Solutions

We co-create, uplift and amplify solutions from the communities who know best.

We don’t just demand change—we model it. From locally-led financing mechanisms to community-driven best practices, we’re designing, co-creating and incubating effective tools to operationalize localisation. We’re proving that local leaders have the bold vision and deep experience to create solutions that best suit their communities.

Through the Solutions work at NEAR, we are co-creating, uplifting, and amplifying local solutions that radically increase local and national leadership and ownership of systems change initiatives.

NEAR’s solutions portfolio is evolving into a hub model in 2025. The Solutions Hub creates an environment for our members, partners to ideate, co-design, co-create, test and scale solutions that address structural and systemic challenges faced by the communities they serve. Through active collaboration with leaders and experts across academia, philanthropy, the aid, private, and public sectors, our members and partners can develop and pilot transformative solutions.

Innovative Financing

We are incubating innovative financing models that are driven by local leadership, that shift the balance of power and decision-making from Northern donors to Global South leaders and the communities they represent.

The Change Fund

Launched in 2022, the Change Fund is NEAR’s flagship financial mechanism. The Change Fund is a scalable and flexible grantmaking process administered by NEAR and governed by an elected Oversight Body consisting of NEAR member representatives. The Change Fund has evolved from its initial emphasis on efficiently and swiftly awarding and disbursing funds amidst some of the most complex crisis and complicated operational and regulatory contexts.

Learn More

Networked Financing Mechanism

The Networked Financing Mechanism (NFM) is an interconnected network of funding instruments, grant making funds, community philanthropy, and other funding initiatives powered by Global South leaders. Guided by the principles of equity, transparency, local ownership, accountability, flexibility, and sustainability, the NFM turns fragmentation into collective strength. Instead of
competing for scarce donor attention, funds collectively expand the field, making success in one context a foundation for success elsewhere.

Locally-led Financing Mechanisms

Through advisory support and incubation models, NEAR co-creates the design, implementation and evolution of locally-led funding mechanisms with our members and partners in a variety of countries.

Bulsho Fund

A pooled fund designed by Somali communities, for Somali communities.

Flexible, trust-based funding that supports climate resilience, livelihoods, displacement response, and essential services — especially where traditional funding struggles to reach.
Climate resilience, livelihoods, displacement, and social services, tailored to local realities through community-driven processes.
Close to 30 projects delivered in partnership with farming cooperatives, internally displaced communities, suburban communities, and nomadic groups.
Solar-powered irrigation for farming cooperatives, electrification of rural maternal health centres, and solar cold storage for women-led market traders.

CORE Fund

Nepal’s locally led pooled fund for resilience and recovery.

Humanitarian response, disaster risk reduction, and recovery — governed and implemented by Nepali NGOs and rooted in national systems.
CORE provides a model for how communities can lead effectively both in moments of crisis and throughout recovery, and redefines what effective, sustainable, and locally-owned humanitarian financing can look like.
Designed to reflect local realities, the fund sources support from a diverse base – ranging from government and philanthropic partners to diaspora networks and crowdfunding within Nepal.
Pilot projects have already delivered recovery support to flood-affected communities, and implemented  fire-preparedness measures in another province, including pre-positioning relief items ahead of the dry season.

Beyond Financing Mechanisms + Solutions

NEAR collaborates with members and partners to ideate, design, and implement innovative solutions that benefit the communities affected by multifaceted challenges.

PULSE

Bridging Ancestral Knowledge and Technology for Early Warning Systems

Participatory Unified Localisation Early Warning System (PULSE): The PULSE initiative integrates ancestral knowledge with technological innovation, promoting more effective early warning systems and anticipatory action that are adapted to each context. In collaboration with communities, PULSE explores how the aid system can be positioned to not just react to the climate crisis, but to actively anticipate, mitigate, and address potential emergencies before they escalate.
In Guatemala and the Philippines, PULSE pilot projects designed with local communities are combining ancestral knowledge with artificial intelligence and big data analysis to improve community preparedness and resilience.

The Solutions Team

Shane Scanlon

Interim Solutions Director

Sagal Hersi

Solutions Officer