Localisation is Here to Stay: Lessons from Kenya

An appropriate partnership between an INGO and a local actor should shift responsibility to those that are best placed to deliver, especially when time is of the essence. Many INGOs and UN agencies have been busy with direct service delivery and sub-contracting local actors on short term basis.

This has meant that adopting transformative partnership models to create an accountable and transparent humanitarian sector and strengthen local actors’ capacity for sustainable delivery of aid have long been neglected. Actors told me that in areas that INGOs have been operational for more than 40 years, it is common to find not a single local actor with adequate capacity to take over from the INGOs.

But partnership modalities between local actors and INGOs/UN agencies have been evolving. To understand the different partnership modalities some INGOs and UN agencies are currently employing to drive the localisation agenda, Development Initiatives, with financial support from the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands Humanitarian Platform and Oxfam in Kenya, engaged 21 Kenyan local humanitarian actors and 10 INGO respondents. The key learnings from the interviews, conversations and workshops that constituted the research for this forthcoming report brought out some interesting findings.