“Good luck,” our partners told us when we shared our vision of developing the platform as a synchronized verification system and our global mission to simplify life for local organizations and move toward harmonization.
What did that really mean? “Good luck, because you’ll need it. We don’t really believe any of this will work out. But give it a try. If one day it becomes clear that it works, then maybe we’ll join in.”
Before explaining what this platform is, let’s go back to the root of it all—localization.
Localization has long since ceased to be just a buzzword in the humanitarian sector. Today, it is one of the key areas of development in international aid. Following the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, the Grand Bargain was signed—an agreement intended to transform the way the international humanitarian system operates. Almost simultaneously, the Charter for Change was introduced, calling on international organizations to transfer more resources, responsibilities, and decision-making authority to local organizations.
Nearly ten years have passed.
And it’s unlikely that you’ll find a donor or international organization today whose strategic documents don’t include the word “localization.” But there remains a significant gap between supporting the idea of localization and being willing to change one’s own approaches.
Localization is not just about increasing the share of funding for local organizations. It’s about changing the very model of interaction. It’s about ensuring that local organizations have a say in setting priorities, participate in decision-making, evaluate results, shape the agenda, and act as equal partners.
That is precisely why localization entails several interrelated changes.
First and foremost, it involves local leadership and coordination. This means moving beyond the mere presence of local organizations to ensuring they have a real impact on outcomes. Can they set priorities? Do they participate in developing programs, budgets, and coordination mechanisms? Or do they remain merely implementers of decisions that have already been made?
The second component involves equitable partnership. This is a shift from a transactional model—where one party provides funding and the other carries out the work—to an institutional partnership. A partnership in which different parties have different strengths but equally influence the final outcome.
The third aspect is joint risk management. For many years, risks were predominantly shifted onto local organizations. Localization offers a different approach: risks must be identified, assessed, and minimized together, rather than simply passed on to partners along with the grant agreement and the transfer of funds.
Accountability is no less important. If local organizations undergo numerous audits and evaluations, they must also be able to assess the quality of the support they receive from international partners. Accountability must work both ways.
Furthermore, “successful localization” cannot exist solely within the scope of individual grants. It involves developing systems, processes, leadership, financial management, monitoring and evaluation, digital solutions, and everything else that makes an organization sustainable regardless of any specific project.
This is precisely where a question arises that has long been on my mind.
During due diligence procedures, donors often ask what financial reserves an organization has. And while this is a perfectly logical question, is it equally logical to ask it in a system where a significant portion of donors either do not fund administrative expenses at all or allow them to be used exclusively within the scope of a specific grant?
Institutional sustainability does not happen on its own. It requires time, resources, and the ability to invest in one’s own development. If the system leaves no room for this, it becomes increasingly difficult to expect a high level of financial independence.
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And what about localization in Ukraine in practice?
The picture here is much more nuanced than simply “there is progress” or “there is no progress.”
The Humanitarian Localization Baseline for Ukraine study tracks changes in seven areas of localization: partnership, leadership, capacity, coordination and complementarity, funding, participation, and policy influence. In 2024, researchers had already documented progress in several of these areas, although they emphasized that the transition to a truly locally led response still faces significant barriers. The most noticeable changes compared to 2024 occurred in policy influence, access to funding, and leadership, while coordination and capacity have essentially remained stagnant, and participation has even deteriorated slightly. It would be an oversimplification to speak simply of “positive momentum.” Progress is being made, but it is occurring at different paces across different parts of the system.
There have also been noticeable changes in Ukrainian organizations’ access to direct humanitarian funds. For example, in 2024, the Ukraine Humanitarian Fund supported 25 Ukrainian national NGOs with a total of $74.8 million. As of the time this report was prepared in 2025, the number of supported organizations had risen to 30, and the total funding had increased to $80.4 million. This represents a 20% increase in the number of supported national organizations and a 7.6% increase in total funding compared to the previous year.
It is also important to note that in 2025, new mechanisms were introduced to provide Ukrainian organizations with direct access to resources: new pooled funds, the piloting of the Ukrainian Pooled Fund, and the Help Localization Facility.
The presence of Ukrainian organizations in coordination mechanisms is also growing. According to the Annual Ukraine Localization Survey 2024, progress has been made in involving local and national actors in the work of clusters, including in decision-making roles. At the same time, more than half of cluster representatives still reported difficulties in involving Ukrainian organizations in strategic discussions and decision-making processes.
But this is where it gets interesting. Presence does not necessarily mean influence.
