What will it take to make localisation a reality? Part two

In a recent blog, I argued that nutrition is one of the best entry points for testing whether localisation is actually happening in practice.

I’d be uncomfortable leaving that blog to stand alone without turning the same questions on the global Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Civil Society Network secretariat I’ve been proudly working at since 2021. Here’s where we have landed. 

When we developed our SUN CSN 2026-2030 strategy (the fourth phase of a longer-term plan), we made localisation the cross-cutting principle through everything, rather than a standalone objective. Each of our four strategic objectives – is now judged against the same test: is decision making and funding actually moving closer to where the impact happens, or are we just saying it is? 

In practice that’s meant a few concrete shifts.  

Decentralising the work, the team and the budget 

The network is split into four regional groups, each with its own senior regional adviser based in the region, so that strategic and technical support happen closer to where alliances are operating. By the end of our last strategic period, close to 70% of our funding was reaching the regional and country level rather than staying at the centre.  

Providing seed funding 

Since 2018, we’ve been running a small seed-funding programme which alliances can access to invest in governance, member engagement, research, innovative approaches or piloting new advocacy strategies. With only £10,000 allocated per alliance – whether strong, newer or struggling alliances, including those working in fragile and conflict-affected settings – the results have been phenomenal. At times, transformational. 

Results of direct seed funding for civil society alliances include: 

In Tanzania, a civil society alliance  used a seed-grant to design and deliver a school gardens programme across 18 schools in Kilindi, a remote district in Tanga region. Eighteen months on, every one of those schools has a garden feeding into school meals, which has increased dietary diversity. Around 800 students are now running nutrition clubs while replicating the model at home, and six schools are producing enough surplus to fund their own next round of seeds and tools. The project has since been folded into the district’s own nutrition coordination structure and handed over to local authorities to run to ensure its sustainability.  

In Sierra Leone, civil society used budget tracking to secure a dedicated nutrition line within the Ministry of Health, then built on that credibility to pilot the country’s first workplace breastfeeding support scheme. The scheme is now being extended to markets and factories, with national policy reform in view. One piece of local evidence, properly resourced, opened the door to the next. 

In Colombia, a small and flexible grant gave a young civil society alliance the space to build the governance, advocacy and fundraising tools it needed to become a credible voice in national nutrition policy. After five years of advocacy and this small contribution, the government of Colombia joined the SUN Movement to address malnutrition in all its forms.  

Making our governance structure inclusive and representative 

We’ve consistently reviewed our own governance along the years. Our steering group, the body that sets the SUN Civil Society Network’s strategic direction, now includes elected national and youth representatives rather than being dominated by international members.  

We are also adding regional representation – nominated from within the regions – so that the Civil Society Alliances across the four regions shape decisions at the global level. Having a small international committee working in English in similar time zones and with stable internet connection was easy. Having a diverse, representative and inclusive structure is harder. But it is our moral duty. 

Getting youth participation right  

Youth leadership has probably taught us the most. Our Youth Leaders for Nutrition programme started in 2018 and treated young people as ambassadors who could speak very

eloquently at a global conference. Over time, we realised this approach wasn’t grounded in the reality of communities. So, we shifted the model.  

Youth coordinators now run community dialogues first before conducting any advocacy work. The mandate for young people to then represent their communities in national or global spaces comes out of that listening work alongside the gathering of local evidence, which young people bring to their national alliance and SUN multi-stakeholder platform.  

This pivotal change has made a real difference. Young people are now bringing concrete local challenges and solutions to inform policy and decision-making processes.  

None of these changes mean we have fully solved the problem. We still rely heavily on a handful of donors, our regional teams are stretched, and plenty of alliances are still working hard to access funding that matches their priorities and capacity. But I’d rather hold ourselves to the same standard we’re asking the wider sector to meet, and be honest about how far we still have to go. 

What actually needs to change to make localisation a reality

If we want to move past the good intentions stage, a few things need to shift in practice. 

1. Funding should be designed to grow with an organisation. That means starting with small and flexible funding, yet predictable and multi-year, with a clear pathway to larger grants as governance and financial systems mature. Single-year cycles force local teams to spend as much energy on the next proposal as on the implementation itself.  

2. Capacity strengthening needs to be built into the grant itself. It should be treated as a core cost, budgeted alongside the programme and shaped to the organisation’s needs, rather than as an optional add-on which makes the bidders less competitive and the staff more stretched. 

3. Risk must be shared. Donors and international partners carry reputational risk when things go wrong. Local organisations do too, and often with far less protection. Due diligence should be proportionate to grant size. And organisations should be able to delay and adjust implementation, or even fail on a pilot project, without those adjustments or failures closing off future funding. 

4. Accountability must run in both directions. Local organisations should account for how funds are used, and donors and international partners should be accountable for whether their own systems make local leadership possible or hinder it.  

5. We must measure whether local actors, including the most marginalised groups, are shaping decisions and receiving resources directly, without – or with limited – intermediary organisations siphoning large indirect costs.  

Bridging the gap between communities and decision makers 

Nutrition sits at the intersection of humanitarian and development work, immediate need and long-term change, across social, economic, political and environmental sectors. That makes it a natural bridge across sectors that too often operate in silos. 

National civil society alliances acting as trusted partners to the government, UN agencies, businesses and donors, within the multi-stakeholder and country-led SUN Movement, make an efficient bridge across actors, from communities to decision makers.  

But a bridge only holds if both ends can bear weight, and right now the weight is still concentrated at the international end. Global institutions, UN agencies, donors and INGOs need to be willing to move decision-making power and resources toward the organisations already closest to the problem. 

The 60⁺ national alliances where our members work have already shown what is possible when the resources and the trust are combined. The harder question the sector still has to answer is why we keep making local leadership so difficult to fund.