still far from its 25% goal — with the latest data stating USAID had channeled just 9.6% of its eligible dollars toward local groups last year — Paxton told Devex USAID is well ahead of other agencies that have committed to localization on paper, but not in practice. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” she added. “Unless there are strategies and directives and targets that are measured and made public, [localization] will just not stay a priority.” PWYF looked at three different pillars to assess publicly available information: definitions, measurement, and strategy. For the first, the organization found that USAID and just one other donor agency, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, have developed a definition of locally led development or localization, while USAID is the only agency to have defined what a local organization actually is. For the second pillar — measurement — PWYF found that USAID was the only donor nation to tick the box on every category. That included whether the agencies had targets on how much money they wanted to channel toward local organizations, a methodology to track progress on that target, and other indicators. Most donors do not publish data on funding flows to local organizations, the report found, making it difficult for third parties to verify where money is going. USAID was the only agency with a funding target, methodology, progress reports, and accessible data on localization, while the other four donors lacked “the necessary internal data systems” to effectively monitor localization progress, PWYF stated. The agencies fared slightly better when it came to strategy and policy, with four of the five donor nations implementing funding initiatives that include partnering directly with local and national organizations. But the report stated that USAID and DFAT were the only two agencies to have developed a “separate, dedicated strategy outlining their approach” to localization. When it came to PWYF’s visual matrix, the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office was the only agency completely in the red: The multibillion-dollar agency did not tick the box on any of the analysis indicators. Global Affairs Canada and the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs followed right behind FCDO, with both the nations’ aid agencies in the red except for a single shared category — implementing funding initiatives to partner directly with local and national organizations. The aid agencies of Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom could not be reached for comment on this story. “Political leadership is a problem,” Gary Forster, the chief executive officer of Publish What You Fund, told Devex. “These governments are signing the commitments, but they’re not standing up and saying, we will explicitly report on how much funding we give to local organizations.”