For five years, The Share Trust has been working to shift power and funding to local actors. Through research, advocacy, and collaboration, we have gathered practical insights into what it takes to move from intention to implementation. Our series, 5 years, 5 Actions, from Learning to Practice, brings those lessons together, outlining five clear pathways for donors, INGOs, and global institutions to contribute to building more equitable, locally led systems.
In early 2025, the UN announced a “Humanitarian Reset” to increase efficiency, reduce bureaucracy and devolve more funding and decision-making to local actors, with the expansion of UN OCHA’s Country-Based Pooled Funds (CBPFs) a key part of that vision. The United States’ recent commitment of $2 billion to OCHA and the CBPFs—to be implemented within six months—nearly triples funding to these institutions and creates real potential to reach unmet need. But scale and speed are a difficult combination: without deliberate action, rapid expansion risks replicating the top-down structures the Reset was designed to dismantle. Attention to these dynamics will be critical as the next US tranche of funding—another $1.8 billion announced in May—starts to flow.
Local actors should lead decision-making about issues that affect them. Local leadership is also important for effective programs—and evidence shows that it can also be more cost-efficient. The Share Trust’s Passing the Buck studies of CBPF funding in Ukraine, Nigeria, Sudan, and Myanmar between 2022 and 2024 found that local NGO partners deliver programming 10–19 percent more cost-efficiently, on average, than international partners. These results stem largely from local NGOs’ lower staff and overhead costs. To avoid understating what local NGOs should be paid—and to reflect the importance of greater salary equity and fair indirect cost coverage—the analysis reflects the highest local NGO salaries observed. Even so, local NGOs remain more cost efficient.
The cost efficiency gap is starkest with UN agencies. Local organizations are, on average, 13-21 percent more cost efficient than UN partners. This difference reflects UN international staff costs that run 1.8–2.8x higher, on average, than INGO equivalents, though this often goes unnoticed since UN agencies, per the terms of their agreements with donors, typically share very little detail on their budgets.2
In addition to affirming the relative cost efficiency of local intermediaries, an analysis of the Sudan Humanitarian Fund (SHF) raises the question of whether it may be more cost-efficient for a pooled fund to manage more local awards directly than to route them through international intermediaries. The intuition is straightforward. Managing more, smaller awards would raise the CBPF's own administrative costs—but those costs exist either way. With indirect awards, they shift to lead partners, and when those partners have high cost structures, total project outlays can end up higher than if the CBPF managed the awards itself.
That said, the extent to which CBPFs can manage significant numbers of new local awards in the short term varies; such a shift could require a change in the size and composition of pooled fund staff. Furthermore, there are circumstances in which international intermediaries add value, including coordination, capacity sharing, security and protection, donor navigation, and compliance management. The key is to draw on international partners’ strengths in ways that enable and elevate local leadership.
UN OCHA deserves credit for its commitment to increasing local funding and the recent steps it’s taken to advance this goal—including pilots to reduce duplicative pre-award assessments and to streamline eligibility criteria for partners managing smaller awards. These efforts should be complemented by ongoing landscape analyses of—and outreach to—potential local grantees. In many places, there is a sense that many local organizations are too small to work directly with CBPFs. For some organizations, that is true, but these assumptions may also underestimate many local organizations’ capacity. In Sudan, for instance, multiple local organizations already receive close to a million dollars or more from the SHF through a combination of direct and indirect awards.
Unfortunately, the pressure to disburse the United States’ $2 billion in six months has created conditions that constrain CBPFs’ efforts to reach more local partners. To move this volume of money in such a short timeframe, CBPFs had to target pre-vetted partners that could absorb large sums within weeks; most local partners didn’t clear that hurdle. Across the 18 countries receiving funding from the $2 billion allocation, UN agencies are receiving 65 percent of direct funds, INGOs 31 percent, and local partners just 4 percent. In 10 countries, local partners received zero direct funding. The inclusion of indirect funding increases local NGOs’ share, but only to an underwhelming 12 percent. These figures present a significant departure from 2025 when local NGOs directly received 46 percent of CBPFs’ funding—and 55 percent of direct and indirect funding. The latest tranche of US funding comes with a 12-month implementation window; this longer timeframe should give CBPFs more latitude to engage local partners and emphasize quality local partnerships. Whether they do will be worth watching closely.
Devolving resources matters—but so does devolving decision making and understanding from local actors themselves what roles they want to play and in what kind of relationship with other actors. CBPFs also have an imperative to support a diversity of local responders, not just those that meet the criteria to receive direct funding. It is encouraging, then, that OCHA is taking an expanded view of locally led action rather than reducing it to a single funding target.
For example, The Share Trust’s Passing the Buck studies found that, for the project budgets analyzed (in the 2022-2024 window), most international partners were not passing through indirect cost recovery to downstream partners. However, many CBPFs are now more clearly requiring their lead partners to equitably share overhead costs, recognizing that these costs are critical to local subpartners’ organizational capacity and sustainability.
In addition, certain CBPFs are experimenting with innovative (indirect) funding mechanisms to get more—and higher-quality—funding to local levels. The SHF’s Mutual Aid Groups (MAG) window is one example. It delivers flexible, small-scale grants to frontline groups via local and international NGOs quickly and with low administrative burden. Scaling the MAG window to $25 million has been a key factor in the SHF nearly tripling its share of local direct and indirect funding between 2020 (12 percent) and 2025 (35 percent).
Fund UN agencies for what only they can deliver. While CBPFs have relatively low administrative costs, their UN agency partners are more costly than other partner types, on average. Their higher cost structures are justified where their scale, mandate, or authority add value others can't match—and harder to justify for functions that local or other international partners can perform, often at lower cost.
Require greater transparency of UN agency budget data so CBPFs and donors can better assess different cost structures and make funding decisions that stretch humanitarian funding farther.
Surface the trade-offs between moving money quickly and localization, highlighting, in addition to the moral and practical reasons for devolving funding to local levels, the cost-efficiency gains of shifting resources to local partners.
Expand Mutual Aid Group windows across other CBPFs to channel fast, flexible resources to local responders.
Engage local actors deliberately on the roles they want to play, where they’re interested in direct donor funding, where they want partnerships with international actors, and how they want those partnerships to look.
Select international partners based on their willingness to devolve resources and decision-making power to local actors—and hold them accountable for progress on both.
Use it to advocate for Action 1 within your organization. We’ve included specific recommendations for donors, CBPFs, and UN OCHA.