Connecting community voices with global reform
Photo: KC Nwakalor/GTS
At GTS, we have long been advocating for accountability to affected people to be treated as the systemic set of problems that it is. In 2022, we partnered with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) in collaboration with the secretariat of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), to together make sure community feedback was spurring necessary reform where it is needed: right at the top.
Drawing on data from thousands of conversations in ten countries, we produced a report synthesising recurring themes in community feedback. The report provided irrefutable evidence that despite the plethora of commitments and activities aimed at shifting power in humanitarian action, people on the receiving end of aid feel disempowered, lack even the most basic information and are at the mercy of a supply-driven system that does not meet their most important needs. As the report states:
‘It is indisputable that people should be ‘at the centre’ of humanitarian assistance. It is equally indisputable that they are not. Despite widespread efforts to include crisisaffected communities and align with their needs, people impacted by crisis feel disempowered and think aid is missing the mark. “To [humanitarians], our needs can be summed up by their needs assessment surveys conducted on what we eat during the day and how we live. But asking us what our basic needs are, they don’t do that. So next time, when organisations want to help us, they should approach us and ask us what our real needs are,” said an elderly, female host community member in Bangui, Central African Republic. She underscores that deeply extractive assessments have little impact on the lives of the people who give their time to answer lengthy and intrusive questionnaires. The same can be said of attempts to involve communities – however genuine the intention – if the humanitarian system is simply not designed to adapt to what people need. Rhetoric abounds, but feedback from thousands of people affected by crisis is clear: decision-making power has not shifted.’
The feedback in the report has catalysed commitment for a series of pilot reforms, spearheaded by Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths, to try to make humanitarian action incrementally more aligned with community priorities.
