As the humanitarian sector grapples with calls for localisation and decolonisation —now further complicated by the recent USAID funding freeze—how do we ensure innovations in community engagement genuinely shift power to crisis-affected populations?

This Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Week (HNPW) 2025 panel explores how different engagement methodologies - from radio to digital platforms - can either reinforce or transform existing power structures in humanitarian response. The discussion will critically examine what "innovation" truly means when communities are placed at the centre of humanitarian action, and how we can move beyond tokenistic participation to meaningful community leadership.

Chair: Ila Schoop Rutten, CDAC Network

Panel:

Sophie Tholstrup, Director of Policy & Climate, Ground Truth Solutions

Alex Ross, Loop Lead, Talk to Loop

Ellie Kemp, Strategic Partnerships Director,, CLEAR Global

Noor Lekkerkerker, CEO, Upinion

Quito Tsui, Collaborator, MERL Tech

To find out more about CDAC's other events at HNPW, visit our website.

Hello everyone, thanks for coming and thanks for being patient with us as we get ourselves organized. My name is Ilois Shuprutin and I'm representing CDAC today. I'm the Information Integrity Lead for Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities. It's a terrible acronym for a great organization.

So today we're talking about community centered innovation. And this is not the panel to talk about what communities think of innovation, of course, if you look at us. But this panel represents a lot of really innovative tools and methodologies for centering communities in humanitarian action. And I think we have a lot to learn from these wonderful ladies here. So let's get into it.

Let's see. OK, that stayed on. We also have someone joining us.

from online too. But I just want to preface what we're going to talk about. So.

in human development and advances in computing, data analytics and biotechnology are reshaping political strategies and the way both governments and private companies compete and survive. Innovation isn't just changing power structures, it's transforming how people connect, work and navigate daily life and even fundamental rights are being redefined in this era of digital transformation. It's a shift that has become one of the most defining features of this century.

And in recent years, many humanitarian organizations have embraced digital transformation, making innovation a key part of their investment and partnership strategies. And data and digital tools are now deeply embedded in their operations and have become central topics in humanitarian law and policy debates. And in the sector struggling with a funding crisis and its ever-growing need, competition for resources is fierce. And more and more innovation is seen as a competitive edge, making the

making the warning innovate or die feel all too real right now. Innovation is not always a force for good. The vast amounts of data used to inform humanitarian responses can be exploited for surveillance, for example, putting vulnerable groups even more at risk. And digital exclusion and algorithmic biases can leave off-grid communities without protection and assistance that they desperately need.

The humanitarian sector has in many ways adopted a FOMO approach, fear of missing out, to innovation. But in this space, rushing into tech solutions without careful thought isn't just inefficient, it can have devastating consequences, for the very people we're meant to help. On one hand, digitalization has made aid delivery faster and more efficient.

Dialogue medicine brings advanced medical expertise, remote areas, digital cast transfers cut costs while giving recipients more control, data analytics and AI help humanitarian organizations process vast amounts of information, et cetera, et cetera. I could go on and this is a good panel to go on about that. But how do we keep humanity at the core of innovation? That's where I want to start this panel discussion. But before we get lost into conversation, maybe we should start with introductions.

So I can go straight to my left here with Noor. Can you introduce yourself?

Sure. And thank you for the nice introduction. My name is Noor Leperkerker. I'm the CEO of Jepinion. We are a digital engagement platform with the aim of bringing the voices of affected communities into the debate and into policymaking. And I'll tell you more about it, I'm sure, in our conversation. Thanks.

Morning, I'm Ellie Kemp. I'm Strategic Partnerships Director at Clear Global. We work on language. So our mission is to help people get information and be heard, whatever their language. We do that through a range of ways, technological and non. It's great to be here.

Hi, my name's Alex. I'm the lead for Talk2Loop, which is a small charity which enables communities to feedback on whatever is important to them at any time on any device or language that they choose is appropriate for them. That could be open feedback about great services we've received, but it can also be reports of fraud or sexual abuse, etc.

Thanks. My name is Sophie Tolstrup. the Director of Policy and Climate at Ground Truth Solutions. We're an organisation who work with communities experiencing crisis to understand what's going on for them, how is the aid they're receiving meeting their needs or not, and what are their biggest priorities around recovering from crisis and looking forward to presenting some of our brand new hot off the press analysis today. Thanks.

Then we have Quito online. Quito, can you step in?

