Our Overarching goal for 2019 has been to shift the movement into “Phase Two”: to move beyond enlisting and organizing member organizations into taking collective, strategic action towards facilitating community-led development at scale. This goal has been achieved!
- Influencing National Governments:
- We were invited by the national governments of Benin and Uganda to provide input into their national 2030 strategies.
- Zambia’s Ministries of Health and Community Development have officially joined the Movement.
- Influencing Donor Agencies:
- The Movement organized side events at the UN Commission on Social Development, Commission on the Status of Women, High Level Political Forum and General Assembly, the World Bank’s Global Partnership for Social Accountability, InterAction, Pathways to Power (London) and Global Washington (Seattle).
- We organized our first all-day Washington symposium with USAID’s deputy administrator as our keynote, and were invited by USAID to co-creating meetings under their Broad Area Agreement Framework.
- Expanded Support structure: to accelerate our collective action worldwide, The Hunger Project has provided:
- Three full-time regional coordinators in Africa: Daisy Owomugasho in East Africa, Pascal Djohossou in West Africa and Rowlands Kaotcha in Southern Africa.
- Expanded staffing in the global secretariat: Ann Hendrix-Jenkins and Gunjan Veda.
- Collaborative Global Research: A team of 30+ evaluation professionals from 23 agencies coordinated by Gunjan completed the first phase of a meta synthesis of 300+ evaluations of member programs with the goal to understand the complex relationship between CLD and sought-after development outcomes like citizen’s engagement, self-reliance, gender equality, sustainability and resilience. The team presented collaboratively developed tools and initial findings to the World Bank and the American Evaluation Association.
- Expansion in East Africa: The Kenya Chapter launched and is proving to be a pace-setting national chapter of the Movement: establishing strong and productive working groups, mapping member activities across the newly well-funded county governments. Rwanda and Ethiopia are close to launching, and first steps are underway in Tanzania.
- Expansion in West Africa: Civil society organizations in Togo launched their chapter, and groups in Mali, Nigeria and Sierra Leone took initial steps towards chapters there.
- Expansion in Southern Africa: In Zambia we had a successful “double launch” in launching our Zambia Chapter and our first-ever Consortium CLD Project.
- In Asia, we’ve enlisted the partnership of LOGIN Asia – an existing local governance network – and, for the first time, the participation in the Movement of 12 Indian organizations.
- Humanitarian Working Group has been almost established, and will be a big priority for 2020.
- Communication “campaigns” to socialize MCLD with current and potential members has begun, managed by Mary Kate Costello. In 2019 we attended brown bag learning sessions at Islamic Relief USA and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the Humanitas Global Development Board Meeting to discuss the value of CLD membership. Mary Kate began development of a member orientation, and is tracking member progress in publishing CLD information pages on their respective websites.