Matchmakers for Local Solutions
MatchLocal strengthens local leadership in humanitarian assistance, peace and development.
We facilitate comprehensive capacity and risk sharing processes between humanitarian partners to foster locally-owned solutions.
In other words, we enable localisation.
MatchLocal is supported by Science&Startups and the Berlin Startup Stipendium. As proud members of the Sustainabiliy and Society Cluster we are very grateful for the support of:
Our Objective
With our comprehensive matchmaking process we aim to create
more opportunities to achieve locally developed solutions;
more options for partnering with local organisations;
more sustainable local structures.
Our hands-on support to localisation povides concrete benefits for both local organisations and donors.
The challenge
Remove the barriers between local organisations and donors and make localisation a reality.
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Localisation means supporting local actors and organisations to take a leading role in responding to crises and advancing development goals.
Effective local organisations promote relevant, inclusive, and bottom-up solutions for humanitarian relief, conflict resolution and development. They strengthen the resilience of communities and reduce dependencies on international assistance.
Localisation increases the competition between potential recipients of international funding, which may reduce costs for donors and enhance the benefits for target populations.
Stronger local organisations expand the “market of ideas” on what to do in response to crises. They can enrich national and international political debates. A larger competition of ideas widens the space for innovation.
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Donors have committed to building local structures and strengthening local leadership in response to crisis. Evidence shows that progress towards this commitment is extremely slow. There is a mismatch between the capacities of local organisations and donor requirements.
The market of potentially fundable local organisations is very limited. This is particularly true for initiatives led by women, youth and marginalized groups. Local organisations often lack the capacities to work complex procurement systems and to comply with the diverse requirements of donors regarding transparency and results-based management.
From the perspective of donors, who are accountable to taxpayers, these weaknesses outweigh the strengths of local organisations. To minimize financial and reputational risks, donors mostly delegate the work with local partners to large internationally operating organisations. Those organisations contract local actors to implement their projects and programmes.
Faced with their dependency on limited and mostly project-bound resources, local organisations cannot afford the logistical and human capacities to attract funding for their own solutions.
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MatchLocal helps to make the commitment to localisation become a reality on the ground. We support local solutions by strengthening the ability of local organisations to engage with donors and internationally operating organisations.
We make international commitments, donor requirements and local needs, ideas, and opportunities match.
Our approach
Together with our partners, we provide a “one-stop-shop” engagement process in support of local solutions. Our five capacity sharing modules can build on each other or be implemented as stand-alone activities.
1. Scout
We scout local organisations. This is based on country expertise, context specific needs and donor requirements. Organisations that qualify as potential local partners may include civil society organisations and local government agencies with basic organisational prerequisites. We pay special attention to women- and youth-led organisations.
2. Assess
We support local organisations in assessing their objectives, capacities strengths, challenges and needs. We also analyse the benefits of further engaging and sharing capacities with these potential partners, including a longer-term mentoring by MatchLocal.
3. Incubate
We organise incubation workshops with local organisations. The purpose is to create ways and means to turn local ideas into fundable solutions. The workshops include future labs to develop local strategies and ideas. They also provide hands-on training in project planning, monitoring and evaluation, grant application, bookkeeping and accountability.
4. Accompany
We accompany local organisations in developing sustainable organisational structures and processes while implementing local solutions, designing projects and applying for funding. We provide local organisations with financial support and ongoing on-the-job mentoring to meet monitoring, accounting and reporting requirements throughout project implementation.
5. Follow-up
We support network building and peer-to-peer learning opportunities for local organisations. Moreover, we work together with local organisations to develop and implement a realistic donor engagement strategy. We assess the progress made in strengthening local leadership and identify lessons learned from the matchmaking.