The days of traditional donors doling
out money to poor nations as mere beneficiaries, and international
organizations telling them how to solve their problems — rather than listening
to them to figure out what the true needs are — are definitely over.
Participants
at the Devex Partnerships Forum in Manila agreed on Tuesday that local
partnerships are without a doubt not just the future, but already the present
of doing good, especially in Asia-Pacific, where the development landscape has
changed dramatically over the past decade and many developing nations are
graduating to middle-income status.
With that
in mind, the question is not anymore whether to “go local” — it’s how to get it
right, make it truly sustainable and thus achieve local ownership of
development programs.
For
instance, the U.S. Agency
for International Development has committed to spending 30
percent of its funds on so-called “local solutions” as part of the USAID
Forward reform agenda.
“USAID has
heard you,” said Denise Rollins, the agency’s acting assistant administrator
for Asia, explaining that USAID has “made a dramatic shift in the way we do
business” by now pursuing an “aspirational” target for at least 30 percent of
all its funds to go to local partners.
However,
some local partners are more suited to this goal than others. Find out more in
the below Google Hangout.
And not only donors are fully “going
local” these days — multilateral institutions like the Asian
Development Bank and implementers like RTI
International have been doing it for many years.
“For us
it’s different, because our shareholders are the countries themselves,” noted
ADB Vice President for Operations Stephen Groff, while Paul Weisenfeld, vice
president for global programs at RTI, said that “everywhere we work,
partnerships help us fill gaps.”
RTI,
Weisenfeld added, always looks for long-term, strategic relationships in its
local partners with a special focus on innovation, no “short-term marriages”
like the development community used to support in the past.
Solid links
are furthermore even more important now in the region, where many poor
countries are graduating to middle-income status.
“Ultimately,
our money is just a drop in the bucket” for these nations, commented Paul
Hutchcroft, lead governance specialist at the Australian embassy in Manila.
Rollins agreed and gave the example of India, where USAID is encouraging
high-net worth individuals to become more engaged in charity.
So keeping
all of this in mind, where do these experts see localization 10 years from now?
After a
representative from Engility suggested
a future in which international organizations will deliver specific
professional services to governments, Rollins predicted that USAID will likely
focus less on service delivery and more on technical assistance, but that will
depend on their partner governments and how the agency engages with them.
“Our
strategies are not developed in a box,” she said.
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