STRATEGY
The Issue
Community-driven organizations are uniquely positioned to understand the challenges facing adolescent girls and respond to their needs. However, they are under-valued in global development discourse because they are seen as too small to address major development issues.
Traditional Development Practice
A current and consistent narrative implies that local organizations are not able to address critical issues in a scalable manner; scale and breadth are often perceived as more valuable than depth. This combination of scale and breadth often results in the perceived “gold standard” of driving down costs of interventions yielding a valuable return on investment. The system is biased towards a “bigger is better” mentality.
According to a report issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in 20181 community-based interventions received less than 1% of the $150 billion in official development assistance.
This framework fails to recognize that communities are unique and diverse in their context and require local knowledge and relationships to ensure that positive change is sustained. Development challenges are embedded in a community context – what works in one community might not work in another community. We believe challenges facing vulnerable communities are nuanced and often unique to each community.
When we see only one model of scale as the gold standard, community-driven organizations are left out of funding and decision making as evidenced by vast global funding disparities.
We believe this should change –
development must be locally envisioned, locally developed, locally implemented, and locally measured.
The SOLUTION
AMPLIFY Girls embodies an innovative grassroots model of scale: it supports CDOs to lead and collectively work towards improving outcomes for adolescent girls – based on the solutions they identify as best for their communities.
