Attachments
1. The Challenge
It is of utmost importance that local/national humanitarian actors lead, participate in and are adequately funded for humanitarian response as they are the ones who know the situation on the ground best and often have better access to people in need than international humanitarian organizations. Given that it is still quite difficult for some funding partners/donors to directly fund local/national actors, intermediaries are instrumental to ensure accountable and equitable partnerships and channel a fair share of funding to relevant local/national organization. The Grand Bargain commitments reiterated the need to reinforce and better support local and national responders.
However studies on localisation have found that the current international humanitarian ecosystem is often perceived as being primarily led by intermediaries and donors, and does not yet sufficiently focus on the operational space, agency and ability of local actors to respond to humanitarian crisis in their own countries. This needs to shift fundamentally in order to address the imbalance of powers and prioritise locally and nationally-led humanitarian action to achieve better humanitarian outcomes for affected populations.
The capacities of local actors need to be better acknowledged and local actors must be given the space to deal with the challenges they face and lead the response to affected people’s needs in emergencies and crises. Local actors need to be better supported and resourced, reinforcing (where and when necessary) administrative and technical capacity, and ensuring respect for humanitarian principles.
Local/National actors’ capacity and potential is often inadequately leveraged or insufficiently used by funding partners/donors and intermediaries. This has been found in several studies to result in inequitable, imbalanced relationships, and can lead to mutual mistrust. In some cases, civil society organisations may be harmed by the nature of these relationships, despite this not being the intent of any party.
Operational and fiduciary risks are sometimes transferred through the funding chain and held primarily by local and national organisations without sufficient investments to enable local/national organisations to better manage risk. The quality of equitable partnerships between intermediaries and local/national actors, including joint planning and decision-making, needs to be prioritised.
Funding partners/donors work with international organisations because of their intermediary capacity, mandates and scale. Such partnerships are also rooted in legal requirements or restrictions, and the limited capacity of many funding partners/donors to intervene directly in humanitarian crises. Intermediary organisations have greater absorption capacity than local/national organisations, which makes them a viable option for funding partners/donors, especially when funds must be dispersed rapidly or at scale to address humanitarian needs.
Funding partners/donors tend to rely on intermediaries to ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance without sufficient knowledge about the value, needs and potential of local/national organisations, who are often part of affected communities.
While some organisations with an intermediary function have taken steps forward in building equitable partnerships with local/national actors, substantially more needs to be done to achieve the ambitions of the Grand Bargain. Policies towards collaboration and partnership with local/national actors have not changed sufficiently, and intermediary organisations have not yet institutionalised localisation as a critical or essential factor in improving humanitarian assistance, particularly at country level.
The Grand Bargain demands that intermediaries be accountable to their local/national partners and more transparent with regard to funding and funding allocation. Further efforts are needed to reduce/eliminate cases where: intermediaries intervene directly as de-facto substitutes for local organisations; local actors are perceived and treated as sub-contractors or as employees of intermediaries; intermediaries act as funding gatekeepers while retaining decision-making powers on funding allocations; and intermediaries exclude local/national partners from engagement with funding partners/donors.