Localisation · Inclusion · Development practice
Localisation is a practice, not a slogan
Everyone in development supports locally led solutions. What it takes for a consultancy to practise localisation, from staffing to decision rights to inclusion.
Avicenna Consulting International · · 2 min read
International development has moved, at least in language, towards solutions that are locally led and country-owned. It is hard to find an organisation that disagrees. The harder question is what changes in practice when you take it seriously.
What localisation looks like in practice
Local leadership with real authority. Local experts and firms in lead roles, with decision rights and a meaningful share of the budget, rather than named as subcontractors on the organisation chart.
Fair partnerships. Reasonable overheads, prompt payment, shared credit for knowledge products and honest conversations about risk. Capacity building should go both ways.
Context knowledge and relationships. Experience of how government departments actually work, which stakeholders matter and how reform is negotiated cannot be flown in for a two-week mission. It builds up over years of presence.
Continuity. Local teams stay after a project closes. That continuity is what turns a one-off deliverable into lasting change.
What it means for a consultancy
For a consulting firm, localisation shows up in everyday choices:
- who leads assignments and who writes the reports
- how teams are assembled for each job, drawing on senior professionals who know the sector rather than defaulting to the same roster
- whether knowledge is transferred to client institutions or stays with the consultant
- how quickly and fairly partners are paid
Inclusion belongs in the design
Gender, disability and social inclusion work best when they are part of programme design, monitoring frameworks and community engagement from the start. Added afterwards, they tend to become a paragraph in the final report. Asking early who is being reached, who is being missed and why changes what gets built.
How to measure it
Useful questions include: what share of funding goes to local partners, who holds the key decisions, whether outcomes last after the funding ends, and whether the people most affected were consulted in design.
As a Pakistan-registered and Pakistan-led firm, ACI works this way by default: local ownership, senior professionals who know the context, and inclusion built in rather than bolted on. The test of any approach, ours included, is whether the results hold up once the project team has gone home.
