Localization isn’t only a philosophical shift. It’s the most practical lever HR leaders in international organizations have to cut costs, strengthen pipelines, and future-proof their organizations. 

But localization has been on the agenda for many years, without much meaningful progress. What needs to change? 

The boom-and-bust problem

“The way the Trump administration has slashed US foreign aid has been wholly irresponsible”, writes the Centre of Humanitarian Action (CHA). “But no-one should be surprised that this is happening.”

The truth is, the US aid freeze may have left the humanitarian sector reeling but the cuts are only an acceleration of a trend that was already happening (albeit on a much larger scale). 

The aid sector has faced escalating funding shortfalls for the past several years, with many large international organizations like UNHCR, WFP, NRC, IRC and Save the Children forced to make large budget and staffing cuts. 

This turbulence isn’t an isolated response to funding freezes but a symptom of a deeper structural issue.

As The New Humanitarian puts it, these cuts have “shone a light on the highly corporate, aggressively growth-oriented models of INGOs”. This growth model is fundamentally unstable, seeing organizations grow rapidly during funding spikes, then shrink just as fast when the funding tide goes out.

This ‘boom-and-bust’ cycle wastes capacity, destabilizes programs, and leaves communities exposed. Plus, critics argue, it’s fundamentally at odds with aid organizations’ ability to provide effective support on the ground. 

Dustin Barter, senior research fellow for the Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI, comments that “everything is incentivized towards big being better which leads to this competitive dynamic, expansionist model”, creating “a very sick profiteering approach disconnected from an ability to actually implement”.

Breaking the cycle through localization 

Underpinning this boom-and-bust issue is the emphasis on international expansion over what Barter calls “ideas around solidarity, localization, decolonization”. As Deborah Doane of Rights CoLab puts it: “If [international organizations] were strengthening local actors, they would never have grown so much in the first place.”

Many experts think the sector has relied too heavily on international expansion to plug urgent gaps rather than embedding national capacity to weather crises. 

This approach carries a double cost. It’s financially unsustainable – international hires are 2x to 5x more expensive than hiring locally – plus it erodes resilience. 

Skills, institutional memory, and community trust disappear when internationals rotate out, and over-reliance on international deployments crowds out long-term investment in national talent pipelines.

Instead of embedding preparedness and resilience into communities so they can better support themselves longer-term, capacity inflates and deflates with donor cycles. Communities are stripped of longer-term resilience in the name of short-term aid. 

This situation creates a negative cycle that’s counter to international organizations’ ability to provide ethical, sustainable support with dignity. And it’s counter to the Core Humanitarian Standard’s (CHS) directive to promote communities’ “primary role in finding solutions to the crises they face”.

Localization offers a way out of this cycle. By hiring and developing more national professionals, international organizations not only reduce costs but also embed knowledge and relationships where they’re needed most. (That said, localization isn’t always the answer. In some countries or contexts, local group rivalry can mean localization can be actively harmful. Sri Lanka is a good example, where the government and the Tamil Tigers have difficulty reaching an agreement, requiring internationally employed staff to mediate with neutrality.)

The opportunity for international organizations

Localization doesn’t only mean donors diverting more money to local NGOs and CSOs, although that shift remains critical. (For example, evidence from Ukraine shows local organizations can deliver 15–32% more cost-efficiently than internationals).

Localization also means international organizations building national capacity inside their own structures:

• Hiring and developing more skilled nationals 

• Creating career pathways from national to international roles

• Developing talent pools that reduce reliance on costly expatriates

International organizations can choose transformation that strengthens rather than diminishes their role in the aid ecosystem by investing deliberately in national pipelines; upskilling and advancing local hires into decision-making positions; and building resilience into their programs and workforces.

This approach benefits everyone, helping meet diversity goals, stretch funding further, and deliver faster, more sustainable, more cost-effective programs. Without losing capacity to scale fast when needed.

But localization is challenging in practice

The localization agenda is a priority for many international organizations, but progress continues to lag promises. There’s a cultural and philosophical element to that, certainly, but one of the major problems is practical: execution is tough.

Why do international organizations struggle to hire local talent?

• Skills scarcity. Global humanitarian recruitment is extraordinarily complex, often demanding niche and specific combinations of skills and background. Add location and finding the right people becomes like finding a needle in a haystack.   

• Hard-to-reach talent. Reaching and building relationships with specialized talent is challenging anyway. Add the need to surface and cultivate candidates from specific conflict zones and hardship locations and it’s even more so. How many on-the-ground Palestinian aid workers check LinkedIn regularly?

• Unfit tools and sourcing networks. Humanitarian jobs demand combinations of skills, background, gender, languages, niche expertise, passport and visa that generic networks can’t surface. International organizations often struggle to hire nationals because they’re using tools that aren’t fit for finding nationals to hire.  

• Outdated rosters. Many organizations rely on static spreadsheets to build surge rosters, which are fundamentally retrospective, backwards-looking documents unfit for the ever-evolving nature of humanitarian work. 

