Local ownership! This is an expression often used by development practitioners and project facilitators. It usually refers to the situation where project beneficiaries acknowledge and recognize the relevance of development projects in their lives, give their full buy in, connect well to project objectives and see themselves as responsible for working towards the achievement of the project objectives. In some cases, local ownership can even lead to project beneficiaries taking responsibility for any failures in project implementation and demonstrate commitment to correct what went wrong. The concept of local ownership is very important for sustaining the gains from development projects and programs.

The spirit of strong local ownership minimizes any risks of tensions in project implementation, or, if any such tensions should emerge, there will be sound basis and conditions for successful resolution.

At COLANDEF, we aim at building local ownership for our interventions at all levels. As many development actors would confirm, building local ownership is not as simple as the expression looks.

In this article, we elaborate some of the key lessons we have learnt that contribute to success in building and sustaining local ownership. The lessons and recommendations have not been arranged in any order of importance. They are all together, critical points that we learned and appreciated how, when applied together, help build strong local ownership.

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