In the 2025 report, this difference is even more evident. 69% of representatives from international organizations believed that Ukrainian actors lead or significantly influence discussions within partnerships. Among national organizations themselves, only 46% agreed with this. In other words, influence is rated higher at the international level than Ukrainian organizations perceive it to be.
The situation regarding funding is even more telling.
According to the Annual Ukraine Localization Survey 2024, of the nearly $10 billion in humanitarian funding for Ukraine tracked by the UN system from the start of the full-scale invasion through the fall of 2024, less than 1% went directly to local and national nongovernmental organizations. At the same time, international organizations themselves acknowledge that Ukrainian organizations are carrying out a significant portion of the work on the ground.
The international NGOs surveyed estimated that their Ukrainian partners carry out, on average, about 50% of the program work, while receiving approximately 33% of the funding. A similar imbalance can be observed among UN agencies. This disparity clearly illustrates where we stand today.
Ukrainian organizations are already carrying out a significant portion of the work. They are increasingly represented in coordination mechanisms. A portion of the funding already flows through them. However, resources, strategic influence, and the right to make final decisions still largely remain with international actors.
And here it is important not to confuse two different processes: delegating more work to local organizations does not mean localizing the system. If resources, decision-making authority, and the ability to influence the rules are not transferred along with responsibility, we are simply changing the implementer, not the model itself.
In Ukraine, nearly all the prerequisites for the next step are in place.
We have a strong civil society, professional organizations with many years of experience, a government that continues to function even during a full-scale war, well-developed professional networks, and a vast body of accumulated expertise.
In other words, the problem isn’t a lack of infrastructure. The question is rather whether everyone is ready to use it.
And this brings us to the issue of trust. Trust in the context of localization is about the willingness to change the rules of the game and involve Ukrainian organizations in the decision-making process. Trust also means agreeing to test a tool before it becomes “best practice.”
This is precisely where, as our experience shows, the biggest barrier arises.
Almost every innovation follows the same path. At first, it’s called impossible. Then it’s deemed too risky, then interesting, but “we’re not ready yet.” And only after someone else proves its effectiveness does it begin to be perceived as an obvious solution.
This was exactly the path PhilinUA took.
When we first started talking about creating a unified platform for evaluating and verifying organizations, many people were skeptical of the idea. We were told that every donor would still have its own requirements, that there had been many such initiatives, none of which had survived, that organizations would not want to go through additional procedures, and that it was practically impossible to harmonize approaches among different market participants.
All of this is possible. But it’s extremely difficult.
As of today, five partners already recognize or use the assessment results from the platform. Organizations undergo the assessment once and receive a result that can gradually be used by a wider range of donors and international partners. In addition to assessments on the platform, we are building the capacity of local organizations, conducting research, and developing practical tools that are gradually creating an infrastructure designed to make due diligence certification—and, through it, the localization process itself—more accessible.
Because if a single Ukrainian organization has to undergo five nearly identical due diligence processes for five different partners, we could spend a very long time discussing the harmonization of procedures. Or we could build a system in which part of this work doesn’t have to be done five times.
This doesn’t mean that all donors will suddenly stop having their own requirements tomorrow, or that a single tool will solve all localization problems. But this is exactly how the infrastructure for systemic change is built: through a specific working mechanism that is first tested by a few partners, then adopted by others, and gradually becomes the norm.
We could talk at great length about the theoretical aspects of localization. But at some point, someone has to take responsibility and start steering the process—and PhilinUA is by no means the only organization doing so. Today in Ukraine, this localization infrastructure is being built simultaneously by many strong Ukrainian organizations and networks: the Humanitarian NGO Platform in Ukraine, the Alliance of Ukrainian Civil Society Organizations, Philanthropy in Ukraine, Right to Protection, and many others. Some are fighting for the representation of Ukrainian organizations in coordinating bodies; some are working on direct funding; some on policy and advocacy; and some on harmonizing procedures, developing organizational capacity, or creating new financial mechanisms.
We are gradually moving away from waiting for decisions to come “from above,” and more and more often we are creating the tools ourselves, which the entire sector then uses.
Localization won’t happen just because we include it in a strategy or agree to increase funding. It starts with a willingness to trust, share responsibility, and invest not only in individual projects but in institutions.
In a room with 100 people, where 99 will say it won’t work, you need to find the one who believes it will. Run a pilot with that person and showcase the results to the others. Then, gradually, those 99 will start taking an interest in the initiative and how it could work for them.
But someone has to be the first.
Lyubov Rainchuk, co-founder and program director of Philanthropy in Ukraine
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