Overall progress towards the Grand Bargain commitments is uneven and difficult to assess. The latest annual independent monitoring of the Grand Bargain notes that maintaining momentum and reinvigorating it where it is faltering will require political commitment, streamlining and prioritisation of commitments and, crucially, better monitoring and analysis of progress and challenges (Metcalfe-Hough et al., 2018). Measuring progress is noted as a barrier: ‘in the absence of consistent reporting by signatories against the target it is difficult to determine whether [progress reported] represents a significant change’ (ibid.). Despite making an explicit commitment to measure progress in meeting the 25% commitment, and clear recommendations on how to monitor progress, no measurement of the baseline or progress against it has taken place.
This study, commissioned by NEAR, is an attempt to build the evidence base from a crisis perspective. It aims to explore alternative approaches to tracking funding dimensions of localisation, in order to complement global estimates such as the Global Humanitarian Assistance report, which shows funding provided to local and national responders directly and through one intermediary accounted for 3.6% ($736 million) of total international humanitarian assistance reported to FTS in 2017.