H1 Legacy Sixteen Country-Year Direct Funding Benchmark

This dataset supports the Stage 1 funding-access and recipient-classification analysis for my study “Local NGO Autonomy, Direct Funding Access, and the Problem of Pseudo-Local Actors in Post-Crisis Response.” The workbook compiles and organizes OCHA Financial Tracking Service country-year funding records used to examine whether local/national NGOs appear as direct first-level recipients of international humanitarian and post-crisis response funding. The dataset directly supports H1, which tests whether strictly defined local/national NGOs are visible as direct first-level recipients of international funding. It also provides the classification and sampling foundation for H2–H4, which examine fund-management authority, downstream implementation roles, and movement toward recovery or displacement-response autonomy. However, H2–H4 require additional documentary tracing beyond FTS records, including pooled-fund allocation records, donor project documents, UN/INGO reports, local NGO annual reports, partnership records, project evaluations, and other implementation evidence. The workbook is intended to support transparency, replication, and auditability of the article’s first-stage descriptive analysis. It documents country-year funding totals, recipient categories, and classification decisions used to distinguish broad local/national actor labels from a stricter definition of genuine local/national NGOs. The strict-local classification is designed to avoid overstating localization by separating locally originated, independently governed local/national NGOs from international NGOs, country offices, branches, subsidiaries, pooled funds, government actors, Red Cross/Red Crescent actors, private contractors, and pseudo-local or internationally affiliated organizations. The dataset should therefore be read as a Stage 1 benchmark and classification base. It can show whether local/national NGOs appear in the first-level donor-facing funding chain, but it does not by itself prove fund-management authority, downstream implementation roles, or institutional autonomy. Those additional claims are developed through later project-level and organization-level tracing. The underlying source data are publicly available through the OCHA Financial Tracking Service. The workbook and accompanying classification notes are prepared for research documentation, replication, audit trail purposes, and future article development.