05/01/2026
Over the holiday period, I had more time to peruse older podcast episodes that are well worth listening to.
And... George Mitchell, Hans Peter Schmitz, Barney Tallack and I are in the FINAL month of finalizing our book manuscript for the second edition of Between Power and Irrelevance: the Future of Transnational NGOs. In which we will introduce a few new case studies on practical steps forward-leaning NGOs took towards locally led development.
This made me want to listen to this older episode, highlighting Christian Aid's steps:
https://mzninternational.com/podcast/
And I am so glad I did.
Christian Aid, since then, has taken even more steps, towards an aligned Operating Model- which we will pay attention to in our book.
Concretely, this is what stood out to me:
* Give up direct implementation (yes, a well-known artifact of locally led development - but is it well-practiced?)
* FBOs have several advantages in closing the gap between espoused values and real in-use practices: their basic premise is to primarily work with local, well institutionalized, capable, and trusted religious institutions; also, their funding basis includes receiving a healthy proportion of unrestricted income, leading to what the podcast host Christian calls "strategic agility"
* Focus on where the INGO really adds value, compared to what’s already being done effectively by local groups
* Share your indirect cost recovery (ICR) funds 50-50% with local partners
* Harmonize partner accountability requirements with those of other development actors and/or accept other donors' proof of accountability standards when your partner org already has met those
* Allocate 80% of your humanitarian appeal donor money to partners
* Allocate one quarter of your flexible funds to partners
* Use longer-term, 3-year partnership cycles
Love the concreteness of these steps.
Read more in our upcoming second edition book, published around September 2026. Follow us as authors here on LinkedIn for more details as they become available!
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