What This Covers
This hub is for staff of international, local and national NGOs, and for anyone who funds or coordinates work with local partners. It follows a partnership from the first design conversation through budgeting, capacity assessment and risk sharing. The structure borrows from the four localization components (listed under Key Concepts) and from the guidance notes that a humanitarian localization working group issued in May 2020; the partnership note drew on input from more than 400 humanitarian agencies, about 85% of them local or national actors.
Start Here
Pick the task in front of you. Where OpenAid has a page for it, it is linked.
- Check whether a partnership is genuine. Tell equal power over design and budget apart from a subcontract, where the partner is handed a project and budget already agreed. Localization in humanitarian aid covers the background. In one multi-NGO study, only about a quarter of participants thought their partnerships were genuine.
- Budget fairly for a local partner. Cover overheads, indirect costs, assets, organizational strengthening and multi-year funding. Sharing indirect costs with local partners shows how overhead is split.
- Assess capacity jointly. Use a two-way approach in which the local partner sets the priorities, then agree a plan for strengthening.
- Handle due diligence and shared risk. Carry risk together instead of passing it down the chain, with tiered assessment and joint risk workshops. The proportionate due diligence checklist and the due diligence questions prompt scale the checks to the award.
- Understand funding commitments and charters. Know the humanitarian sector's 25% direct funding target and the Charter for Change pledges international NGOs made, and choose between an MoU, a partnership agreement and a subgrant.
Key Concepts
- Localization: work built on four components: partnership, capacity strengthening, financing and coordination.
- Principles of Partnership: endorsed in 2007, resting on complementarity, equality, transparency and responsibility. The principles never define partnership, so people have used the word for anything from a contract to a statement of intent.
- Genuine partnership versus subcontracting: in a genuine one, power over design, budget, management and review is shared and equal. A subcontractor gets a project and budget already agreed.
- Capacity strengthening versus capacity building: guidance prefers strengthening, exchange or sharing because they recognize skills and assets a partner already has. The support runs both ways.
- Risk transfer versus risk sharing: transfer often pushes risk down to local NGOs. Sharing means donors, international organizations and local NGOs identify and reduce risks together.
- Common due diligence: one assessment of a local actor that many funders accept.
- Tiered due diligence: a tiered model that a common assessment process may use.
- Direct funding targets: the Grand Bargain's 25% minimum share of global humanitarian money reaching local and national organizations, as directly as possible, with 2020 as the original deadline. Check current reporting for how far the sector has come.
What to Put in Each
Start from the partnership agreement and MoU guide and the due diligence checklist. Across a partnership, these are the four things to cover:
- Partnership agreement: roles and responsibilities, shared risks, agreed mitigation, and risk sharing written into the contract.
- Partner budget: overheads, indirect costs, assets, organizational strengthening, a capacity budget line and multi-year pass-through.
- Joint capacity plan: joint assessment, tailored strengthening, two-way learning and a graduation plan.
- Joint risk register: workshop-style assessment, updates in regular meetings, plus a shared questionnaire for reviewing security risk and a budget template for costing it, both drawn from an interagency security forum's guide for pairing local and international aid organizations.