In September 2024, on the sidelines of the opening of the UN General Assembly, a coalition of Global South leaders convened philanthropists and localisation advocates to explore ways that philanthropy can advance locally led development. Adeso, in partnership with the African Philanthropy Forum, the Casa Socio-Environmental Fund, NEAR, Alight, and WINGS convened the dialogue, How Philanthropy Can Lead the Way To Locally Led Development: A Global South Roadmap.
Participants strategized on ways to implement the Global South Roadmap, a highly collaborative framework that puts the Global South in the driver’s seat of any effort to breakthrough the decade’s long logjam preventing meaningful progress on locally-led development.
Key issues debated in this session include:
- How does the Global Majority define locally led development and what do Global South civil society leaders see as the greatest impediments to its actualization?
- Is there a role for philanthropy – from both the Global South and the Global North – in advancing locally-led development? Are there systemic levers that philanthropy is better equipped to pull than other sectors like government?
- How can Global South expertise be more robustly and systematically incorporated into the current effort within philanthropy to fund locally led development?
- What accounts for the inability to reach the targets to fund locally led organizations directly and is there a way for philanthropy to address that?