The future of international NGOs: Defining our role in locally led development
Across the global development sector, many of us are grappling with a difficult question: As more organizations shift their focus to locally led development, what role should international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) play?
Recent reporting highlights how some INGOs are re-evaluating their strategies in response to the sector’s realignment toward localization — something quite familiar to us at Results for Development. We began wrestling with the fundamental question of the right roles for INGOs in 2017 after adopting a new mission focused on supporting change agents around the world and a subsequent 2020 strategy to prioritize the agendas of country-level leaders driving systems change.
In recent years, many other organizations have been on similar journeys to R4D. Our field has innovated and embraced new mindsets, and nearly every funder has prioritized channeling money toward local organizations. Despite this, INGOs continue to reckon with questions about their place and how to effectively support localization, even when it may seem at odds with our own survival.
At R4D, our successes and failures, as well as the feedback we’ve received from local partners and government agencies in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) about the collaboration they desire, have led us to a refined vision of our role — and we believe we can continue to support localization efforts in two main ways:
- As an ecosystem catalyst: Acting as a connector and facilitator, we help diverse actors in the global development ecosystem work together to more effectively support local change agents.
- As tailored support for country-led change: Bringing together complementary local and global expertise to provide bespoke assistance in response to demand from local leaders, such as coaching, learning partnerships, evidence translation and facilitation of multi-stakeholder processes.
Editor’s note: This blog offers a deeper exploration of ecosystem catalyst roles. A future blog will address support for country-led change.
The challenges of a complex global development ecosystem
One barrier to localization is the notoriously fragmented global development ecosystem. Effective systems change within any country is difficult, and it becomes even more challenging when numerous, uncoordinated global partners operate in their respective siloes, which are sometimes out of sync with local priorities.
To make sustained and meaningful progress, we, as stakeholders in this ecosystem, must work together more efficiently and align our contributions with local needs and institutions.
At least five types of global development partners are active in most LMICs, supporting various elements of the local ecosystem:
- Multilateral agencies that provide technical guidance (e.g., the World Health Organization)
- Development banks that offer large loans and grants (e.g., World Bank)
- Global partnerships that channel aid for specific purposes (e.g., Gavi, Global Fund)
- Bilateral aid institutions (e.g., the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in the United Kingdom; the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Australia)
- Foundations and philanthropists, including large institutional foundations and individual billionaires (e.g., the Gates Foundation)
Though all these actors genuinely aim to support locally led development — and most are increasingly directing their resources to local institutions — the disjointed nature of our ecosystem can lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
Many of us have witnessed the absurdity of multiple partners working on similar issues within the same country, each with their own goals and demands on country stakeholders and systems, but with no coordination. This can leave local leaders overwhelmed with the task of coordination instead of being able to focus on their own priorities.
There is a clear need for better alignment among these partners to effectively support local agendas, and we are eager to work with others who are addressing similar challenges, such as those who recently affirmed the principles of the Lusaka Agenda, the world’s latest attempt to align the global health ecosystem around country priorities.
At R4D, we have been asking ourselves, and our local government and non-government partners, what we can do to help, rather than exacerbate the situation — and we believe that because R4D regularly works across these disparate parts of the ecosystem, we are well positioned to connect the dots and foster stronger coordination and collaboration.
How can INGOs address the problem of donor fragmentation?
As a mid-sized INGO, R4D is smaller, nimbler and more neutral than the global donor institutions.
We have skills that they don’t always have, such as coaching, facilitation and network management. And we have experience working alongside most of the global actors, and strong trusting relationships with many governments they seek to support and local technical institutions; therefore, we find ourselves increasingly making a difference by playing roles that promote alignment and coordination across global partners and enable them to successfully support local agendas while also promoting local experts as the core source of expertise in their regions.
Here are a few examples of how R4D is working to help the whole ecosystem become better aligned to support locally led results:
- Facilitating global action across partners on urgent issues
- Supporting large multilateral institutions with localization goals
- Promoting regional expertise and institutions
- Managing global or regional peer-learning networks
Facilitating global action across partners on urgent issues
Global development partners know they need to align with each other, and they are increasingly aiming to create processes and platforms to do so. But they can face collective action challenges. Expert, neutral facilitators like R4D can help them ensure they have wider awareness of each other’s actions, build a shared agenda, mobilize more funding for under-resourced thematic areas and generate collective learning that moves the entire field forward.
