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We need aid with focus on quality over speed and quantity - book

by Rosie Pinnington
Wednesday, 26 November 2014 10:41 GMT

A boy looks from his temporary shelter at a Rohingya refugee camp as Myanmar's government embarks on a national census, in Sittwe, Myanmar, April 2, 2014. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun

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* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

One of the problems is pressure to spend quickly and see quick results, coupled with increasingly stringent donor reporting requirements

By Rosie Pinnington

A different way of directing overseas aid is surveyed in a new book published this week, ‘Local First in Action: unlocking the power to get things done’.

Based on 8 months’ research across the development, peacebuilding and humanitarian sectors, the book presents examples of aid projects that are locally led, with international funds being directed and deployed by local organisations in the recipient countries.

The aim is to help people on the receiving end of aid to drive and define how change happens in their own societies.

The study shows examples of donors and international organisations allowing their local partners to design and shape development or peacebuilding strategies according to their own local priorities.

This approach sees the international community identifying and supporting existing capabilities and resources in recipient countries, rather than simply providing external expertise and aid funding. It is an approach championed by the Local First initiative.

For instance, the DANIDA Peace Security and Development Programme in Mombasa gave their civil society partners one year to reshape an initiative originally designed by the Danish Government to combat global terrorism through addressing the radicalization of youth along Kenya’s Coast Province.

Rather employing the more standard approach of using local partners to implement the programme on its behalf, DANIDA handed the design over to local people – recognising that being relevant and responsive at the local level was the best way to address its own global security concerns.

Some of the models show that being ‘locally led’ can mean working in a way that is less risk averse and more open to including actors that others would consider too dangerous to work with.

For instance, the DANIDA programme allowed its local partners to establish their own networks, which included religious leaders and even terror suspects. As one member of a peacebuilding organization that features in the book said: “We have been putting our feet where we’re not supposed to for a long time now.”

Across all of the models, the donors and international NGOs that are enabling locally led change were found to be commonly working to the following principles:

  • Prioritising the deployment of local capabilities, skills and resources over the external provision of aid money and expertise
  • Flexibly adapting to local priorities, contexts and realities
  • Facilitating cumulative change in-country over time, and learning from successes and failures along the way
  • Providing support in a timely and responsive way
  • Broadening the definition of success by balancing tangible with less tangible goals
  • Promoting local agency and accountability through listening and participation

At the centre of nearly every one of these models is the simple principle that in order to be led by local realities, actors and priorities, those wishing to help countries develop must be flexible.

Closely connected to flexibility is the understanding that there is no neat, linear path towards change.

Donors can facilitate rather than drive change, through adapting to context and continually adapting, readapting and learning (from both successes and failures) along the way.

This seems like common sense, but increasingly stringent bureaucratic control, led by a ‘value-for-money’ culture among donors in recent years, does not leave practitioners with the room to be locally led.

In many ways these Local First principles resonate with broader initiatives towards ‘localizing aid’ and ‘doing development differently’. A couple of the models explored in the book draw from research at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) into ‘locally led, politically smart’ aid.

This means a willingness on the part of practitioners to engage in the politics of complex development challenges at the same time as creating the space for local problem-solving.

Examples such as the DfID-funded Pyoe Pin programme (which links together civil society groups in Myanmar) indicate that donors can be effective relationship-brokers, bringing together networks of local actors from across government, media and civil society to push forward institutional reform.

Rather than do away with aid entirely, Local First has found that there are better ways of doing aid.

It is not so much aid that is the problem, but the processes through which aid-givers decide what is needed and how to provide it.

One of the biggest problems is the pressure to spend quickly and see quick results, coupled with increasingly stringent donor reporting requirements.

Part of what is needed is longer, slower aid, where the focus is on quality over speed and quantity.

This new book offers valuable insights into models for that approach.

Rosie Pinnington is the author of ‘Local First in Action: unlocking the power to get things done’, published by British NGO Peace Direct.

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