Localisation has become one of the most repeated commitments in the humanitarian sector. Donors demand it. UN agencies report against it. Clusters put it in every workplan and strategy. After more than 25 years coordinating and delivering large-scale WASH responses — including as Cluster Coordinator and Manager in Ethiopia, Palestine, South Sudan and other complex settings — I have watched the gap between the language and the reality grow wider, not smaller.
This is not a diplomatic reflection. It is an attempt to say clearly what many of us discuss privately after the meetings end.
The Structural Reality
Humanitarian partnership remains unequal. One side largely controls the money, the standards, the reporting systems and access to international platforms. The other side largely delivers. Calling this a partnership does not change the underlying power relationship. It only makes the inequality harder to name.
When only a few cents on the dollar reach those closest to a crisis, we should stop calling it a failure. It is a system succeeding at what it was built to do.
I have seen this pattern repeatedly. Recent large allocations of US funding through UN pooled funds made it especially visible. The vast majority went to UN agencies and international NGOs. In some countries, almost nothing reached national organisations directly. The explanations given — short delivery timelines and the “risk” of working with local partners — revealed the real logic. When significant money appears, the system returns to its default: international intermediaries first.
What Localisation Often Produces on the Ground
In the responses I coordinated, the push for localisation produced mixed and sometimes damaging results. Capable national organisations that understood the context and had real community presence were often sidelined. At the same time, new or expanded local entities appeared whose main skill was navigating donor and UN requirements rather than delivering quality services or strengthening national systems.
This does not build sustainable civil society. It distorts it. Professional standards get diluted in the name of inclusion. Organisations skilled at the funding game rise; those focused on actual work struggle. The local partner landscape becomes shaped more by the aid market than by community needs or national priorities.
Staff poaching makes it worse. International organisations regularly hire the strongest people out of national NGOs. What is presented as capacity building frequently becomes capacity extraction. I have watched this happen across multiple responses.
Governments Are Not Optional
One of the more serious problems I have seen is the tendency to treat local NGOs as the default solution while avoiding the harder work of government accountability. National and local authorities remain the primary duty-bearers for basic services. Creating parallel structures through NGOs — local or international — without simultaneously pushing governments to perform is neither sustainable nor legitimate.
In too many places, the international system has preferred the convenience of working through NGOs over the more difficult task of engaging, challenging and supporting government institutions. Short-term outputs may look good. Lasting systems rarely result.
Donor and UN Accountability
The United Nations continues to face justified criticism for failing to channel promised funds directly to local organisations. Despite the Grand Bargain and years of commitments, only a tiny fraction of global humanitarian funding reaches national actors directly. The barriers are not accidental.
Pooled funds and UN mechanisms still route money through multiple layers — donors to UN agencies, then to international NGOs, and only then (if at all) to local organisations. Each layer takes its cut. Stringent compliance requirements, long checklists and heavy reporting standards systematically exclude smaller organisations that lack large administrative teams. The same rules applied to a major international agency are applied to a small community organisation. Those who somehow clear the hurdles then compete against organisations that have spent years inside the system and already know how the game is scored.
Risk aversion remains deep. Local actors are still treated too often as high-risk subcontractors rather than equal decision-makers. When local representatives sit on advisory boards while depending financially on the same UN agencies and INGOs at the table, their participation frequently becomes agreement rather than real influence. Language barriers reinforce the imbalance.
Single-issue donor agendas compound the problem. When funding is driven primarily by one institutional priority — gender, child protection, climate or any other theme — the result is fragmented programming that does not always match the actual strategic needs on the ground. Funding should contribute to coherent plans and real priorities, not primarily advance a donor’s organisational agenda.
Cases where UN pooled funds have channelled a high percentage of resources to local organisations are sometimes presented as success stories. Closer examination often shows this happened because international agencies could not operate in those areas, or because of the size of the funding envelope. Local actors were selected because they were the only option left, or to increase the number of small grants, or to promote consortia (not necessarily built on genuine strategy) in order to reduce the number of proposals for review — not because the system had fundamentally changed.
Better approaches do exist. Models in which a capable national organisation absorbs the compliance burden, provides support in local languages, and does not compete with smaller groups for implementation have shown clear advantages: lower operational costs, faster delivery, and no loss of accountability. Local organisations are not inherently weak. When properly supported, they understand the context, are embedded in communities, and can deliver even under tight timelines.
Within the UN system, the partnership culture itself remains part of the problem. Localisation is too often treated as a tool to deliver pre-defined international agendas rather than a real shift in power. Cluster Lead Agencies are meant to enable independent coordination and act as one partner among others. In practice, they frequently behave as owners of the platform, shaping decisions around institutional interests and limiting the influence of smaller partners. Hierarchy and internal competition for resources and visibility remain deeply embedded. The higher one goes in the system, the more these institutional interests tend to dominate.
What Needs to Change
If localisation is to mean anything beyond statistics and statements, several things must shift:
- Donors need to redesign funding so that direct, flexible, multi-year support to capable local and national organisations becomes normal rather than exceptional.
- Funding decisions must prioritise contribution to collective strategic plans and assessed needs, not the advancement of any single institutional agenda.
- UN pooled funds must simplify registration and compliance so requirements scale with grant size and reflect local realities.
- Allocation targets for direct funding to national actors need real consequences.
- UN agencies must accept that enabling genuine partner leadership sometimes requires giving up control and visibility.
- Professional standards and mutual accountability must apply equally to all actors.
- Government accountability must be treated as central, not optional.
The next large funding rounds through UN pooled funds will show whether the system is prepared to change or will simply reinforce the existing order. International organisations will eventually leave when the money is no longer there. The question is what kind of local response capacity will remain.
The giver–receiver dynamic will not disappear through better language. It will only change when those who currently hold the resources and the decision-making power are prepared to give some of it up — and when they are held accountable if they do not.
I am not against stronger local and national leadership. I am against a version of localisation that prioritises appearance over quality, accountability and lasting impact. The people affected by crisis deserve better than another cycle of rhetoric that leaves the underlying power structures largely untouched.
These are hard truths. They need to be discussed more openly.
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