One successful example is the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA), for which R4D serves as the secretariat. IDIA, formed in 2015, came online at a time when many innovation groups and donors were critiqued for running separate, siloed challenge funds focused on “silver bullet solutions” rather than addressing country-defined challenges or scaling innovations within broader systems.
IDIA has not only convened a diverse group of development partners — including the WHO and World Bank, as well as government agencies and private foundations such as USAID, FCDO, the Swedish International Development Agency, Grand Challenges Canada, Skoll Foundation, the Gates Foundation and the MasterCard Foundation — but spurred action.
The network has become deeply focused on how to match innovations with local needs and how to support country governments and leadership to implement them at scale. For example, IDIA now collaborates on the Public Sector Scaling Action Lab in East Africa, which provides a platform for country-based actors working to integrate health innovations into public health systems to share learning and collaborate on advancing meaningful solutions, and that’s just one case in point.
R4D is taking similar approaches in other areas as well.
Through EdTech Hub, we are aligning global development and research partners around evidence-based approaches for the use of technology in education. Through the Scaling Up Nutrition Financing Capacity Development Platform (SUN FCDP), we’re aligning donors to be more responsive to country-led nutrition priorities. Through the Governance Action Hub, we bring together diverse stakeholders to expand the frontiers of what is possible in governance reforms. This role as facilitator of global hubs for collective action may increasingly become a role that INGOs are well positioned to play.
Supporting large multilateral institutions with localization goals
We are increasingly focused on how we can channel our skills in ways that help large multilateral organizations like the World Bank, WHO, Gavi and Global Fund achieve their goals, and in the process be responsive to local leaders’ priorities.
For example, EdTech Hub brings together several funders all focused on improving educational outcomes and systems through technology. The Hub provides discrete, tailored, on-demand technical support through a “Helpdesk offering.”
FCDO, the World Bank, UNICEF, and the Gates Foundation identify critical EdTech challenges or opportunities and bring them to the EdTech Hub’s Helpdesk. Typically, these requests involve working directly with governments or implementers in-country. The Helpdesk can provide support, tapping into the rich global expertise of EdTech Hub consortium members. This on-demand technical support is offered alongside major financial investments by the World Bank in education systems reforms, which increases the returns on those major investments.
Through these engagements, the Hub provides a global perspective sharing lessons learned, success stories and challenges with a wide range of government partners in LMICs helping influence strategic thinking and planning.
In another instance, R4D is working alongside the Global Financing Facility (GFF) for Women, Children, and Adolescents and the World Bank with support from the Gates Foundation on Frequent Assessment and System Tools for Resilience (FASTR). R4D’s role in FASTR is to help ministries of health in countries around the world translate FASTR analytical tools to their contexts and strengthen their capacity to rapidly collect data and evidence and effectively use it to make important decisions about the health of their people.
We have found that we can complement and support the success of multilateral institutions, including helping to better connect and align the investments of bilateral institutions and foundations with the work of multilateral institutions. In this way, we help those donors to avoid creating separate, parallel activities that challenge country leaders.
Promoting regional expertise and institutions
With increased focus on local institutions, we have played a role in strengthening — and sometimes launching — regional centers of excellence. With R4D’s global reach and network of technical experts, we’ve brought individuals and institutions into learning communities with each other and helped them connect to “customers” who need their expertise, such as governments in the region, multilateral organizations and donors.
In 2018, R4D helped launch the Strategic Purchasing Africa Resource Center (SPARC) by identifying and supporting 11 African academic and policy analysis institutions across the continent who wanted to advance evidence and capacity for African governments to effectively use approaches like strategic purchasing of health services and products to advance health equity. Six years after its launch, this group of institutions is still connected to each other, and it is regarded as a go-to source of health financing expertise in the region for governments, the WHO and other global partners.
