Less than 2% of all global humanitarian funding goes directly to local aid organizations, despite their crucial role in crisis response. Start Network’s Shifting the Power project aimed to strike a more acceptable balance between international and local responses to disasters in 5 countries; shifting this balance of power towards locally-led humanitarian response.

The project’s Learning Exchange Workshop held in Geneva last March 13, 2018 included a discussion on sustaining the initiatives to a more balanced humanitarian system even beyond the project’s implementation period. Action Aid in Kenya, National Humanitarian Network (NHN) in Pakistan and CODE-NGO in the Philippines shared cases of good practices on how this can possibly be done.

Action Aid in Kenya shared an example of how a women’s group improved its ability to influence decision-making on humanitarian policies with the local government’s disaster management committee. This case highlighted the central role of women in humanitarian response, because in pastoralist communities, the women are the first responders once men have left to work with the livestock. NHN in Pakistan has embedded the Shifting the Power approach by signing a Charter of Commitments with INGOs.

CODE-NGO, on the other hand, shared about its involvement in Start Network’s Transforming Surge Capacity project in the Philippines in setting up a nationally-owned on-call roster of trained humanitarian responders, which over the past year has also looked at strengthening organizational capacities to stage and manage humanitarian response. CODE-NGO further noted that capacity building investments should be more focused on community preparedness – organizing community members, households, residents to prepare for and respond to disasters. A call to INGOs (international NGOs) is to shift their approach towards supporting communities to have a say on the resources needed and the type of initiatives that are implemented and recognizing existing local capacities. Some INGOs in the Philippines also made space on the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) for a local NGO network, increasing recognition and visibility of local actors and shifting the power to them. The HCT has been traditionally composed of UN agencies and INGOs.

Roselle Rasay is the Executive Director of CODE-NGO.