Yes, of course. Hi, everyone. I'm really sorry I can't be there with you in person. It's a great panel, though, so I'm really excited to be part of it. I'm Keto and I'm a researcher and writer working at the intersection of technology and justice with a focus on technology use and complex deployment context. I'm a core collaborator at Meltech and I lead the humanitarian AI and Mal working group there, as well as working with CDAC to help

give technical advice and think a bit more about what these new technologies mean for communication with disaster affected communities. So really glad to be here. Thanks, Sayla.

Let's jump in. I want to pose this question to everyone. In this moment of crisis, do we know what communities want? Maybe we can start with you, Noor, actually.

Yeah, sure. That's a great question. Let me tell you a little bit about what it is that we do as UPINION so you know from what kind of experience I'm speaking and then diving right into your question. So at UPINION, we really believe in the use of technology and innovation as a means to provide a practical tool for communities to meaningfully participate throughout the entire cycle of humanitarian and development action.

So also program initiation, also policy development, evaluation and continuously. So we developed to that end our own digital engagement platform, a two-way communication platform that allows us to stay in touch with people continuously. So they can share real-time and two-way their experiences with us and we feed that to actors that are interested or actors themselves.

humanitarian practitioners, policymakers are directly in touch with the community so they can continuously integrate this feedback into their way of working. This method is also as an there's an economical side to it. It's cost efficient to reach people that way and we're able to reach people that are otherwise hard to reach. What about migrants who cross borders who do not stay in the same place? So we really believe

and still believe that our solution contributes to making aid more aligned with community preferences. And when we started building your opinion, that was really our core belief. Aid can now become more effective, not only because of our solution, but because of many good solutions we see around us, because we can continuously be in touch with people. Now, what we've learned over the past years is that listening has its challenges, but we got pretty good at it.

Obviously the challenge is with acting upon it and I'm not the first one to say this and I will not be the last one I'm sure so Obviously, there is some kind of systemic overhaul needed some more drastic change and that's why as you opinion We've owned we've also focused more on the process around bringing those community voices to those decision-making tables and Also making sure that there is like a longer structural sustainable follow-up

But that hasn't been without challenges. As I said, acting upon feedback or what communities want is obviously difficult. And what we've really seen in our ways of working with a range of actors, donors, INGOs, smaller organizations, is that they are very interested in receiving or hearing community voices, receiving feedback even.

But are these actors as interested in giving the communities access to them? That's where for us we've really seen there is a gap. And we see that on a daily basis because we are continuously in touch with those communities and we continuously have to give back to our communities what happened with the findings or the insights you shared with us, what happened with that report.

What happened? What happened? What happened? This is a question that we're answering on a daily basis. And we feel we're accountable to our community, so we always have to come with an answer. Another observation that we've had in the years of our work is that when you start engaging with community and start listening to them, really, after program initiation, so anywhere later in the program cycle than those first stages, it's too late.

And communities know that. They know very well that asking for their feedback, listening to their preferences is not as effective when programs have already been designed and decided upon. Because they know there is little space to then make really meaningful adaptations. So we really encourage starting that process from the onset, throughout, and intermittently.

But I think there's also a very important point that I have to make and I think we will be making it more often. We're asking communities to share their insights and to share with us their feedback in a system that in short seems unwilling to change and is not ready to shift the power or truly allocate resources directly to community led initiatives and local actors. I think there's a ton of evidence for this which we

I'm sure we've all been reading. And I think it also shows because we're sitting here today on this type of panel. We have lot of these kinds of discussions these days, which are important. But this is why I was talking about systemic overhaul and the need for systemic change to really make this work. Listening to communities obviously should not be an end goal. It should be a means to an end. And only then will it be able to move directly

beyond project spheres or narrow themes. So in short, I think we're pretty good at listening, but the action that follows it is what we have to work on.

That's very clear. Thanks, Noor. Alex, do we know what communities want?

Yes, so from our experience with Talk2Loop and all the different feedback that we get, we can see that communities definitely want to be involved in decision making. They have their own innovations, they have their own ideas and experiences and that changes over time. And so what they need and what they prefer and how they want to engage in that changes as their context changes. So if there's a spike in conflict and they're displaced and then their needs change, etc.

They also want to have agency and control just like we would if we were in any crisis situation. We can see that they want to be able to report issues and concerns without fear of retribution, which is a very big issue that we see across people in the sector trying to be able to report fraud, abuse, corruption, et cetera, but not feeling safe to do that or having to remain anonymous and finding pathways to get to the right actor to be able to report.

