What Gets Measured Gets Funded
Ask any local organisation what it takes to secure and retain donor funding, and monitoring and evaluation will be near the top of the list. Results frameworks, indicators, third-party evaluations, audited financial reports, and the accountability infrastructure expected of grantees is extensive, and reasonably so. Donors are entitled to know their funding is achieving what it set out to achieve.
It's worth asking, then, why the sector doesn't hold itself to a comparable standard when it comes to its own commitments.
The Grand Bargain's central accountability mechanism is self-reporting: signatories report their own progress against their own commitments, once a year. A 2026 retrospective published by Oxfam, marking ten years since the Grand Bargain was signed, is blunt about what this has produced: accountability mechanisms "remain weak and contested," and while self-reporting "encourages showcasing," the metrics produced "are not always comparable" across signatories. In other words, the mechanism meant to track whether commitments like the 25% direct funding target are being met is largely voluntary, self-graded, and not standardised enough to compare one donor's progress against another's.
Compare that to what we ask of a local organisation applying for a grant: independently verifiable indicators, standardised reporting templates, external audit. The asymmetry is not a minor inconsistency. It shapes what the sector actually knows about its own performance. We can state with precision, thanks to independent research like ODI's, that only 3.8% of humanitarian funding reached local actors directly in 2024. We know that because researchers outside the formal Grand Bargain accountability structure did the work of tracking it down, not because the structure itself was built to surface it.
This matters beyond the numbers. An accountability system this asymmetric quietly reinforces the very dynamic localisation is meant to correct: local organisations are trusted with money only once they've proven themselves against rigorous, externally verified standards, while the institutions setting that expectation are largely trusted to report on themselves.
Closing this gap doesn't require a new global commitment. It requires applying the same discipline institutions already expect of their grantees: independently verifiable indicators, comparable metrics, and monitoring built into the funding relationship from the start- to the commitments donors and institutions make to each other. This is the thinking behind our own work on institutional monitoring and accountability: not tracking whether a single grantee delivered a programme, but tracking whether the donors and institutions above them are delivering on what they signed up for.
Sources: Oxfam, "Grand Bargain: 10 Years On" (2026); ODI, "The state of international humanitarian funding to local and national actors" (2026).
