On local ownership and development

Customers and staff inside a phone and electronics shop in Laascaanood — A locally owned phone and electronics shop in Laascaanood.

There's a pattern I've watched repeat across two decades of humanitarian and development work: the projects that last are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones a community decided to own before anyone showed up with funding.

I've seen this up close, in disaster response, in planning ministries, in resettlement programs on two different continents. Externally resourced initiatives can move fast, but they tend to leave the moment the funding does. Locally initiated ones move slower, but they're still standing years later, run by people who never needed a donor's permission to start.

This is the thesis I want to develop further in longer-form writing: that "local ownership," treated as more than a grant-proposal buzzword, is the single strongest predictor of whether a development effort outlives its first funding cycle.