Read on Twitter
Important op-ed. These are issues that I explore with my students as they consider a career in international development. https://twitter.com/cobrienudry/status/1360945833156476929
The op-ed briefly mentions the paperwork issues that limit directly funding local organizations. This is a bigger issue that needs unpacking. A couple of initial thoughts here.
1) There’s often discussion that local organizations do not have the capacity to manage the funds the same way INGOs can. But local organizations are also not funded the same way to buy the capacity the way INGOs do. This fact is often overlooked.
2) There are opposing forces within bilateral donors, and likely others, that make this reform difficult. Specifically, OFAC restrictions make governments and organizations understandably risk averse, but it reinforces a bias against funding local organizations.
With this and other compliance issues, I have found program and compliance are rarely in the room together when designing a program. So while there’s this flexible and local vision, the practicalities of compliance make that vision impossible to implement.
3) Attempts at localization have been surface level, and have not looked at all the layers of bias with aid systems that put up barriers to localization. After the Arab Spring, I went to Egypt to write proposals. USAID wanted to fund Egyptian orgs directly.
To do so, they tried to streamline the process. Besides that few organizations that I talked with wanted USG money, and few needed INGOs except to write a proposal in USG-speak, the few that did apply with INGOs went through rounds and rounds of questions.
While the application was streamlined, what the readers were expecting was not.
4) We need to become more aware that our nomenclature reifies bias. “Building capacity” is case in point; it shows an inherent paternalism to talk about “partners” in country this way. I’m still working through this in evidence conversations.
This points to that if we are serious about localization, it needs to be done throughout donor systems and organizations. I think it is possible, but we need to address all the barriers that create bias to reaching this goal.
