Our new report shows a troubling lack of transparency among philanthropic foundations that pledged to increase direct funding to local organisations. Despite commitments made in 2022 through the Donor Statement on Supporting Locally Led Development, the vast majority have failed to report targets or progress.
Many bilateral donors have signed up to international agreements to take a more locally led approach and transfer a greater share of resources to local partners. But our new study finds that many of the same donors are not sharing any practical evidence of increased local funding. Commitments Without Accountability highlights that four out of five donors do not have localisation strategies or clear definitions, targets, or methods for measuring progress in funding shifts.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has made a bold
commitment to the localization agenda: it has set a target that 25% of its funding will go directly to local partners by 2025. However, our new analysis shows that how USAID defines and measures localization is actually undermining its progress and at odds with its aim to increase the diversity of local partners and amplify under-represented voices. It is allowing perverse incentives – such as affiliates of international organizations to be counted as local – and leaving significant funding opportunities – such as projectized funding that currently goes to UN agencies and multilaterals – untapped for local partners.
What tools can be used to track funding for gender equality and women’s empowerment? This blog provides examples of country, institution, funding-specific, and cross-institution tools for tracking gender-related finance. Produced jointly by researchers at the Center for Global Development, Donor Tracker, and Publish What You Fund, this blog provides illustrative examples to give researchers, practitioners, and advocates an idea of the types of tools they can harness to monitor donors’ efforts toward achieving gender equality.
As part of our research into humanitarian data transparency, we have produced two country-specific research briefs on Iraq and Bangladesh. The briefs explore the information needs of humanitarian actors on the ground in Bangladesh and Iraq, and the challenges they face in accessing and using this information.
Four years ago at the World Humanitarian Summit, major humanitarian aid donors and implementers brokered the Grand Bargain to address the gap in humanitarian financing. One of its commitments was to improve transparency within humanitarian response. While significant gains have been made, the full potential of more transparent humanitarian information is yet to be realised. This can only happen […]
