We often talk about “localizing” aid as an ideal solution for bringing funding closer to the communities concerned, and giving them back control over their future. But in reality, this ambition comes up against a cumbersome and costly chain of accountability: from citizens to states, from states to donors, from donors to international NGOs, and finally at the very end to local organizations, which are often fragile and poorly structured.
At the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, the Grand Bargain initiative set a clear goal: to ensure that at least 25% of humanitarian aid is allocated as directly as possible to local actors by 2020. The idea was to reduce intermediate costs and improve aid effectiveness.
Standards such as the Sphere Handbook also stress the importance of centering decisions on affected communities, and of strengthening both local involvement and accountability. In practice, however, they remain unclear as to how to proceed, how to simplify procedures and how to empower local players.
As for the Core Humanitarian Standard, it too calls for support for local capacities and accountability to communities, while acknowledging that such good intentions all too often come up against the complex realities on the ground.
I’ve seen it all with my own eyes.
In 2000, in the Gnagna region of Burkina Faso, I joined a team where half-yearly reports and training workshops sometimes took longer than the intervention itself. Meanwhile, our village partners had no accounting system in place, and no staff trained in monitoring and evaluation.
In 2004, with MSF in Sudan, at the height of the Darfur emergency, the administrative procedures of the HAC, UN, donors and NGOs could delay an intervention by several weeks or even months. In the meantime, IDPs were dying of dehydration, or creating their own emergency response to immediately meet the vital needs of their neighbors, with an invisible chain of solidarity.
2005, with the 9ᵉ EDF in Côte d’Ivoire, each disbursement for the emergency program passed from Brussels to the local delegation, then to the State (CONFED), then to the international NGO, then to an umbrella organization, before finally reaching the farmers’ groups. The result? Six months of waiting and dozens of pages of reports and audits for each tranche of funding, totally sidestepping the constraints of the seasonal crop calendar.
Still in 2020 in Mali, an EU resilience program Despite a solid method, the multiplication of reports and bridging mechanisms (clusters, donors, consortium), and despite the establishment of a unified monitoring platform, cumbersome procedures have further slowed down each phase of implementation, and the State is absent from the appropriation and continuity of achievements.
These few examples are only a sample of a much wider experience. They simply show that localization is not just a matter of funding percentages: it’s above all a delicate balance between administrative simplification, shared monitoring tools and strengthening local skills.
For localization to become a sustainable reality, it is urgent to :
1. Alleviate accountability requirements Harmonize and mutualize expectations between donors, clusters and partners to free up valuable time for field work.
2. Invest genuinely in local capabilities Not just in money, but also in know-how, management and tools, right from the project design stage.
3. Test and deploy innovative technological solutions Blockchain, digital money transfers, collaborative platforms: all levers to fluidify flows and guarantee greater transparency.
4. Building trust The true measure of localization is the ability of local players and communities to make their own decisions, to manage funds themselves, and to be accountable and transparent.
5. Ensuring sustainability Any action can only endure if it is part of a framework of local ownership: either via a structured community system, or through a state mechanism capable of absorbing and sustaining the gains made. Any action that does not come under the heading of “life saving” must be designed to guarantee this prerequisite of ownership. This means, of course, that the time required to prepare and formulate a proposal needs to be extended, with specific funding and dedicated resources that go beyond a simple “proposal writer”.
Rethinking every link in the design and accountability chain, from the taxpayer to the village cell, is the only way to move localization from a mere slogan to a concrete, sustainable transformation driven by the players themselves.
Hamada AG AHMED
Hamada AG AHMED
Expert in Humanitarian/Development Programs and Contextual Analyst.
AG AHMED Hamada (aka “Wandey”) is a French-Malian expert in humanitarian management, contextual analysis and development program coordination. He holds a Master’s degree in Humanitarian Management and Development Action from the University of Paris 12 (UPEC) and a diploma from the Bioforce Institute in Lyon, and has over twenty years’ experience in emergency aid, resilience and local capacity building, both in the field and at the headquarters of leading international organizations.
After initial missions in Central Africa and the Sahel with several international organizations, he successively held strategic positions as Head of Mission, notably for the French Red Cross, before taking up the position of Head of the West Africa Desk, where he oversaw humanitarian and development operations in several Sahelian countries. He led the implementation of integrated programs combining health, nutrition, food security, climate change adaptation and early recovery.
He served as Crisis Analytics Team Leader at Mercy Corps, leading a humanitarian analysis and operational research unit covering the central Sahel (including Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso). In this role, he coordinated the production of strategic analytical reports, based on mixed methodologies, to inform humanitarian responses in complex and unstable environments.
In 2019, he joins Groupe URD in Mali as coordinator of the KEY program, funded by the European Development Fund, where he supports Malian authorities and technical partners on strategic planning, results-based management and capacity building with a strong focus on practice analysis and operational agility.
A committed analyst, he is interested in the structural dynamics and weak signals affecting vulnerable populations. He has led several prospective studies, the most recent of which focuses on the forgotten human and environmental heritage of Lake Faguibine, in collaboration with AFD. He advocates an integrated approach combining local knowledge, foresight tools and scientific data to strengthen resilience and territorial governance in fragile areas.
Articles by Hamada Ag Ahmed previously published in Défis Humanitaires :
The resilience of populations and the importance of (very localised) governance in the Sahel.