The Movement for Community-led Development

(Photo: leaders from our Malawi Chapter, Rowland Kaotcha (The Hunger Project), Petronella Halwindi (Heifer International) and Bedilu Shegan (Counterpart International) welcome Malawi’s Minister of Local Government and Rural Development to the celebration of the Champiti Epicenter self-reliance.)

In this first year of the Sustainable Development Goals, our movement has achieved significant progress on the goals we set at our launch, and have built a strong foundation for empowering women and men everywhere to take charge of their own lives and destinies.

1. We raised the profile of CLD in international development, providing leadership opportunities for our members and establishing a “big tent” that has united diverse agencies in highlighting the profound policy transformation that will be required to achieve the SDGs.
2. We doubled the size of the movement to include 39 agencies with total collective revenues of US$4b per year and a presence in 92 countries.
3. We launched Country Chapters in Malawi, UK and the Netherlands, and the groundwork has begun in Haiti and 10 other countries for launches in 2017. We’ve set a goal of 50 country chapters engaging with their governments for country-owned CLD programming by 2020.
4. We signed an MOU with the government of Malawi that we intend will lead to taking CLD to national scale
5. We developed a Shared Analytic Framework that, to date, encompasses our collective approaches in 16 interventions across four distinct phases.
6. We presented the movement to key agencies, at the World Bank, IFPRI, IDS, USAID and at a broad range of UN conferences, producing video presentations on our website and forging partnerships with CLD champions within those agencies.
7. We shared case studies and best practices in our own webinars, also available on our website, and soon on UNDP’s South-South website.
8. We joined forces with like-minded initiatives, particularly with the UNDP Saemaul Initiative and the LOCUS initiative on integrated development.
9. We began collecting evidence of the impact of CLD, which will require significant focused attention in 2017 to assemble what we need for effective advocacy.
10. We witnessed policy change. It’s impossible to take credit for advocacy results, but we can celebrate new significant shifts in US policy in the direction of CLD within the new Global Food Security and Food for Peace strategies.