And finally, they also want timely answers. So there's a huge amount of feedback that is, where is my cash? Why has this project stopped? There's floods coming. How can we get help to prepare, et cetera? So timely, responsive feedback to what's important to them is what will help in a crisis. And the closer that that happens and those decision-making happens to the communities with them, the more effective that aid will be is definitely what we're seeing in the data.

And unfortunately we're also seeing in the data that organisations are slower to respond. We tend to extract the data and use it in different ways rather than responding directly to communities. And there's a lot of work to do on safe reporting as well.

So less participation washing, more genuine two-way feedback. Communities are being very clear that they want their agency, they want flexibility, they want to be part of decision making. do you have any input on this?

Sure. I think we, as a sector, typically, we know that we're not always hearing from the whole community. And we have an English bias very heavily, as we can see by this English panel in the room of English speakers. In the sector, we're very heavily Anglo-centric. We're also, when we bother to translate the strategies and...

thinking that we have developed in English from an Anglophone worldview into other languages. It's typically the other UN languages. And if you're lucky, Portuguese. that little bubble we take with us when international organizations go to respond in other contexts. But language is power. And in linguistically diverse countries, certain

certain language communities hold that power and certain language communities do not. So if you are, for instance, a Wahha speaker in northeast Nigeria, chances are you didn't get much of anything of an education, particularly if you happen to be a woman or you are an older person or you have a disability of some kind. You're going to do better if you're a house speaker, essentially. And we are often not aware of those

of those power dynamics essentially who gets to the table, who gets heard, who's more likely to be at a disadvantage in an emergency is tied up with and is compounded by language barriers. So they can compounds issues of gender and age and disability. But because we're often not looking at that and traditionally we haven't looked at that, I'd like to think that

bit of prod and some language maps from Clear Global we're doing better in more recent years and I know that colleagues here certainly are.

But as a result, structurally, we haven't been as good at hearing from certain sections of society that are more likely to be the ones that are going to get left behind. And we know that this plays out in needs assessments, for instance. We did some great research in Nigeria, but you hear this reflected elsewhere, where you have a really carefully, technically developed needs assessment questionnaire with triangulation possible between all of the questions, et cetera.

and it's developed in English and then it's handed over to your enumerators who are Hausa speakers without any discussion of, how would you understand all the words used? Do you all understand them in the same way? How would you translate that question into Hausa? Let alone any kind of language support for the majority of people in Northeast Nigeria who are not first language Hausa speakers, how are you going to translate that? Do we have interpreting support? And typically we don't. And so there is a massive

structural bias in a lot of our needs assessments as a sector when we don't take that language factor properly into account, where we don't support the people who doing the actual data collection around these assessments. We have a structural bias towards younger, better educated men from the dominant language group. And that means that the decisions on which program design happens, the decisions on which donors make funding decisions, the basis on which donors make funding decisions is skewed to

away from some structurally disadvantaged sections of the population. And that can be, that then gets into the feedback, of course, that we hear. It runs through the whole program cycle and it can end up remaining entirely invisible. If we never ask the question about what is the language you prefer or what is the main language that you use at home, then we'll never know who we're missing. And that can be amplified by technology. I know we're going to get onto that. And technology.

in the way in which Talk2Loop, for instance, is using it can also be part of the solution.

Great, so in some cases, we don't know what communities want. And inclusion is something that we really need to examine, not only in this conversation, but whenever we're talking about tech. Sophie, I know you have opinions about how we assess what communities want. But I also want to ask you, why as a sector is this not our starting point, what communities want and if we know it?

feel so strongly about this that I've just poured water all over the floor. Yeah, so as my fellow panelists were speaking, I had a kind of out of body experience and just thought, what if we were sitting at the annual conference of healthcare providers or a supermarket moguls or of transport providers? What a surreal question it would be to ask, do we know what our end users want? Do we know what our clients want? I think the fact that we even have to ask the question at all and the fact that between

this panel and elsewhere, other panels that are happening right now, we struggle to have a really clear and comprehensive answer to that. It's a huge failing. And it's a failing not only for organizations like ours that have focused on trying to understand what communities want and need. It's a failing for every single humanitarian aid provider in this building and beyond. Because if we don't have a really clear view of what the people that we serve want and need and prefer, then what on earth is happening over there in the Palais, in those closed door meetings, where right now,

humanitarian leaders are scrambling to try and see what humanitarian aid can survive these cuts. If they're not starting with a really solid understanding of what people in crisis want and need and prefer, then we're heading towards a really disastrous situation. We already know, and I'm sure all of you are having these conversations on the side, that the decisions being taken in those closed rooms over there are about doing the absolute bare minimum, catching people when they're already falling off the cliff.

