The Role of International Organizations in the Localization Movement: Insights from Our Partnership with Project Concern Zambia

By Chioma Okafor, Senior Technical Advisor, Local Capacity Strengthening

The global development community has reached the consensus that local leadership is vital to achieving greater equity, effectiveness and sustainability of development programs. Local actors are closer to the issues, understand local needs and priorities, and can more efficiently address barriers to accessing services, including health care. Local institutions also have greater legitimacy than international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) to drive policy advocacy and sociocultural changes necessary to address development challenges effectively.

One of our key donors, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has set an ambitious target to direct 25% of funding to local organizations by 2025. While progress is still slow and uneven across sectors, we are observing significant shifts in funding flows for programs financed through the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Between 2018 and 2022, USAID’s PEPFAR-funded HIV/AIDS programs expanded annual direct funding to local partners by $345 million, which constitutes a remarkable 81% increase. USAID’s direct partnership with local organizations is a critical piece of locally-led development but would not be possible without capacity strengthening interventions. This is where INGOs, like Global Communities, have a pivotal role to play in the localization movement. Of course, this has a significant impact on the way INGOs operate, requiring a systems change process that shifts mindsets, power and resources and prioritizes local leadership in humanitarian, development and peacebuilding efforts.

In January 2023, Peace Direct published a brief on 9 Useful Roles INGOs Can Play as Intermediaries in an Age of Localization. These roles are outlined in the following graphic:

As an INGO founded in the United States, Global Communities is engaging in a critical reflection about its role in the future defined by localization. While our approaches vary dependent on a local context, we always partner with local actors — individuals, organizations and networks — to jointly improve the performance of a local system to produce locally valued and sustainable development outcomes. At Global Communities, we work to strengthen local voices and leadership across our programs for long-term sustainability with an emphasis on shifting power to the local level. Our work in Zambia is a perfect example.

from an ingo to a local zambian organization

Global Communities has a decades-long history in Zambia. Between 1996 and 2020, we operated in Zambia as Project Concern International (PCI), implementing HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, nutrition, tuberculosis and cervical cancer programs. As part of its commitment to locally-led development, in 2018, PCI began a process to transition its operations to a fully localized entity governed entirely by Zambians. First, PCI engaged with the Center for Infectious Disease and Research in Zambia (CIDRZ), a local Zambian organization affiliated with the University of Alabama at Birmingham. With guidance from CIDRZ on legal and governance procedures, Project Concern Zambia (PCZ) was registered as a local entity in September 2019. Soon after, in 2020, PCI merged with Global Communities, and we became a capacity strengthening partner to PCZ.

The role of global Communities as an advocate & amplifier

As a newly established local organization, PCZ had concerns about fundraising, which opened the door for Global Communities to serve as its advocate and amplifier.

“We are a local entity and independent, but we never even thought we would start getting grants, because it was too early, we thought,” said Yvonne Mulenga, Chief Executive Officer of PCZ. “… Global Communities was so intentional about localization. They said, ‘We want to support you. We want you to be independent, but we want to support you [so that you can] get off the ground.’”

Carrie Hessler-Radelet, President and CEO of Global Communities, visited Zambia in 2019 to support PCZ’s fundraising efforts. Hessler-Radelet introduced Mulenga to the U.S. Ambassador to Zambia and other high-level U.S. government officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), USAID, Peace Corps and the Department of Defense. At a reception hosted by the U.S. Ambassador, Mulenga learned of the upcoming New Partnership Initiative (NPI), an award designed to help USAID “reach its partnering potential by improving collaboration with new, nontraditional, and local actors, while enhancing local leadership, capacity, and accountability.” In collaboration with Global Communities, PCZ completed the NPI application and was one of three local organizations that received the award.  

“For me, it was just unbelievable, because we were really new, and we got this $21 million grant over five years,” Mulenga said.

A year later, in September 2020, USAID awarded the five-year Empowered Children and Adolescents Program (ECAP) II to PCZ as a prime implementer. The goal of ECAP II is to mitigate the impact of HIV and improve the health and well-being of Vulnerable Children and Adolescents (VCA) through high impact, evidence-informed and age-appropriate interventions customized for each VCA sub-population using a family-centered approach. Under ECAP II, Global Communities served as the institutional capacity strengthening partner to PCZ and its local sub-grantees from 2020 to 2023. 

