Recommendation 1: Donors, UN agencies and INGOs should track the amount and quality of funding provided to local actors through maximum one intermediary organisation and create a concrete plan to meet the 25% target with specific indicators.

Recommendation 2: Donors should require that INGOs track and report on their cascading of overheads to their local partners and that they publish their overhead policies and communicate this to their local partners. This should however be a general obligation and not prescriptive, to avoid different donors imposing different systems for overhead sharing.

Recommendation 3: Donors should establish and fund monitoring, evaluation and accountability processes for equitable partnerships and systematically hold implementing partners accountable for follow-through of these. This should include:

1. Establishing clear processes and channels for donors to regularly dialogue and reflect on partnership quality and localisation with downstream local partners on grants and consortia that they fund;
2. Requiring international agencies to demonstrate how they are strengthening their staff capacities and systems for mutual accountability;
3. Meaningfully engaging local partners in mutual accountability processes, including briefing them about channels to dialogue with back-donors on their grants and their wider strategic approach to localisation.

Recommendation 4: Donors and international agencies should fund and implement baselines and annual follow-up studies to monitor and evaluate progress on equitable partnership and localisation at country and global levels. Alignment across donors and international agencies on metrics and methods for this (building on the index in this report, research by HAG, the NEAR framework and others) is key. Findings should be formally tabled to inform stock-taking and policy dialogue on localisation in country-level donor coordination groups.

Recommendation 1: Donors should systematically increase their funding towards a diversity of local actors as directly as possible and invest in the capacity of local actors to absorb higher funding amounts. Donors and international agencies should:

1. Establish and adhere to a basic minimum percentage of funding that can be dedicated to capacity-strengthening;
2. Increase their support to organisational capacity and sustainability across humanitarian, development and climate finance;
3. In cases where international donors identify any shortcomings within local organisations, assist in capacity-building efforts to meet the requisite international standards.

Recommendation 2: Donors should increase flexible, multi-year and unearmarked funding whenever possible to allow for a context-specific and agile response and require international agencies to cascade the benefits of this to their local partners and report on doing so.

Recommendation 3: Donors and international agencies should develop and carry out policies to ensure fair and consistent provision of overhead costs to local partners. Such policies should:

1. Ensure that overheads can be used in a flexible way by local partners;
2. Specify and guarantee overheads coverage for both international and local partners involved rather than a zero-sum game between them;
3. Ensure cascading of overheads onto downstream partners rather than leave this to the discretion of the prime partner managing the contract with the donor.

Recommendation 1: Donors should establish regular processes of dialogue with local organisations at both in-country (embassy) and at headquarters levels on their global policy and practice as well as country-specific strategies, programmes and diplomatic efforts, in support of local leadership in crisis response. Collaboration by donors on this, leveraging the potential for in-country donor coordination groups to organise regular dialogue with local actors’ networks, is key. Use of online platforms for policy dialogue, alongside more face-to-face outreach and dialogue where possible, can also enable this.

Recommendation 2: Donors should actively facilitate the leadership of diverse local organisations in country-level coordination forums, allowing them to set the agenda and priorities in humanitarian action for the entire duration of the response. UN agencies and INGOs should be accountable for supporting and facilitating this leadership and participation and should provide transparent information and make consultative processes accessible. Where possible, already existing locally led coordination platforms should be supported and utilised to avoid duplication.

Recommendation 3: Donors should hold international agencies accountable on capacity-strengthening interventions, for demonstrating how their methods and outcomes are enabling of local leadership. This includes increased support for local-to-local capacity sharing and international-local capacity exchange as well as monitoring, evaluation and accountability processes that demonstrate outcomes in terms of local partners’ growth in organisational sustainability and transitioning to leadership in programme or grant management.

Recommendation 1: Donors should absorb a portion of the costs associated with managing programming in dynamic and high-risk contexts (e.g., increased costs associated with currency fluctuations, confiscation of humanitarian items by armed actors in conflict zones), and adopt more flexible funding modalities that allow for extension or amendment according to the situation.

Recommendation 2: Donors should collaborate with their international, national and local downstream partners on grants and consortia to convene processes of dialogue and reflection on risk sharing to foster a better shared understanding of the risks faced by all partners and to identify concrete donor polices to better mitigate and manage risks underpinned by a commitment to equitable partnership. At the global level, donors and international agencies need to involve their finance, audit and other staff responsible for risk management in dialogue and reflection to overcome barriers and unlock more enabling, equitable approaches to risk management between donors, international agencies and their local partners.

Recommendation 3: Donors, intermediaries and local organisations should jointly develop and implement risk and security assessments and management plans tailored to the local context and donors should provide adequate funding to ensure the safety of the staff of local organisations.