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	There is no injustice so deeply entrenched it cannot be overcome by Desmond Tutu Oxfam - Grow campaign   Around the world close to 1 billion men, women and children will go to bed hungry tonight.   Yet a lifetime of experience has taught me that there is no problem so great it cannot be solved, no injustice so deeply entrenched it cannot be overcome. And that includes hunger.   Hunger is not a natural phenomenon. It is a man made tragedy. People do not go hungry because there is not enough food to eat. They go hungry because the system which delivers food from the fields to our plates is broken. And now in this new age of crisis – with increasingly severe and extreme weather and dwindling natural resources – feeding the world will get harder still.   So how did we get here? Our governments must shoulder a lot of the blame. Their policies and practices are propping up a broken system which benefits a few powerful companies and interest groups at the expense of the many.   They have spent billions of dollars on biofuels companies and northern farmers but neglected the 500 million small scale farms which together feed one third of humanity.   They have spent more then a decade debating climate change but pledged emissions reductions which put us on course for catastrophic warming. They have let the food markets get out of control and have denied women, who produce much of the world’s food, the right to land, resources and opportunities enjoyed by their male counterparts.   But the future is not set – it is ours to shape. However it does require a totally different approach to the way we produce and share food.   Governments – especially the powerful G20 countries – must kick start the transformation. They must invest in poor producers and provide them the support they need to adapt to a changing climate. They must regulate volatile commodity markets and put an end to the policies which reward companies for turning food into engine fuel. And they must deliver a global climate deal to keep climate change in check.   Of course many governments and companies will be resistant to change through habit, ideology or the pursuit of profit. It is up to us – you and me – to persuade them – by choosing food that’s produced fairly and sustainably, by cutting our carbon footprints and by joining with others to demand change.   http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow Visit the related web page
	How civil-society investments strengthen local ownership of development by Overseas Development Institute, agencies   In the latest of our Financing Progress series, World Vision''s Randall Tift and William Langley explore how the shift towards investments in social, institutional, and human capital can help ensure that international and local resources for development have a sustained impact.   World Vision and other international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) are sharpening their focus on mobilising both international and domestic resources for development. US-based INGOs channel around $20 billion per year in private funding for overseas relief and development, according to the Hudson Institute. That is comparable to USAID’s 2014 foreign assistance account budget of $20.4 billion and there is no doubt that it has done a great deal of good.   Aid flows channeled from INGOs through local organisations and communities help to reduce child mortality, facilitate collective action at community level, and support the development efforts and capacities of local and national governments in partner countries.   In addition to these resource investments, INGO programs also emphasize the importance of building other forms of local ‘capital’. In fact, INGOs often mobilize or help create, financial, institutional, human, and social capital to spur progress towards development goals. They also help to regenerate natural capital, which underpins the productivity of agriculture. By building long term partnerships with local communities and civil society organizations, INGOs help to ensure that critical local assets contribute to the effectiveness and sustainability of development interventions.   Increasingly, INGOs are building social accountability mechanisms into their development work to make service delivery more relevant, responsive, effective and efficient. Such programmes generate benefits beyond the goods or services provided by foreign assistance. The result is development from the ground up: citizens themselves hold their governments – and each other – accountable for their performance, thus improving local service delivery.   World Vision is one of many INGOs pursuing local development goals via our global investment strategy. As a previous Development Progress contributor noted, two-thirds of the world’s poor live in middle-income countries, which are increasingly able to mobilise local resources for development and poverty reduction. INGOs can contribute by helping to mobilise resources that might otherwise remain untapped.   For example, in emerging economies, particularly those in Southeast Asia and Latin America, we have had success using international funding to generate local capital for development financing. Our offices in Colombia and Thailand now generate 40% and 72% of their funding locally. Similar results can be found in Indonesia, the Philippines, India, and Mexico. This integration of local and international funding will continue to support local ownership without sacrificing the capacity to scale up or adjust the projects supported by international funding sources.   INGO activities often develop the human and social capital of their partner organisations and host communities. In fact, 95% of World Vision’s staff around the world are hired locally and are empowered to develop programme strategies and field approaches. As development professionals they are also supported by our international resources, such as technical assistance, so they can gain from experiences right across our global network. This combination of resources and technical partnership helps them to accelerate locally owned and more sustainable development.   INGOs have multiplied the impact of their financial resources by expanding their analytic frameworks and their planning to include these critical non-financial assets. And this more balanced emphasis ensures that the aid we provide has a high degree of local ownership. To put it simply, our programmes could not function without local partners and communities investing their assets and generating resources alongside those provided by INGO donors – and that keeps us accountable where it matters most.   INGO skeptics and localisation enthusiasts may not realise just how much local ownership is already going on in current development approaches. For some time, critics have argued that financial flows channeled through INGOs are unsustainable and reinforce dependence on foreign assistance. While these fears should be explored, donors, aid analysts, and citizens in developing countries should also try to understand the ways in which INGOs are responding to this challenge. Generating local development resources is one key response, and is essential to the growing success of this new development model.   It must be stressed that good development funding models alone aren’t enough, on their own, to establish strong local development programmes. There must be an element of social and institutional accountability built into these programmes as well. Building on the work of development practitioners over the past decade, World Vision is scaling up a social-accountability approach called Citizen Voice and Action (CVA) across 35 countries.   CVA is an advocacy programme that educates citizens on national standards for service provision, facilitates dialogue on desired social and institutional change, and empowers citizens to engage with local officials to realise those changes. This approach leverages international financial capital to generate local social and institutional capital.   CVA works because it creates a credible basis for cooperation on collective action. As communities talk to local government about their development needs and options, they build their own commitment and capacity to expand their participation as partners in local development. This commitment is essential to develop the community’s social capital, and to improve the effectiveness with which local governments begin to provide key services, such as good quality education and access to healthcare.   In Uganda, for example, CVA has yielded demonstrable results in improving the quality of education. To address frequent teacher absenteeism and low academic performance, World Vision brought parents together to identify exactly how they should hold teachers and administrators accountable. As a result, test scores improved, teacher attendance became more consistent, and parents’ willingness to pay for mid-day meals increased. Here, gains to social capital contributed to gains in human capital through improved education.   In remote regions of Armenia, healthcare is provided by doctors who are legally required to visit rural communities at least once a month. However, in many areas there has been no mechanism to enforce these visits, and doctors have often been reluctant to undertake the necessary travel.   As a result, healthcare delivery in these areas has suffered. CVA enabled residents to travel to their regional capital, navigate the often overwhelming bureaucratic system, and voice their concerns. By working with regional officials, community members revised doctors’ incentive structure to account for the distance they have to travel, motivating them to make long journeys to areas that were once unreached.   Generating financing for development has always been – and will continue to be – a role for INGOs, but the shift towards investments in social, institutional, and human capital has done more to ensure that international and local resources for development have a sustained impact.   http://www.odi.org/programmes/development-progress/blog-series/financing-progress Visit the related web page
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