getting the child when they're heading to the therapeutic feeding center and abandoning all of that work to give that child's parents the agricultural skills and tools to farm in such a way that that child never ends up in the therapeutic feeding center. We're gonna make some really expensive mistakes. I mean, expensive in terms of money, in terms of lives, in terms of livelihoods and in terms of people's opportunities. So the fact that we're asking the question at all.

is a failing on all of us and on all of us in this building and in this conference. So in terms of a more constructive answer, Ground True Solutions just last night, so I'm, is perfect timing, published a report looking at the last two years of our data. So that's 34,000 interviews with people experiencing crisis across 12 countries over the last two years. And we tried to organize

the data that we have in terms of what is it that people experiencing crisis want and need from this humanitarian reset that's going on? What do they need from the future of humanitarian aid? And just very quickly, we organized the data under five key imperatives. Number one, as global response becomes less and less adequate for the problems it's trying to address, community-led response mutual aid takes on an even greater relative importance than before. So we need to figure out how to get the resources

the support and the collaboration to those frontline mutual aid efforts that we heard about last night over in the Intercontinental Hotel that are happening all over the world. We need to do better at supporting community-led and mutual aid. Number two, build a humanitarian response that's fit for a more violent and lawless world. So we hear from people across context that they feel more unsafe in their daily lives. As...

the consequences for breaking international humanitarian law dwindle into nothingness. We're seeing more conflicts, more attacks on civilians, more breaches of international humanitarian law. And we need a humanitarian system that can work despite that, that can keep people safe and can get assistance to people even when access is limited and when conflict is raging, as unfortunately it is in more and more countries. Number three, and this is for me the clearest finding that jumps out, whenever we talk to anyone, no one is talking about

food aid, no one is talking about getting clean water tomorrow. People, even in the midst of acute crisis, are thinking to the future. People's long-term aspirations are really, important. People are thinking about future, livelihoods and recovery. And we're constantly asked to advocate with humanitarian aid providers to do more. Even if it means that people are skipping a meal in the immediate term, people would prefer to have the assistance that helps them to build revenue generation streams, to educate their children, to diversify their livelihoods and build for the future.

So we need to do more of that. And if it's not us doing it, we need to be getting the development actors into the places that we work. Number four and particularly relevant for this group and this panel, make information work harder. Advances in technology mean that we can get data to people, that people can exchange data in ways that were unthinkable even 10 years ago. So why are we still struggling to get early warning information to people when it matters in a way that they can act upon? Why are we still struggling to explain to people what aid they're entitled to?

how decisions about prioritisation and targeting have been made and how they can feed into that. We can make information work a lot harder. And five, step up efforts to reach the most marginalised with the right assistance. And I'll focus on that a little bit in my presentation today. But we're still failing to reach, as Ellie said, the most marginalised people. And it's not just minority ethnic and language groups. We're also failing at reaching people living with disabilities, female led households, people who shouldn't be off the map.

but we're not getting them the right assistance to them at the right time. And finally, people consistently tell us that the aid that they receive is so misaligned with their priority needs that that translates to a huge waste of opportunities and a huge waste of money. So in sum, that's what our data tells us about what communities want. But the fact that we're asking this question at all, I think is a big, big problem for all of us. Over.

Thank you. It's amazing. We've spent an enormous amount of money on feedback mechanisms and accountability as a sector. So why are we still not responding to what people want? I'm wondering, Noor, if you can speculate a little bit with us on how to close that feedback loop with innovative techniques.

