90 - Integrating Local Knowledge in Humanitarian and Development Programming: Perspectives and Experiences of Global Women Leaders

Abstract Information: In the humanitarian and development sectors, the international community often fails to ground its actions in considerations of the concrete knowledge, experiences, and stories of the local actors in the areas where they work. The paper Integrating Local Knowledge in Humanitarian and Development Programming: Perspectives and Experiences of Global Women Leaders collects the stories and inputs of 30 women leaders from around the globe in an effort to understand the ways in which they conceptualize local knowledge and put it into practice in their work, as well as the specific challenges they have faced when attempting to share their knowledge with international actors in their spaces. The research builds upon a July 2022 USAID study about local knowledge by incorporating the perspectives of local leaders themselves. In this way, this paper strengthens the conversation around the value of local stories and feedback in shaping the ways that humanitarian and development actors evaluate their work and its impact in countries other than their own. The study found, among other things, that effective programming and evaluation in the eyes of local populations requires intimate knowledge of a community, its history, and its context, usually acquired only when from a community or after a significant period of time spent in it; that a lack of resources and access to certain spaces consistently prevents local actors from sharing their knowledge out themselves; and that international actors tend to listen to grassroots actors only when they need something or when a crisis emerges, rather than at all moments of a relationship. These findings as well as many others can help inform the international evaluation community and accelerate its transition toward adopting more locally-led, decentralized, non-extractive approaches to evaluation and other aspects of international programming. Additionally, by focusing on the perspectives of Women-Led Organizations (WLOs), the paper also speaks to feminist approaches to evaluation and international humanitarian work. Through this study, 30 women leaders told us their own stories of working with and being evaluated by the international community, and it is imperative that evaluation specialists in the Global North hear them.

Relevance Statement: Evaluation practitioners in the international humanitarian and development sectors have been transitioning recently toward adopting more locally-led, decentralized, non-extractive approaches. This paper provides concrete examples of how this shift can be made, with recommendations coming directly from the voices of women leaders from grassroots feminist organizations across the globe. While the research explores the contribution of local knowledge to more areas of international programming than only evaluation – including consultation, project design, and implementation – the battles faced by grassroots actors when trying to communicate their knowledge should be interesting for those in the field who are eventually responsible for evaluating the work of global initiatives that involve (or neglect to involve) them. Allowing women leaders to share their own stories via this paper is a key step to determining more equal, just, and participatory approaches to evaluating the work that involves and affects them. If accepted, their voices would also be involved directly in the presentation of the paper, either through video recordings or quotes (if not possible to bring them in person). This research will also reinforce for audience members the power of qualitative research in sharing human stories and perspectives with a degree of nuance and richness that quantitative data cannot always communicate. The perspectives explored in the paper were learned via one-hour, semi-structured interviews with women leaders who were free to share their frank and honest opinions with the team of researchers, without fear of repercussion in future partnerships. Even this practice itself, of creating space for feedback from grassroots leaders to their partners at INGOs, is a valuable practice the interviewees mentioned; they want these relationships to allow for genuine criticism from the grassroots without negative consequences in the next round of programming cycles. For this reason, the very exercise of conducting this research was a first small step toward the international community taking up the interviewees’ recommendations for provoking power shifts and improved models of partnership and evaluation. This paper includes learnings that are deeply relevant to evaluation theory and practice. Interviewees shared who the local knowledge stakeholders are at community level in their regions, thus informing who evaluators should be speaking with during their assessments. They explained the challenges they face in getting their contextual expertise heard by others, thus illuminating what obstacles evaluation specialists should be keeping an eye out for. They described good practices in making sure local knowledge gets integrated into international work, thus pointing evaluation specialists to the types of approaches they should be looking for when assessing global initiatives. They shared their own measures of success when determining whether local knowledge has been effectively incorporated into a global initiative, thus guiding evaluators from the Global North toward employing similar methods. And finally, they provided concrete recommendations, as noted above, for how all actors from the international community can better partner with and include the voices of grassroots leaders in their work, ranging from providing feedback more often to being aware of local power dynamics to avoiding extractive practices.