LOCAL - Lowering Compliance Burdens for Local and National Associations

The LoCAL project, funded by DG ECHO, aims to reduce the compliance and administrative burden faced by local and national actors (LNAs) in humanitarian action. LNAs are frequently requested to undergo multiple, overlapping due diligence (DD) or partner assessment processes to access funding --- absorbing time, resources, and capacity that could otherwise be directed to operations and accountability efforts.

A DRC-led Donor and INGO Roundtable in November presented one solution - Passporting - and a practical tool to streamline processes - the Passporting Platform.

Under the LoCAL project, HQAI and consortia partners DRC and SPONG set out to test whether existing assessments can serve as trusted inputs/proxies for other due diligence processes. The consortium used HQAI’s audits against the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS) as a high-robustness test case and produced a passporting methodology and a prototype multi-donor passporting platform, designed to operationalise the concept and provide a unified view of evidence and how this evidence was created.

This central, structured space for collecting and managing due diligence evidence brings together different due diligence requirements within a common data framework: LNA self-assessments, donor due diligence assessments, third-party CHS audits etc.