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Those who work in the development and humanitarian sphere know that local ownership of assistance is the route to greater equity, effectiveness, and sustainability. As an Agency, USAID has embraced this understanding and redoubled our commitment to shift funding and decision-making power to the people, organizations, and institutions driving change in their communities. To underscore our commitment to this goal, we are pursuing two Agency-wide targets. First, we are striving to channel a quarter of our funding directly to local partners by the end of FY 2025. And second, by 2030, at least half of USAID programs will be locally led, in terms of setting priorities, designing activities, implementing programs, and defining and measuring results.
In a report released publicly yesterday, Moving Toward a Model of Locally Led Development: FY 2022 Localization Progress Report, we provide the first status update on USAID’s progress toward these targets. We have progress to celebrate. In FY 2022, direct funding to local partners—organizations, firms, and individuals based in the countries in which we work—reached 10.2 percent of attributable obligations. This is the highest percentage of direct local funding in at least a decade, a 38 percent increase from last year. We also provided $199 million in government-to-government assistance and another $57 million to partners working regionally. The report provides more details by sector, bureau, region, and country, and this resource on Key Performance Indicators: Direct Acquisition & Assistance Funding for Localization describes how the data are collected and calculated.
This progress is due to your efforts, especially at our Missions and overseas Operating Units, to expand USAID’s engagement with local actors, many of which are new partners to the Agency. This work is not always easy, as many of you reflected in the Customer Experience Survey. It takes a lot of staff time, creative thinking about how to reach diverse groups of local actors, and, sometimes, a new approach to thinking about risk. But progress across other pillars of our Agency-wide reform agenda continues to reinforce our efforts on localization, including through workforce investment and growth, administrative burden reduction, and efforts to become more accessible to a more diverse group of partners. We have articulated a high appetite for smart, disciplined risks when it comes to working with local partners. And we are integrating localization into guidance, training, and resources, many of which can be found in the Localization Playbook on MyUSAID, to ensure staff have the information and skills needed to advance locally led development throughout acquisition and assistance processes and the Program Cycle. Taken together, these actions are laying the foundation for continued progress toward our localization targets.
Equally important to USAID’s goal of direct funding is the goal of shifting power and enabling more local leadership of USAID-funded programming. The ability to influence how development happens for one’s own organization or in one’s own community is at the heart of locally led development. With this progress report, we outline a new indicator to track progress toward this objective across the many ways we engage with local actors, whether they are recipients of direct funding, subcontractors or subrecipients to an international partner, participants in a USAID program, or members of a community affected by USAID programming. The indicator, which was developed based on input from USAID staff, local partners and community-based organizations, and U.S.-based implementing partners, will track the use of 14 good practices for enabling local leadership at different stages in the award process or Program Cycle. I encourage you to read the report for more details.
We will report initial data for the local leadership indicator in our FY 2023 localization report, recognizing that this first year of data collection will be a learning year. We will seek to leverage existing data collection and reporting systems and processes where possible, but, as this is a new measure, we will also rely, in part, on new forms of reporting by Missions and Operating Units. Additional guidance on this indicator is coming soon, and we hope you will join us for a webinar on July 19 to learn more about this new measure.
The timebound, measurable targets we have set for our localization goals are important tools to help track and motivate our progress. But these two targets cannot fully encapsulate all of what it means to advance locally led development. There are many ways USAID’s work can create space for local leadership, not all of which are easy to quantify. How we work matters, too—how we come to the table as a partner, with an understanding of local systems and with humility and flexibility; a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion; and respect for the local changemakers who are driving progress in their communities.
Thank you to all those who have helped us realize meaningful gains in this first year. To be sure, we have a long way to go. But initial signs of progress show, thanks to your dedication and commitment, that we are headed in the right direction.
—Deputy Administrator Paloma Adams-Allen
Comments and questions concerning this message may be directed to: localization@usaid.gov.
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