By Barry Smith, SDDirect Associate and Senior Partnership Advisor
This week, we are launching a new Learning Report from Phase 4 of the Plan International/Social Development Direct Building Equitable Partnerships Initiative. In Phase 4 of our collaborative initiative (Partnerships for Locally Led, Globally Connected Development, July 2024 to June 2025), we engaged in a very active schedule of action-research activities, events and stakeholder engagement. A wide range of learning dialogue events were convened, with participants from international development donors, local and international NGOs and CSOs, philanthropy support organisations, and humanitarian response actors.
The report also contains links to the report and recent case studies of practical efforts to create equitable partnerships (including major programmes funded by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office) – moving from rhetoric to real-life application of tools and principles to shift the power in development and humanitarian collaboration.
As Rose Caldwell, CEO of Plan International, says in the forward to our report, we need to be honest: barriers to equitable partnerships still exist across our organisations and are often deeply embedded in the way we work and how we view the world. ‘Systemic change is required to create an enabling environment for equitable partnerships – a collective effort is required from us all, including donors, to transform the development sector, and to be the change we want to see.’
Following are highlights from the report:
Donor-level learning and recommendations
Donors play a critical role in more equitable partnerships, but while some progress has been made in changing donor practices, sustained organisational and systems changes is needed to shift away from transactional, compliance-based models and institutionalise equitable collaboration and ways of working. Donors should:
- Take on board the need to shift practice and power to enable ‘modern’ and more equitable partnerships.
- Promote and invest in more flexible, transparent and locally led funding models.
- Re-imagine the role of donors as active participants and co-owners in partnership design, implementation, learning and regular partnership health checks.
Partnership-level learning and recommendations
All partners should:
- Address and manage unequal power relationships through more inclusive, power-sharing practices.
- Acknowledge the experiential, personal and contextual dimensions of partnerships – there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution.
- Learn from the knowledge, innovations and adaptive strategies of communities.
- Foster mutual learning and accountability, with a shared understanding of equitable partnership as a trajectory, not as a static point.
- Support local organisations’ operational capacity and core funding.
- Use emerging equitable partnership tools to incentivise and drive action.
Sector-level learning and recommendations
Equitable partnerships require an enabling environment to flourish. Development and humanitarian sector actors should:
- Build sector-wide platforms for collaboration to learn and drive change.
- Support the shift in donor culture, sharing research and evidence to demonstrate, and advocate for, the long-term benefits of equitable partnerships (including through storytelling).
- Re-imagine and re-invent funding, partnership and leadership models based on principles of equity.
- Ensure that the discourse on equitable partnerships and localisation is not dominated by the global North.
- Understand and address the particular barriers to equitable partnerships in humanitarian response.
To read our Phase 4 Equitable Partnership Learning Report – which includes links to recent case studies of practical efforts to create equitable partnerships (including major programmes funded by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office) – see: Building equitable partnerships | Social Development Direct.