Devex @ UNGA 79: What it would take to move the needle on locally led development

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It’s no secret that promises to deliver more humanitarian and development funding to local and national organizations have not been fulfilled. During the high-level week of the 79th U.N. General Assembly, Devex caught up with Degan Ali, who heads the Kenya-based NGO Adeso. Ali is a leading voice in the aid decolonization movement, which seeks to decenter the voices of Western decision-makers and shift more power to local leaders in the global south. Ali discussed the lack of trust and credibility given to local NGOs compared to international organizations, challenges in meeting the 2016 “Grand Bargain” target of 25% funding to local organizations, and how bureaucracy and risk aversion in organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development is hindering localization efforts. And while she gave USAID Administrator Samantha Power credit for elevating the localization agenda, Ali called the effort to get bilateral organizations to shift to locally led development an “impossible, impossible uphill battle.” “But where I do feel like there's hope and there's opportunity, is for the [international] NGOs to change and philanthropy to change, and those are the spaces where we need to put a lot of pressure,” she said. “And that's what we're trying to do at Adeso with the Pledge for Change with the INGOs, and the decolonizing philanthropy work that we're doing.” Devex Global Development Reporter Elissa Miolene sat down with Ali for a special episode of our This Week in Global Development podcast series.