• Historic pipeline neglect. When contracts end, organizations often lose track of talent instead of keeping them ‘on stock’ for future crises. This leads to a reactive model of recruitment where you’re always chasing and never preparing – encouraging reliance on wider international talent pools rather than taking the time to build local relationships. 

The obstacles can be fierce. But when organizations overcome these barriers, the payoff can be transformative.

The strategic dividend of hiring local talent

Localization doesn’t only reduce costs or improve speed. It builds long-term strategic advantage across several dimensions:

Continuity and resilience

When skills are embedded in communities, they don’t vanish when donor cycles shift. Local staff stay rooted; carry institutional knowledge forward; keep programs running even when international teams leave. 

That continuity builds trust with communities and donors alike, and it stabilizes organizations internally. Plus, local staff are typically more attuned to cultural nuances and community priorities, making interventions more relevant, more ethical, and ultimately more effective.

Diversity and representation

Recruiting and developing more national women, for example, doesn’t just help tick boxes on representation reports. It creates real pipelines into international and leadership roles.

That expands the leadership bench, strengthens decision-making, promotes true local ownership, and helps international organizations meet their DEI commitments credibly. 

Impactpool’s community is already 54% women, offering a ready-made foundation to accelerate change.

Crisis readiness

Humanitarian skill needs evolve lightning fast. Take COVID-19 as an example. Countries with strong local vaccination capacity were best prepared; others scrambled. The same pattern will repeat in future crises – whether that’s climate-related disasters, conflict-driven displacement, or new pandemics. 

Building deep local pools of specialized talent now is how organizations get ahead of the curve. Imagine being able to activate 5000 vaccinators, sanitation engineers, or GBV specialists from within your own rosters at a day’s notice. That’s not pie-in-the-sky thinking: it’s possible, with the right talent pooling and rostering tools with global, sector-specific reach. 

Impactpool represents the world’s largest community of impact sector talent, with over 1M candidate profiles from 195 countries. 

Organizational credibility

Donors, regulators, and the wider public are increasingly scrutinizing the humanitarian sector’s localization promises. Organizations that can demonstrate real investment in national staff pipelines – not just rhetoric – strengthen their funding case, brand reputation, and license to operate. 

Talent ROI

Localization frees up scarce funding for program delivery. When international hires can cost 2–5× more than local ones, even modest shifts in workforce composition can unlock millions in savings that can be reinvested in frontline delivery. 

The more you can stretch dollars, the more people you can reach.

Taken together, these dividends add up to a workforce strategy that is not just more efficient but more aligned to the future of humanitarian action.

From aspiration to action: making localization real

Intentions aren’t enough. Localization has been on the sector’s agenda for years, but the execution gap remains wide. One of the biggest issues is that international organizations often still lack the infrastructure to make localization practical at scale.

This is where Impactpool comes in, built based on decades of first-hand experience working and recruiting globally within the sector. 

• The world’s largest impact-sector community. More than 1M+ professionals from 195 countries – 54% women. 10K new members joining monthly.

• Live rosters, not spreadsheets. When candidates update their CVs anywhere in the ecosystem, their profiles update for every organization they sit in. Local talent lists never go stale.

• Advanced sector-specific filters. Search by gender, nationality, language, past deployments, passports, visas, and specialist expertise — surfacing the rare combinations that matter in humanitarian hiring.

• Proactive engagement. Integrated outreach tools make it easy to keep relationships warm, even when candidates aren’t actively applying. Keep your pools engaged and ready for when you need them. 

• Analytics that matter. Diversity and localization insights show where your pipelines are strong, and where you’re at risk — so you can course-correct before crises hit. 

Read how Impactpool helps international development organizations transform recruitment

By shifting from static rosters to a living ecosystem, international organizations can preserve capacity between crises, reduce costs, and strengthen their local pipelines. 

So you’re ready to go when you next need people fast. And primed for a future of steady, sustainable growth that intentionally steps aside from the boom-or-bust cycle that’s proved so damaging.  

Embrace meaningful localization with Impactpool 

The humanitarian sector can’t afford to keep repeating the same destructive pattern: expanding aggressively during crises, cutting back when funding dips, and starting from scratch when the next emergency comes.

Many international organizations are engaging with change in good faith, but the shift to localization and true local ownership is hampered by teams lacking the right tools to hire, develop, retain, and progress skilled national professionals. 

Impactpool makes that possible. With the reach, the data, and the tools to connect you to the right local talent, Impactpool helps international organizations transition away from boom-and-bust cycles towards ethical, sustainable growth that has a positive, long-term impact within local communities.

For senior HR leaders, localization isn’t just an abstract reform agenda. It’s the most practical lever you have to reduce costs, strengthen pipelines, and deliver the diversity, resilience, and impact your organization promises. Impactpool makes that transformation possible.

Impactpool’s global talent ecosystem connects mission-driven organizations with specialized talent – empowering organizations to build impactful teams while helping professionals find meaningful roles. 

Try Talent Suite free: Attract, source, engage, and re-engage the world’s largest impact-sector talent pool.