Wednesday 28^th May 2025, 11am-12:30pm EST / 4pm-5:30pm BST
Online event

BOOK YOUR PLACE

Publish What You Fund’s three recent localisation studies have found that commitments from major donors and philanthropies to increase local funding have not led to meaningful change. Our forthcoming research, Metrics Matter 3, shows that five major bilateral donors are still only providing a fraction of their funding directly to local organisations. Even as ODA levels reached a peak of $223.3 billion in 2023, progress on local funding seems to have stalled, or in some cases gone backwards.

But in the last three months the world has changed and the conversation on localisation has gone quiet. As donors, INGOs and local CSOs scramble to make sense of the changing aid landscape and, in many cases, fight for survival, where are we on locally led development? Have previous commitments and good intentions been quietly discarded? What’s next for the local partners who have lost funding, and lost trust?

Join us on 28 May as we bring together voices from local groups, INGOs, think tanks and funders to explore the current state of locally led development, the old and new barriers to change, and what needs to happen for local actors to have the power, resources and recognition they deserve. We’ll discuss if this is the time to rethink how we approach localisation.

We will hear from:

• Sarah Rose (formerly Senior Advisor for Localization at United States Agency for International Development) – Sarah was instrumental in driving USAID’s push for greater localisation.
• Dylan Mathews (CEO, Peace Direct) – Dylan’s commitment to supporting local organisations in the global south spans almost twenty years, during which time he has worked for a range of peacebuilding, international development and humanitarian organisations.
• Gunjan Veda (Global Secretary, The Movement for Community-Led Development) – Gunjan’s work includes creating collaborative and mutual partnerships, interrogating structural violence in existing systems, forms of knowledge production and publication, and consistently challenging existing spaces for partnership, capacity strengthening and knowledge sharing to become more inclusive and equitable. Routledge has just published her third book: Community-led Development in Practice: We power our own change. Gunjan has previously worked within the non-profit and government sectors in India, and was a policy-maker in the Indian Government’s Planning Commission.
• George Ingram (Senior Fellow, Center for Sustainable Development, The Brookings Institution) – George’s professional career in Congress, the executive branch, and the non-profit sector has focused on international economic and development policy. He serves as chair emeritus of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, board member of Friends of Publish What You Fund, and member of the Executive Committee of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network.
• Gary Forster (CEO, Publish What You Fund) – Gary joined Publish What You Fund in 2018, and he has led the team’s work on development finance, aid transparency, women’s economic development and localisation. Before this he was the CEO of the INGO Transaid from 2011 until 2017 having joined the organisation as a volunteer in 2006. With a background in logistics from his time at Procter and Gamble, and qualifications in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Gary has spent much of his career designing, implementing and evaluating health programmes throughout sub-Saharan Africa.