Publish What You Fund’s three recent localisation studies have found that commitments from major donors and philanthropies to increase local funding have not yet led to meaningful change. Our latest research, Metrics Matter III: Counting Local, shows that five major bilateral donors are still only providing a fraction of their funding directly to local organisations.

However, in the last few 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?

We convened a panel of expert voices from local groups, INGOs, think tanks, and funders to explore the current state of locally led development, and discuss if this is the time to rethink how we approach localisation.

We were delighted to be joined by:

• Sarah Rose (former Senior Advisor for Localization at United States Agency for International Development)
• Gunjan Veda (Global Secretary, The Movement for Community-Led Development)
• Dylan Mathews (CEO, Peace Direct)
• George Ingram (Senior Fellow, Center for Sustainable Development, The Brookings Institution)
• Gary Forster (CEO, Publish What You Fund)

Watch the discussion below and download accompanying slides on our research findings here.