Everyone agrees on localisation. So why does so little change?

There’s a moment that comes up in almost every localisation conversation I’ve been part of.

Someone in the room, usually a civil society representative, asks why so little has actually changed given how long we’ve all agreed on the principle.

My answer is usually the same. Nutrition is one of the best entry points we have for testing whether localisation actually works because nutrition is intrinsically local. What stops children getting enough healthy food in Sudan is not what stops them in Chad, Myanmar or rural Peru. It might be insecurity, the distance to a clinic, food prices, breastfeeding norms or who in a household carries the unpaid work of feeding everyone else.

These things shift from one community to another, sometimes month to month. No headquarters, however well-intentioned, can track that in real time. Local organisations already do.

The Scaling Up Nutrition Civil Society Network I have the honour to lead brings together more than 5,000 civil society organisations organised in national alliances across 67 countries striving to end hunger and malnutrition. When we survey our members each year, they tell us clearly what gets in the way. In the last round, over half said their relationship with donors was among the weakest they had. Almost two thirds had no dedicated core funding at all.

This isn’t a story about people not caring. Everyone I work with, both on the donor side and the civil society side, genuinely wants localisation to succeed. The problem is that a lot of the machinery built around funding, reporting and risk was designed for a different kind of organisation than the ones doing the work closest to communities.

Where the vision of localisation breaks down

A few patterns show up again and again in my conversations with our network members.

1. Funding rarely matches capacity
   
   Some donors want to support local organisations directly, which is welcome. But the grant instruments often assume a finance team and compliance department which a young organisation or alliance simply won’t have yet. A modest sub-grant can be harder to absorb than it looks if the reporting and audit requirements around it are built for a much larger institution.
   
   As a result, donors and philanthropists tend to invest in large-scale food fortification programmes or humanitarian service delivery through UN agencies and INGOs because the funds are more easily released and robust compliance mechanisms will be in place.
   
   Changing this doesn’t mean lowering standards. It means starting smaller or more flexibly, and building up, so the size of the grant matches what an organisation can realistically manage at that point in its growth. It also means focusing on what the partners need to do to become stronger, grow, and yield the expected outcomes, rather than focusing on delivering results defined by a donor’s logic at a given time.
   
2. Risk tends to travel downward
   
   Financial and reputational risk is often pushed onto the organisations with the least capacity to absorb it, while the decisions and the resources stay with international partners. If we are serious about shifting power that has to include sharing risk, and investing properly in the governance and financial systems local organisations need to carry more risk over time.
   
3. There is a difference between being consulted and actually leading
   
   Local organisations are still, too often, brought in once priorities have already been set, to react to a plan rather than shape it. I ask myself a blunt question when I am assessing whether a partnership is real: are local actors in the room early enough to influence what gets funded, resourced in a way they can genuinely manage, and trusted with the decisions that affect their own communities?
   
   When the answer is no, it doesn’t matter how good the strategy document sounds. Chances are it won’t work. Or it won’t work as well as it would if the decisions had been made locally.

What is already working to shift power

I’ve watched our members find ways through these barriers, often with very little to work with.

In Mali, sustained community mobilisation helped get the right to food written into the constitution and secured a national budget-line for therapeutic foods. That kind of change survives well beyond any single grant cycle because the people who built it are still there once the funding has moved on.

In Nigeria, a national youth network ran over 50 community dialogues in six states, reaching people with disabilities and others who tend to be missed by standard data collection. Those dialogues gave young people a genuine mandate to walk into national decision-making spaces speaking for communities they had actually listened to, rather than being asked to represent people from the outside.

In Pakistan, civil society organisations were first responders during devastating floods and, separately, successfully advocated to double the excise duty on sugary drinks. Localisation at its best looks like both of these things happening at once: presence at the community level and influence at the policy table.

These examples are stories of small organisations succeeding in spite of the system.

Imagine what the system could look like if it were built around them from the outset?