This week, NEAR is traveling to Geneva to participate in the Grand Bargain’s Annual Meeting. The Grand Bargain grew out of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit and is a unique agreement between some of the largest donors and humanitarian organisations who have committed to put more power and resources into the hands of people in need and to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian action.
Each year since this inception six years ago, the Grand Bargain’s 65 Signatories come together in June to meet and mark progress, identify areas needing more attention, and re-commit to progress on the Grand Bargain’s commitments. This year will be the first in-person meeting in two years, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
2021-22 has been an important year for NEAR’s leadership and engagement in the Grand Bargain. We are excited to see colleagues and ensure continued commitment to the localisation objectives that NEAR members value in the Grand Bargain.
This year launched the Grand Bargain 2.0 Framework, which made important changes in the way the Grand Bargain organises itself. One important change in this framework is the inclusion of a Global South Signatory in the Facilitation Group.
NEAR has held this seat for this first year and the Alliance for Empowering Partnership (A4EP) will hold it for the second year. This seat affords an opportunity for Global South actors to directly influence Grand Bargain leadership and decision-making.
NEAR’s Sherpa representative in the Facilitation Group is a Global South leader, Dr. Puji Pujiono, Senior Advisor of the Pujiono Centre in Indonesia, supported by the NEAR Secretariat. This is a welcome – if overdue – chance for Global South leaders to directly influence the Grand Bargain’s leadership and coordination. We are proud of the progress that NEAR ushered in during this tenure.
NEAR spearheaded the establishment of National Reference Groups (NRGs), coordination spaces led by local and national actors at country-level. These groups promise to bring the Grand Bargain discussions and commitments from the global to the national level. The concept for NRGs builds on the lessons learned from the Grand Bargain’s Country-Based Dialogues and seek to convene all relevant humanitarian actors, including local and national actors, INGOs, UN agencies, donors, national government bodies, and other relevant groups.
This initiative will constitute a meaningful mechanism to progress localisation dialogues, driven by local and national actors, in countries where crises are occurring. NEAR members around the world are working now to establish NRGs and one local leader, Iyad Agha, representing the Northwest Syria NGO Forum, will travel to Geneva this week. In the Annual Meeting, Agha will present his experience establishing an NRG and the prospects it offers for localisation and local and national actors’ access to quality funding.
One of the signature commitments of the Grand Bargain is a pledge to transfer 25% of all humanitarian funding as directly as possible to local and national actors. This target is still high on the political agenda, as evidenced by the USAID Administrator Samantha Power’s announcement in late 2021 that 25% of all U.S. assistance will be delivered to local and national actors. Despite these pledges, it is still just a meagre percentage of funding that is directly provided to local and national actors. In 2020, only 3.1% of the total humanitarian funds went to local and national actors.
NEAR is looking forward to a high-level event this week on the margins of the Annual Meeting where, alongside the Office of the Eminent Person of the Grand Bargain, Jan Egeland, we will launch a caucus (or high-level political dialogue) dedicated to making progress on funding for localisation.
NEAR is hopeful that the two planned subsets of discussion, including 1) the 25% funding target for local and national actors, 2) a commitment to overhead funding for local and national actors and increased investment in local and national actors’ institutional capacity, will provide a step change in addressing the institutional barriers that hinder the system reaching the 25% target. With the support and participation of USAID, we anticipate this caucus will reach much-needed political agreements for investing in national and local leadership in crisis settings.
We urge you to follow along with NEAR this week. We will be sharing a policy report and infographic that detail the progress made and our recommendations to sustain the momentum that has been built. Our social media channels will be active, so please join us and participate in the conversation. We must continue the push for the Grand Bargain to put local and national NGOs at the centre of all its initiatives by transferring power and resources to Global South organisations.