‘Locally-Led’ Development and Open Government: Focus on USAID

This pilot study analyzes public sources of official data to assess USAID's information disclosure practices, trace its sectoral priorities, and identify patterns of funding to national organizations.

Image credit: Jeffrey Hallock

Why Open Government and Locally-Led Development?

USAID is the primary U.S. government agency focused on funding international development and humanitarian assistance. It has pledged to significantly increase the proportion of development assistance it provides directly to organizations based in aid recipient countries, aiming for 25% by 2025. It has also pledged to include ‘locally-led’ input on project design, agenda setting, and evaluations in 50% of its program spending by 2030.

Informed engagement by civil society stakeholders in locally-led programming requires an understanding of trends in USAID funding priorities. This in turn requires transparency about aid spending.

User-centered public access to information about the flow of development aid allows stakeholders to follow the money, spotlight progress, and identify bottlenecks. This ARC pilot study assesses USAID’s information disclosure practices, traces its sectoral priorities, and identifies patterns of funding to national organizations.

In September 2023, Jonathan Fox and Jeffrey Hallock’s blog How More Open Government Can Bolster USAID’s Localization Agenda introduced the ideas behind the study and shared some early results.

Water barrel with USAID logo, and four women washing their hands

USAID donated handwashing stations in Colombia to help the community stop the spread of COVID-19. Credit: USAID/Colombia, CC 2.0 via Flickr

Focus Areas

1. Public Access to Project Data: Colombia Spotlight

Open government analysis assesses accessible data about what governments do. It also examines the relevance and reliability of those data.

A user-centered approach to open government additionally focuses on the accessibility and legibility of information.

Our initial data analysis and results on disclosure practices focus on USAID in Colombia. This initiative was informed by consultations with Colombian counterparts.

Data and technical analysis:

Sources: USAID Colombia (accessed August 2023); ForeignAssitance.gov (accessed August 2023); Evaluations at USAID Dashboard (accessed August 2023).

2. Sectoral and Direct Local Funding Trends: Country Profiles

These preliminary country profiles analyze development project priorities, sectoral trends in foreign assistance, and changes in direct local funding (2021-2022).

They use data from USAID mission pages, USAID reports, ForeignAssistance.gov, USASpending.gov, and the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI).

Feedback on this work in progress is welcome; contact Jeffrey Hallock (jh1227a@american.edu).

Country-level Analysis of U.S. Foreign Assistance: Preliminary Overviews of Publicly Available Data

 

3.  Direct Local Funding Trends: Across USAID

A USAID official report in June 2023 announced that although the proportion of direct local funding was increasing, it was still far short of the 25% target.

As we have built tools to analyze data for the pilot study, we have begun developing an online tool for cross-country comparison of direct local funding. It is based on an evaluation and re-purposing of USAID’s self-reported funding figures.

    • USAID Direct Local Funding Comparison Tool (under development)

4.  Open Government Practices: Land Tenure and Indigenous Rights

Land tenure and indigenous rights are priority issues for USAID. ARC is applying open government tools to assess publicly available data on trends in these issue areas. Feedback on this work in progress is welcome; contact Jeffrey Hallock (jh1227a@american.edu).

5.  Open Government Practices: Sub-Awards and Evaluations

Sub-awards and evaluations are two critical development aid modalities that could contribute to enhancing locally-led programming. These overviews analyze data access challenges and trends. Feedback on this work in progress is welcome; contact Jeffrey Hallock (jh1227a@american.edu).

Source: International Aid Transparency Initiative (Country Development Finance Data – Colombia, accessed May 31, 2023). USAID figures for 2021 and 2022 are from USAID’s report “Moving Toward a Model of Locally Led Development”. See also, Tilley and Jenkins (2023) “Metrics Matter: How USAID Counts “Local” Will Have a Big Impact on Funding for Local Partners,” Publish What You Fund.

An asterisk denotes that public data is reported as not complete for the year when accessed.

Publish What You Fund and USAID define ‘local’ organizations differently. For Publish What You Fund, local denotes the recipient organization’s primary headquarters is in the recipient country; for USAID, it includes nationally incorporated branches of international entities.

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