Mozambique: localisation in a context of transition

The international humanitarian system is shrinking faster than it is transforming. Localisation has been a stated priority since the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, with successive reform agendas having promised a more locally led response – the Humanitarian Reset being the latest. In Mozambique, that promise has not been kept. Local actors are capable, trusted and present but remain structurally marginalised in the leadership, funding and coordination of the response. What has received far less attention, which this article takes up, is what happens to localisation during the transition from humanitarian to recovery and development. This article argues that without a radical shift in how the international system operates, the transition underway risks becoming a managed withdrawal that abandons communities, rather than a genuine transfer of leadership to local actors.

A transition driven by funding, not context

Northern Mozambique has been in protracted crisis since an armed insurgency broke out in Cabo Delgado in 2017, displacing more than one million people at its height. From 2022, security improved in parts of the province and large numbers of internally displaced people began returning home while the government established the Agência de Desenvolvimento Integrado do Norte (ADIN) to coordinate recovery. This transition was not driven by a genuine improvement in conditions but rather by funding pressure. Security incidents in Cabo Delgado during 2025 reached the highest levels in years, with new areas coming under threat and displacement continuing. The Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan for 2026 appeals for $348 million to assist 1.1 million conflict-affected people across 20 districts in northern Mozambique, with a further $187 million required for 600,000 flood-affected people in the south, against a backdrop of severely constrained international funding.

Despite the worsening humanitarian situation, the Humanitarian Reset and the suspension of humanitarian assistance from the United States (US) from January 2025 accelerated the push towards transition across the global system, including in Mozambique. The country was considered for the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) accelerated transition plan endorsed by IASC Principals in June 2025, which initiated the phase-out of the humanitarian response in eight countries, but avoided being included. Over 100 local partners signed a joint letter arguing that Mozambique’s inclusion would have been premature, driven more by the imperative to cut costs than by any principled assessment that needs had diminished and arguing that the reset should not become an exit strategy in disguise.

Local actors are making localisation happen – despite structural barriers

Although the push towards transition has been for the wrong reasons, local actors are seizing the opportunity to advance localisation. In June 2025, a group of local and national non-governmental organisations (L/NNGOs) came together to form the Mozambique Local Humanitarian Coordination Platform (MLHCP), as a coordination and advocacy platform in northern Mozambique and beyond. Its members are multi-mandated organisations with deep roots in the communities they serve. Yet successive peer-to-peer missions have found that local actors remain confined to implementation roles with limited influence over leadership, strategic direction or resource allocation. A localisation strategy was adopted by the Humanitarian Country Team in 2024, but the working group set up to oversee its implementation has not met for over a year. A Country-Based Pooled Fund (CBPF) was established for Mozambique in 2024 with L/NNGOs initially prioritised as recipients, but only 4.5% of the $77.8 million allocated in the first round in early 2026 of the US contribution to OCHA pooled funds reached L/NNGOs directly – despite United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher’s public commitment that 70% of pooled-fund money should go to L/NNGOs.

Only 10 of more than 40 L/NNGOs have passed the due diligence process for CBPF funding – not because they lack programmatic capacity, but because international due diligence is calibrated for organisations with institutional infrastructure that most L/NNGOs have never been supported to build. Institutional costs, human resource systems, financial management, and protection from sexual exploitation and abuse policies are rarely fundable under project grants, creating a compounding disadvantage for organisations that cannot subsidise them from core funding as international agencies routinely do. What is missing is not local will or capacity but rather institutional investment and structural reform.

Cluster transition and the time for local leadership

With humanitarian clusters facing potential deactivation, the risk is not simply a loss of coordination capacity but the consolidation of arrangements that were never adequately transferred to local actors in the first place. Local actors have been confined to implementation roles, with decision-making authority concentrated in international agencies even as funding contracts. In northern Mozambique, seven years into the response, only two of nine clusters are co-led by L/NNGOs. Where co-leadership with these actors does exist, it is usually in the form of nominal appointments without resources, language accommodation, or genuine decision-making authority.

MLHCP has advocated for Area-Based Coordination (ABC) as the model most suited to the transition context and local leadership. ABC organises coordination around the geographic and community realities in which most L/NNGOs operate, enabling them to take on coordinating roles more readily than sectoral cluster architecture. In districts with the most severe needs where international presence is contracting, resourcing L/NNGO focal points within an ABC model offers the most viable mechanism for sustaining coordination and community accountability.

The distinction between a planned, principled handover and a resource-driven withdrawal is not semantic. Cluster transitions should be planned and properly resourced. New IASC guidance on cluster simplification issued in March 2026 makes clear that local actors should assume leadership functions in coordination systems, which is a direction MLHCP is structurally positioned to advance, but only if it receives formal recognition and dedicated resourcing, neither of which is currently in place.

Local actors and the nexus: two sides of the same coin

The transition in northern Mozambique makes advancing the humanitarian–development–peace nexus a priority, which local actors are well placed to lead given their sustained community links. Where conflict, displacement, poverty and climate vulnerability are interlocked, complementary interventions must be pursued. Yet the architecture through which nexus programming has been pursued has reproduced the same exclusions that characterise the broader humanitarian response. Coordination structures designed to advance the approach have not delivered substantive localisation. Research has shown that local and national actors are actively implementing nexus programming but their experiences and perspectives are not being reflected in international approaches to the issue. Nexus programming is shaped primarily by international actors and donor cycles, with local organisations largely absent from its design and leadership. The experience in Cabo Delgado has confirmed the same pattern.

This is a major missed opportunity. The majority of L/NNGOs in northern Mozambique do not identify as exclusively humanitarian or development. They deliver food assistance and livelihoods, psychosocial care and peace education, emergency shelter and reconstruction, and gender-based violence prevention and response wherever community needs take them. Their multi-mandate character positions local actors well for nexus programming: their sustained community presence, cross-sectoral experience, and accountability to communities mean they can maintain relationships and integrate programming in ways that single-mandate organisations cannot. What constrains them is the funding architecture and siloed planning frameworks that make integrated programming structurally more difficult to achieve. Localisation of humanitarian aid and nexus should be seen as two sides of the same coin, but the aid system makes this impossible.

Conclusion

The transition in northern Mozambique is a test of whether the humanitarian system’s commitments to localisation can be honoured. It is happening, but not by design, as the system has not been structurally reformed to make it possible. What a principled transition to local actors requires is not complicated: direct access to funding before the transition completes; simplified and mutually recognised due diligence; fully funded institutional overhead costs; mandatory, fully funded cluster co-leadership by L/NNGOs; ABC models resourced with local focal points; and a dedicated nexus funding mechanism with flexible, integrated resources accessible to multi-mandate local actors. As one leader of a women- and girl-focused national organisation told us: ‘There is no localisation, and no genuine transition, without local actors championing the way; otherwise, it remains hearsay and is delivered only in piecemeal.’ Far from being peripheral to this transition, local actors are its only viable foundation.

Nyararai Magudu is the Founder and Technical Director for Girl Child Rights and National Convener for the Mozambique Local Humanitarian Coordination Platform.

Tcheizi Mutemba is the Founder and Executive Director of Grupo de Saneamento de Bilibiza, a women-led national organization that is working in Cabo Delgado.

Damian Lilly is an independent consultant based in Mozambique who used to work with the UN and NGOs and is an advisor to the MLHCP