The world has poured billions of dollars into Africa in recent decades trying to address poverty, disease and malnutrition. We know that progress has been too slow, and too uneven.
Last week, many eyes were turned toward Tanzania, where some of the world’s brightest minds gathered at the World Economic Forum on Africa. African leaders, and individual, corporate and government donors, are reassessing the effectiveness and sustainability of past spending and looking for new ideas in this fragile global economy.
At Population Services International (PSI), our experience shows that donor funds are most effective when they support a locally led, results-based and integrated approach. Of these, most important is local leadership, although all partners – businesses, NGOs, community leaders, donors – ideally are equally involved in implementing and evaluating a development strategy.
This sounds basic, but it’s been exceptionally difficult to achieve. The approach may work well at smaller community levels, but when brought to scale across a region or a country, top-down solutions often wind up being imposed to fill gaps that emerge from flawed bottom-up approaches, with neither achieving success.
There are genuine success stories, though. One great example of a locally-led and integrated strategy that has been done right, to scale, and that serves as a prime example of just how effective donor funds can be when spent wisely is in Rwanda. . .
Read the full article on The Huffington Post – Lessons From Africa: The Leadership Spark
