Insights

On November 30, 2023, NPI EXPAND hosted the first event in the project’s series, Lessons in Localization: Experiences and Perspectives from the NPI EXPAND Project. As NPI EXPAND comes to a close in October 2024, the project will share experiences and lessons learned from implementing its large-scale grants and capacity strengthening program through a series of webinars for stakeholders over the next twelve months. To stay updated on the series and future events, be sure to sign up for email updates from the project using this link.

As NPI EXPAND enters its final year of implementation, the project has awarded over 160 grants to 89 local partners in 11 countries since 2019. The process of selecting local partners to receive grants has required a balancing act, ensuring that transparent procurement procedures and compliance with USAID rules and regulations are followed while also trying to avoid a lengthy and difficult process that might place undue burden on local organizations who wish to respond to solicitations. While local partner selection looked different in each country depending on the context, NPI EXPAND regularly incorporated principles of locally-led program design to implement processes that involved local partners and stakeholders in activity design through cocreation.

Co-creation: Critical to Locally Led Program Design highlighted how the project approached local partner selection in three countries, Kenya, Mali, and Pakistan, challenges faced, local partners’ experiences with the selection process, and how community engagement in activity design impacted implementation.

The webinar began by sharing NPI EXPAND’s different approaches to local partner selection, which required balancing procurement procedures and regulations with reducing burden on local partners. Panelists from NPI EXPAND staff and grantees discussed challenges related to designing and implementing local partner selection processes were addressed in three different country contexts – Kenya, Mali, and Pakistan, as well as the ways in which NPI EXPAND engaged communities, local partners, and other stakeholders in activity design through cocreation, and the impact of community-led activity design on project results and impact.