Before collaborating across countries and governments, and before the concepts of aid or development cooperation even existed, local individuals and organisations around the world have always been working on solutions to their challenges from the ground up. However, in Official Development Assistance (ODA), cooperation is usually between governments, and local voices are frequently ignored. This problem is acknowledged by major international institutions: The World Bank, UN and OECD have all committed to horizontal cooperation and delegating more decision-making power locally. In 2016, a “Grand Bargain” was struck between numerousdevelopment institutions to channel at least 25% of all humanitarian funding directly to local responders. However, real change has been slower: By 2023, the figure stood at just 1.2%, and other sectors have seen similarly low results.
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Back to the roots
Local actors in developing countries have been calling for greater voices in designing development policies and projects for decades, and a significant body of research confirms the need for locally-led development ratherthan top-down, donor-driven aid. According to Charles Kojo Vandyck, Author and Head of the Capacity Development Unit at the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI), “those most impacted are hardly ever in the spaces to influence decisions. If we get invited, it’s often after decisions are already made, mainly to implement predefined activities. We must shift the focus from doing things for people to supporting them to lead their own change.”
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has developed eight principles for locally-led climate adaptation, including flexible, long-term funding and delegating decision-making to the lowest appropriate level, and similar guidelines exist for other development areas. Significant hands-on knowledge is concentrated at the grassroots level, so some development practitioners argue that by failing to incorporate it, valuable opportunities are missed. Anil Gupta, Author, Founder and Secretary of the Gujarat Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network (GIAN) and the Honey Bee Network, and retired Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, explained that “people in every village are trying things out, experimenting, exploring, looking at local biodiversity and finding its uses, finding local solutions to local problems. Unfortunately, local experimentation has been ignored in development. It is almost always on distributing assets, providing jobs, income, and so forth, but not letting people innovate to find their own solutions.”
This neglect of local knowledges means that effective solutions developed within a community often remain there and cannot be scaled or shared with other communities facing similar problems. Civil society organisations everywhere are working to change this by building systems of knowledge exchange and sharing to connect local actors and solutions across regions. For example, Gupta told us how GIAN, “collected the papers published on the knowledge of the people, translated them into local languages and shared the combined knowledge back with them during shodhyatras, modern-day pilgrimages to unearth grassroots innovations and traditional knowledge.”
Trust-based giving
While many grassroots projects start as business enterprises and are thus self-financing or are funded through mutual aid or local NGOs, achieving scale often requires external financial support. This is where advocates say unrestricted, long-term and trust-based funding becomes important. As Nicola Banks, Professor at the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute and Co-Founder and Director of One World Together, explains: “Tomorrow, there might be a crisis you need to adapt to or a new strategic area to explore, because that’s what your community needs. But in traditional funding systems, there’s no room for that dynamism, for changing strategies if something else works better or if a new opportunity arises. They are built on the idea that we can’t trust local organisations that look different, act different, and do so because they are truly rooted in their own lived experience.” Theexperts we spoke to agreed that this lack of trust often stems from a misperception that local organisations lack the capacity to find and implement their own solutions and must be monitored closely to ensure accountability. But as Vandyck told us, “local organisations are deeply accountable to the people in ways that external actors aren’t. These people are their neighbours, their families. There’s a strong incentive to use resources responsibly and to focus on long-term impact, because we live with the consequences of our work every day.”
Additionally, they stress that short-term, administratively heavy and project-specific funding exacerbates capacity constraints by merely keeping organisations afloat rather than helping them flourish. To secure funding, organisations must fit into specific, donor-determined boxes, or, as Dr Yohanis Riek, Founder and Board President of Yo’ Care South Sudan and physician, frames it: “we have a compliance- rather than impact-driven system. As local actors, we must do what the donor requires to get funding again next year. That can lead to overlooking the outcome to just focus everything on compliance.”
Grassroots humanitarianism
While grassroots initiatives exist across all sectors and contexts, in fragile settings where traditional institutions are often constrained by safety procedures or the absence of a stable government to partner with, the humanitarian work of civil society organisations becomes particularly invaluable. Dr Eva Khair, physician, Founder and Director of Women4Sudan, Humanitarian Health & Partnerships Advisor at Humanitarian Action for Sudan and Conflict & Humanitarian Parliamentary Advisor to the United Kingdom, explained: “In the context of Sudan, relying on the UN is ineffective because humanitarian access is politicised. The country is split into different administrative regions, so working with the national government, as the UN does, only gets you access to some people. We need meaningful relationships between multilaterals or donor government and local civil society, to fund and work with those mutual aid groups tackling humanitarian work, healthcare, education, food security, sexual violence, human rights, everything.” Civil society organisations are uniquely positioned to recognise and adapt to local needs, but the short-term funding they receive often focuses on mitigating acute problems rather than building long-term prosperity. Riek believes that “we must promote resilience, localisation, other adaptive mechanisms that strengthen the system rather than always just doing crisis management. Building local capacity requires adequate, flexible and long-term funding that is not defined by the priorities of the donor. If you are adequately funded, you have the capacity to make change.”
Similarly, local organisations often lead climate change adaptation and natural disaster management, which, given its unpredictability, also requires flexible funding and local decision-making. Banks told us that, “in Livingston, Zambia, our partners had 20-hour blackouts every day because of an extended drought. Without electricity in the office, no work could be done. With our flexible funding, they just installed a solar panel to get the office back up and running overnight. So that became way more valuable than thousands of pounds earmarked for specific purposes, purely because it enabled them to do what was needed to get things started again.” There is also significant potential for knowledge-sharing between communities in different climate conditions; for example, drought-prone areas have amassed deep knowledge of water conservation and management that can help communities where water scarcity is a more recent problem, and the same holds for regions at risk of flooding, extreme temperatures, or other climate impacts.
Towards a new development
With development cooperation currently in crisis, it is becoming increasingly clear to stakeholders across the field that approaches need to shift. Simultaneously as traditional donors reduce their ODA, developing countries and local organisations within them are building their own solutions and demanding that their voices be heard and taken seriously. Despite funding cuts, global and local geopolitical instabilities, increased climate risks and other challenges, grassroots organisations around the world are displaying impressive creativity, commitment and adaptability. As Vandyck put it, “I don’t think it’s healthy to frame developing countries only through a lens of crisis. Amid all these challenges facing us, what you see is unprecedented resilience. People are vociferous about their rights and about finding local solutions to the problems they share.”
To scale these local solutions and tap their full potential, a diverse and innovative range of development modalities is required, including traditional ODA dispersed more directly and with fewer bureaucratic hurdles to the local level, triangular and South-South development cooperation, and grassroots initiatives. Financial support from wealthy countries remains essential, but by rethinking the methods and daring to act and distribute resources more locally, more could be achieved with less and developing countries could be gradually empowered to drive their own progress.
