Where can and should governments fill the gap? How can we improve peer support? How can we scale up good practice? Amy Croome on key takeaways from a gathering last month in Nairobi of civil society leaders and Oxfam staff.
As the humanitarian system grapples with a global funding crisis, it is more important than ever that we protect and build on progress towards shifting power and resources to local humanitarian organisations. How to do this in the face of current challenges was the focus last month of a Local Humanitarian Leadership forum in Nairobi. This brought together 65 people – local civil society leaders and Oxfam staff – from across the world, to reflect on and progress our collective work on transforming the aid system and advancing local humanitarian leadership (LHL).
Here are my six key takeaways:
1. INGOs & UN agencies should stop humanitarian response for citizens and refugees in places where the government can and should be doing this work
With funding severely cut, we grappled with what we should prioritise and what we should drop. What became clear from discussions with colleagues and partners from Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines, Colombia, Zimbabwe, Kenya was that we need to look hard at the respective future roles of government, the UN and INGOs.
Before NGOs and UN agencies establish their own needs assessment processes and various cash and other assistance programmes, they need to look at whether existing government safety nets or social protection schemes could do the job. The message from our forum was that the most efficient way to deliver emergency assistance will be, where possible, to channel funds through existing government structures to reduce inequalities and vulnerabilities. Research also shows that state-led social protection responses are more cost effective and faster. UN Agencies can still offer technical support, while INGOs as civil society actors should focus on boosting and strengthening domestic civil society’s ability to monitor and influence where governments spend money and also to press for greater transparency on how funds are spent.
2. Peer exchanges work: let’s do more of them
Bringing people together to learn from each other works. In fact, at the forum we heard about locally-led mechanisms and networks that had been established based on ideas planted at the last Local Humanitarian Leadership Forum over four years ago. Indeed, judging by the number of colleagues and partners intently listening, writing notes and having side chats with those they were keen to learn from, that will be true again in another four years. A key ask was, rather than a centralised gathering, to invest in and organise visits of partners and colleagues to contexts where people can see good local humanitarian leadership on the ground, something for us to look at in future.
3. INGOs need to be consistent
We heard impressive examples of how Oxfam has supported and enabled partners, networks and feminist leaders to grow and lead humanitarian and civil society work. But we also heard about things that are not yet consistent and need improvement: delays in payments and partnership agreements; inconsistent application of payments to cover overhead costs; and a tendency to short term agreements. It was also clear that there is huge variance in approaches from country office to country office. This is partly down to crises and context variance, but also that much of this work is shaped by individual Oxfam staff’s interpretation of what LHL is. Initial feedback from Pledge for Change survey of over 60 Oxfam partners on our performance confirms this, as does feedback we received from local actors at the recent Humanitarian Leadership conference in Doha.
4. We need to do more to highlight good practices and scale them up
It is easy, amid the slow progress of localisation, to think that all we do is talk about theory, that local actors still lack capacity, and to concentrate on depressing stats. But that is not the whole picture: in fact, as someone who has been with Oxfam for some time, I was still blown away by how much is and has been happening on the localisation agenda across our programming and advocacy. The volume and range of experimentation and gradual growth of international system change and recognition of local leadership in crises context is impressive. The challenge many participants put to Oxfam and each other is to better document and share these good practices in ways that will help to scale them up and contribute to significant policy change.
5. Let’s keep up the momentum on locally-led funding mechanisms
Locally led funding where local organisations have access to flexible resources that they can decide how to use themselves are clearly on the rise. In just one small group discussion of six people, we identified no less than 12 locally-led funding mechanisms / pooled funds, including the Local Intermediaries Action in Myanmar, the Asal Humanitarian Network’s soon-to-be launched virtual pooled fund in Kenya, the Nexus Platform in Somalia and the Pacific Diaspora Funding mechanisms. The pooled fund discussions mostly focused on the UN-led Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) and Country-based Pooled Funds (CBPFs) that are very active at the moment, and it was interesting to get a sense of the locally-led approaches now out there. Look out for more on this in the near future.
6. Networks are the heart of everything, but they are harder to form in some contexts and need support
So much of our collective organising, learning and advocacy happens through and with networks – and networks of networks. But we need to appreciate how much harder it is to form, and benefit from, networking in some places. Colleagues and partners from some contexts highlighted how in fact for them, this is not the normal way of working – for example in Syria, South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo. There, for various reasons it has been challenging to galvanise different actors to act collectively, especially where governments have prohibited organising of all or certain groups. International actors need to support the opening of civic space and enable civil society organising.
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