Locally led development is the best path toward sustained improvements in health and development outcomes around the world. In Zambia, USAID has made tremendous progress in establishing direct awards with local organizations to lead HIV programs. Yet gaps in local partners’ organizational capacity must be addressed to strengthen their operations and ensure sustainability.

Through USAID LOCAL, IntraHealth and partners SustainAbility Solutions and Ku-Atenga Media are providing LIPs the support they need for success in operations, income generation, advocacy, and more, building on lessons learned from IntraHealth’s USAID Accelerating Support to Advanced Local Partners (ASAP) and ASAP II projects and other local partner capacity-strengthening initiatives. USAID LOCAL is working to:

• increase LIPs’ capacity for risk identification, mitigation, and compliance to financial and operational best practices

• enhance LIPs’ resource mobilization and funding diversification capacity for the purpose of organizational sustainability

• increase networking opportunities; improve communication, monitoring, evaluation, and learning capacities; and enhance understanding of integrated programming.

Facilitated by Zambian local experts and data-driven platforms, the project’s approach centers on four core steps: 1) participatory self-assessments to help LIPs identify the causes of organizational challenges and skill gaps; 2) co-designed capacity-strengthening plans that reflect each LIP’s priorities and growth goals; 3) customized capacity-strengthening methods; and 4) continuous measurement to monitor the impact of capacity-strengthening, adapt methods, and share knowledge with the broader LIP community for peer-to-peer learning.