Elevating the Community's Agenda: Honing USAID Forward’s Approach to Local Ownership

This paper provides recommendations for putting effective local ownership into practice. This paper draws on lessons from Mercy Corps’ decades of work in more than 40 countries and local partnerships with hundreds of diverse civil society, business
and government groups. We also conducted extensive interviews on local ownership approaches with 14 high-performing partners and local actors in Latin America, the Caucasus, West and Central Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and South Asia. These voices represent a broad cross section of local groups — both those who access U.S. funding, and those who do not — and their common and conflicting opinions are an important reminder of the realities of working amidst diverse partnerships and capacities, across a range of country settings.