The role of global communities as a trainer, coach & Co-learner

As a capacity strengthening partner, Global Communities supported PCZ to effectively manage the USAID award as a prime implementer, comply with PEPFAR requirements and U.S. government regulations, and provided project support and technical guidance. We worked very closely with PCZ and its other local sub partners — BlueCode, Bwafwano Integrated Services Organization (BISO) and the Zambia Conference of Catholic Bishops (ZCCB) — to improve organizational performance, service quality and project outcomes, while also strengthening internal systems, policies and procedures to ensure sound financial management and compliance across the consortium. This way, we supported PCZ’s goal to progressively develop organizational maturity, grow operations and ensure long-term sustainability.  

[Global Communities] demonstrated the critical role of INGOs in the localization movement. You got us and our public and private sector partners to think outside the box and manifest the collective resources and power to better serve our program participants. This means meaningful engagement of local partners in effective capacity strengthening for their context.

Yvonne Mulenga, CEO, Project Concern Zambia

This was a multi-step process. First, we used our participatory approaches to facilitate organizational capacity assessments with PCZ and the other ECAP II partners. The objective was to identify opportunities for organizational change, learning and development, focusing on performance improvement in the following domains: Governance and Legal Structure, Sustainability, Partnerships and Communication, Human Resource Management, Project Management, Economic Strengthening, Systems Strengthening, Gender- based Violence, Strategic Management and DREAMS (Determined, Resilient, Empowered, AIDS-free, Mentored and Safe) programming. This was done using an iterative co-creation approach that positioned PCZ, its local sub-grantees and Global Communities as equal partners

Second, we supported the development of highly contextualized organizational action plans that met the partners where they were. These plans were adapted throughout the project cycle for constant learning.

Global Communities also supported PCZ with resource mobilization, business sustainability and development efforts. This included the coordination of a Business Planning and Resource Mobilization workshop for PCZ, its consortium partners, government ministry officials and private sector partners. Topics included business planning, communications and branding, proposal development and budgeting, and private sector engagement. The workshop enabled PCZ to identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats while updating their organization strategy and sustainability plan.

“It was a very enriching planning exercise and conversation that we had,” said PCZ Board Chair Jetty Lungu. “Our team is now better equipped with tools to change mindsets and survive in this competitive business environment.”

THE ROLE OF GLOBAL COMMUNITIES AS Connector and eco-system builder

According to Mulenga, localization has not come without challenges and hindsight has proven to be an important source of insight.

“We had a great start, but it was all rapid,” she said. “… For instance, we didn’t really think about how to diversify our resources and have our own new business development unit.”

INGOs such as Global Communities can serve a crucial function as intermediaries for local civil society organizations, linking them to funding channels and acting as facilitators to enhance the environment for collaborative efforts and the continuous delivery of programs. In 2021, Global Communities connected PCZ with the Helmsley Charitable Trust, a private foundation interested in funding holistic programs that support vulnerable children and their families in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2022, Helmsley awarded PCZ a $3.6 million grant for a complementary ECAP+, which expanded programming to newly identified hot spot sites with high HIV incidence among children and adolescents. 

Relationship building is essential to resource mobilization for local partners. It is integral that INGOs continue to support local partners with institutional strengthening approaches, including building alliances that align program objectives with the interests and priorities of funders.

Growing concerns about “localized ingos”

Increasingly, there have been calls for USAID to address its definition of a “local entity” to prevent INGOs from registering their country offices as national entities, leveraging the tangible and intangible resources of their global entities, and giving them an unfair advantage over other local groups.

Recognizing the subtle but important difference between local organizations and INGO affiliates, Global Communities supported PCZ in becoming a fully independent and locally governed entity with no legal affiliation to Global Communities A key to our approach was empowering the local Zambian staff and partners to take the lead in decision-making processes and decentralizing authority and autonomy.

“In Zambia, we had a strong local team with a strong interest in going local. They were able to assemble a local governing body,” Hessler-Radelet said. “They had compelling reasons to do so, because the USAID Mission in Zambia was leaning more towards local organizations for implementation.”

shifting mindsets for sustainable and locally-owned solutions

It is important for local organizations to consider their business models to be truly sustainable. This includes developing strategies for resource mobilization, donor relations and strong award management. These are capacity strengthening areas that INGOs can support local organizations with while acknowledging this necessitates a shift in power dynamics to position local organizations for success. However, we must recognize the cultural barriers, change management, structural and research barriers that impact the progress of localization, particularly with donor concerns around compliance. Ultimately, a mindset shift means that INGOs must be willing to give up power and control and put it in the hands of the communities and organizations by supporting local changemakers to drive progress and impact. 

Hear more from Yvonne Mulenga on lessons learned during PCZ’s localization process and advice she would give to other organizations considering a similar shift.