For decades, the international development community has grappled with how to enable local ownership for development, which is essential to foster sustainable, systemic change. We are a community that has come together because we believe that achieving locally led development will require developing ourselves–building consciousness of our own biases and privilege and how these have informed our ideas about where leadership needs to come from–and growing and improving initiatives that cultivate the agency and leadership of people in developing contexts.
The approach we are suggesting would enable a fundamental shift in international development–from a focus on identifying proven interventions and scaling them across developing contexts in pursuit of measurable outcomes at significant scale, towards one that invests in the people in developing contexts and supports them to achieve meaningful outcomes over time.
