USAID, Norad and partners to empower local development partners to promote long-term sustainability and impact on community

The world’s development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding challenges are vast and complex, with local implications. Equally, there are increasing opportunities to address and overcome these challenges, but success hinges upon enhanced collaboration and cooperation between donors and the people, institutions, and communities who address and are impacted by these challenges every day. In doing so, donors must acknowledge and respect the dignity, agency, priorities, knowledge, rights, and aspirations of those people and communities.

To those ends, we will pursue the following actions to foster locally sustained change that is tied to each country’s unique context. These actions build on previous donor commitments to advance locally led development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding efforts, including those outlined in the Paris Declaration (2005), the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (2011), the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015), the Grand Bargain (2016), the Grand Bargain 2.0 (2021), the OECD-DAC Recommendation on Enabling Civil Society in Development Co-operation and Humanitarian Assistance (2021), and the Locally Led Adaptation Principles (2021).

We commit to:

1. Shift and share power to ensure local actors have ownership over and can meaningfully and equitably engage in development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding programs. Supporting locally led development requires rethinking our roles as donors; understanding and valuing local knowledge, capacity, and expertise; and integrating diverse local perspectives (including those of marginalized and underrepresented groups) into all aspects of the efforts we support. Decisions should be made in partnership with those who will be affected by them. We will work to prioritize and reinforce local leadership and ownership, and reposition ourselves and other international actors as supporters, allies, and catalysts of a more inclusive, locally led, co-created, and sustainable approach to development.

2. Work to channel high quality funding as directly as possible to local actors while ensuring mutual accountability for the effective use of funds, management of risks, and achievement of development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding results. This shift will require a longer-term development perspective, more flexible mechanisms, and support for organizational development and capacity strengthening. Implementing this approach will require creativity and innovation to address structural barriers to local actors’ access to funding and alignment with local partners’ goals and capacities. It will also require building trust, simplifying reporting requirements, and reexamining the role of intermediary organizations.

3. Publicly advocate for locally led development using our convening authority; our partnerships and networks; enhanced cooperation with national and subnational authorities, community leaders, and civil society; and our voice in international fora and multilateral institutions. This will require intentional and consistent engagement with local actors, including sharing our platforms with local partners rather than speaking for them.

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