For the second time, Peace Direct has come top in a global survey of aid agencies. The 2013 Keystone Survey looked at 62 international agencies including Save The Children, Christian Aid and VSO, and placed us overall first. This was based on 3,125 responses, and echoed the findings of the previous Keystone Survey in 2010, which also rated us top.
Keystone is a ground-breaking independent report on what local organisations in developing countries think of the agencies that fund them. This gives a voice to the concerns and wishes of Southern organisations, and offers a way of assessing the performance of international agencies against such criteria.
Peace Direct’s chief executive Carolyn Hayman commented: “These reports offer a challenge to all aid agencies, because they show that people in the developing world no longer want to be passive recipients of Western aid – they want to lead their own development programmes and find their own solutions to their problems. This is an approach which we take with our locally led peacebuilding projects worldwide. We believe this could be the future of all kinds of aid programmes.”
The report itself concludes: “The picture that emerges from the survey is of an organisation that maintains respectful relationships with its partners and brings real added value to them.” However, it also reflects beneficaries’ wishes that funding from Peace Direct could flow more regularly.