We also worked with SPARC partners to collectively publish the largest body of evidence on health financing in Africa, including 17 papers by 40 African authors.
Other examples of support for regional institutions include Learning together to advance Evidence and Equity in Policymaking to achieve the SDGs (LEEPS), which is a network of African intermediary or knowledge translation organizations focused on equity in decision-making and building a culture of evidence use on the continent, as well as the Asia Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR) community, a regional network of institutions, government actors and learning platforms that have co-created a vision and collaborative actions to strengthen the HPSR ecosystem to support country-level health systems strengthening. Both groups of institutions are working to collectively build their skills to influence policy.
As global development institutions and country leaders increasingly seek local organizations to conduct research, provide policy advice and deliver contextually appropriate technical assistance, INGOs can shift their role toward enabling the success of these regional institutions rather than competing with them.
Managing global and regional collaborative learning networks
We often hear from country leaders that they want more opportunities to learn from each other, so R4D designs and facilitates networks that bring together people facing a common challenge so they can share knowledge and jointly problem-solve. This process, called Collaborative Learning, provides a structured way for change agents to work together to identify strategies to address complex challenges while also providing ongoing implementation support to one another. Unlike many traditional technical assistance approaches, Collaborative Learning centers the expertise of local change agents and captures valuable tacit knowledge of practitioners to advance systems change.
The Linked Immunisation Action Network is a Collaborative Learning Network (CLN) that functions as an integral part of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance’s strategy to prevent declining vaccine coverage and drive introduction of new vaccines in middle-income countries. Linked convenes practitioners, technical experts and immunization partners from middle-income countries for peer-to-peer learning designed to identify challenges and develop effective approaches to overcome them. Not only does Linked enable country leaders to more effectively design and implement their own immunization programs, it helps Gavi better align with country priorities.
R4D invests in staff skills and approaches that balance facilitation and coaching with important technical expertise, thereby augmenting Gavi capacity. In 2023, the Linked network systematically evaluated its contribution to Gavi’s middle-income-countries objectives and found that it is indeed enabling countries’ progress.
Similarly in education, the School Action Learning Exchange (SALEX) has aggregated and shared knowledge, evidence and research to support educators across its multi-country network.
As an early pioneer of the Collaborative Learning approach and an advocate for its use in global development, we have created tools to help others design, implement and measure the results of their own networks, including a first-of-its kind measurement and learning framework for evaluating the successes and shortcomings of learning networks. As more INGOs and local partners play learning and facilitation roles, and as donors increasingly fund partners in the global south to play these roles, we encourage them to utilize these tools.
The international NGO of the future
Imagine for a moment if more INGOs embraced these kinds of “connector” roles, which leverage the comparative advantages of their global reach to amplify local agendas and help local leaders rally partners in the ecosystem behind them. Such a shift could foster a more supportive ecosystem for local leaders where change is less often hindered by uncoordinated or competing priorities of the many global organizations working within countries.
This vision will require more funding for “connector” roles, which are often low-cost compared to traditional forms of direct assistance. The level of investment in these kinds of roles has traditionally been low and non-sustained because many large bilateral and multilateral funders are designed to channel money to specific countries. This makes it difficult for them to fund global or regional connector efforts, even when they see their value.
We’d like to invite private foundations and philanthropists to consider what role they could play here.
Despite having less money to deploy, private funders typically have much more flexibility. Supporting “connector” roles can offer them a huge degree of leverage. They can exercise influence within the global development ecosystem in support of local priorities and local capacity, and they ensure their contributions align with and augment the efforts of large funders rather than creating more parallel initiatives that local leaders must manage.
We understand that funders want to see proof of the results. That’s why at R4D, we’ve been developing innovative ways to measure how “connector” roles — traditionally difficult to evaluate — contribute to specific impact in countries and systems changes that lead to sustainability. We are eager to share more about our exciting findings and lessons learned from this effort in the coming months.
We remain committed to our vision to be a globally connected, locally rooted organization, and we will humbly continue our learning journey alongside the many other fellow travelers working to transform our field. We invite your ideas, feedback and partnership in building a stronger ecosystem in support of change agents around the world.
