An invitation to action.

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What would it look like if development was truly locally led? 

If local actors shaped priorities, designed solutions, and defined success? And if partnerships were grounded in trust, equity and accountability?

This vision is already within reach, but only if we act together. 

This is an open invitation to governments, donors, foundations and civil society. Will you join us?

Created in partnership with the OECD and other allies: Our hope is that this invitation will inspire action at all levels of the global community – namely a meaningful recommitment to long-term, locally led development.

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We call on all development partners to integrate the OECD Guidelines for Supporting Locally Led Development into their policies, programmes, and partnerships.

Specifically, we urge you to:

1. Be clear on your intentions and definitions for locally led development. This includes translating commitments into clear policies and strategies, establishing a shared understanding of locally led development across your institution and being explicit about roles, responsibilities, and power dynamics within each partnership.
2. Implement meaningful co-creation of development solutions. This means recognising local actors as co-decision-makers in setting priorities, shaping approaches, and defining success; systematically engaging diverse local actors to embed local knowledge, expertise, and lived experience in policies and programmes; and working with and through existing local networks and processes.
3. Develop equitable partnership approaches. This means setting clear expectations for equitable partnerships across different partnership types and actors, engaging in long‑term partnerships to build trust, capacity, and shared ownership and ensuring intermediaries uphold equitable partnership approaches.
4. Improve human resource management. This means empowering country-level decision-making, ensuring local perspectives inform headquarters strategies, aligning staffing, incentives, and recruitment with LLD objectives, and prioritising local and regional expertise.
5. Provide quality financing to local actors. This means providing long-term, predictable and flexible financing, including core and overhead support for local partners, intermediaries and networks; combining national budget support with decentralised or subnational financing where conditions allow; and tailoring financing modalities and requirements to local contexts and capacities to ensure inclusive access.
6. Redefine roles for international intermediaries. This means setting clear expectations and requirements for intermediaries to support local leadership, redefining intermediary roles over time, shifting towards advisory, facilitation and capacity-support functions, and embedding locally led development commitments in partnership agreements with intermediaries.
7. Simplify due diligence and equitable risk sharing. This means harmonising and aligning due diligence standards to reduce duplication, using passporting for mutual recognition across funders, adopting simple, proportionate reporting requirements, and promoting risk sharing rather than risk transfer.
8. Promote locally led monitoring, evaluation and learning. This means engaging with and strengthening partners’ existing Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning systems, ensuring evaluations are culturally appropriate and grounded in local leadership and expertise and including local perspectives into evaluation reporting and adaptive programming.
9. Promote and practice transparency and accountability. This means establishing transparent reporting systems to track and publish how much ODA reaches local actors directly and through intermediaries, assessing the quality of funding and partnerships established, and embedding locally led accountability commitments in partnership agreements and performance frameworks.