This week Devex reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development saw a record-breaking obligation to local contractors in 2022, up 169.8% in real terms from the previous year. While this is promising, it will be vital to ensure that initiatives are not tokenistic and that localization efforts are indeed meeting the needs of the communities they are aiming to serve rather than ticking development boxes.

In the United Kingdom, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office admitted that thousands of people “in acute humanitarian need” will die unnecessarily from hunger, poor health care, and during pregnancy because of ongoing aid cuts.

At the World Bank, Ajay Banga received some backlash from employees as he announced that while he would like to maintain a flexible workplace, he wants staff in the office more than three days a week. The institution’s staff association argued that the announcement was rushed, with no guidance on how to apply this new “flexibility” and that managers were not consulted.

Are localization efforts heading in the right direction? Will having staff back at the office benefit the World Bank? To answer these questions and others from the past week, Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar is joined by George Ingram, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, as well as Spark MicroGrants CEO and co-founder Sasha Fisher for the latest episode of the This Week in Global Development podcast.

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USAID’s record breaking localization push and the impact of UK aid cuts