As I by my colleagues here, obviously that's going to need more work than just the active efforts of one organization. That's going to really require us to really put our heads together. And I think we can go in two directions now, right? We can continue with a slimmed down version of the aid system as it stands now. And we can just...

write a post on LinkedIn every now and then saying that never waste a good crisis and this is the time for reform and then go back to our desks and work the same way that we always do. Or we can really put our heads together and really work with like-minded individuals and organizations leaving behind us our pre-existing hierarchies and competition that unfortunately the system in which we operate has created. And I think to make it more concrete,

This is a great opportunity. We're at HMPW. We were already talking that we should really put our heads together, but this is not an exclusive or exclusionary process. Others are also welcome to join it. Because I remember all the posts after HMPW last year, people feeling, well, somehow a bit frustrated with the process, being in the same conversations again. And let's not let that happen another time. So let's really stick our heads together and come up with very concrete solutions.

as we're just discussing before the start of this panel, how are we going to make sure that communities can influence also the inter-agency standing committee, the senior leadership in the sector. But also, and I was thinking about this when you were just talking about the complex and non-homogeneous character of the community. Let's understand

the community better with all its minorities and and all its different interests. UPINION, yes, we're creating these digital communities, for instance, Syrian refugees in Lebanon or women throughout Yemen. But we're also looking into what people are interested in. Some people are very interested in actually helping designing projects, right? They have ideas about how can we work better with the municipality and they have very concrete ideas.

Some people really like to be involved in the more high level advocacy efforts. Let's not treat the community as one. I know we're often doing it just for the sake of ease. And I'm also doing it because we just need to use a word to continue this conversation. But let's understand the community and indeed not treat it as one. But look at how different communities, different people can also contribute differently.

Can I give one more concrete example? So maybe to come up with something positive. We have just recently basically revamped our real-time engagement platform. This is just one example of a solution where we've seen some positive steps. So it's a safe and inclusive meeting space where there is real-time interpretation, which I would love to discuss more with you after this panel.

It's also meeting space that is easy and safe to access both for communities and humanitarian practitioners, decision makers, policymakers. What we want to achieve with this meeting space is create a space for sincere dialogue between different community members and policymakers. And yes, we've seen interest in that. We've had some very enriching conversations, for instance, between people working on

from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs working on or now thinking on how to deal with Syria, with potential return to Syria, how to potentially support people that might want to return, how to make sure that this returns happens in a voluntary and dignified manner. And on the other side, some Syrian refugees who have very serious reflections and considerations right now, what happens if I go back? Can I go back? What do I need to go back? I don't want to go back, et cetera.

So we do see interest in this tool. Of course, as said, we still need to make sure that those insights, findings still get plugged into the larger policy discussion, but it is a start. And then indeed also in this landscape where things have to be more efficient and cost effective, which is just the reality we're all part of. Your opinions philosophy is make use of technology and digital tools when you can to reach people in a cost effective way.

So we can also spend more of the other resources on reaching people maybe that are not digitally connected, on bridging that digital divide, et cetera. Thank you.

As you're speaking, reminded me also while Sophie was speaking, it reminded me of the question, who's allowed to innovate? Who's allowed to make those risks? Who's allowed to fail? Before we get into that, I wanted to just center our conversation. We've been speaking a lot about structural incentives and supply driven aid, but you guys have the tools to listen to communities and drive community engagement differently. And we have this political moment to shape community engagement differently. So what do you think the future will look like?

Do you think there will be opportunities to plug in those insights into the larger system? And do you expect to be doing more community engagement with these existing tools or new tools? So look into the crystal ball with me for a moment. Who's tempted to start? Go ahead, Alex.

Kito, are you with us? Do you have any ideas about the future and whether or we'll be using more tools or different tools or existing tools to do more community engagement?

Yeah, I think there's kind of like maybe the future I would hope for looking into the crystal ball, maybe the future that's potentially more likely given current trends, patterns, and types of discussion. So on the future, think we'd like to have, right, is a much better networked kind of approach to community participation of which I guess technology can fill the one aspect of that, but certainly shouldn't be a replacement, right, for

genuine, sincere interaction, engagement that can be carried through various conversations. think the challenge with digitally mediated feedback is it still requires people to take it up and move it forward. That's the systemic issues, but that's also, I think, the advocacy pains and challenges, right? So it's not feasible or only the remit of like folks on the panel and their organizations to take forward this information, even though they are, but it's also critical that

folks in the civil society space, the development space, obviously at HQ, given the current set up of the sector, it's necessary that they also take this forward, right? But have that inclination to feedback and create these kind of smaller and bigger nested loops of engagement. And that would be what I think we'd hope to see is that to a degree innovation is about.

making it easier for folks and meeting their needs, That if there are folks who have preferences to engage in technologically mediated ways that we are designing tools that enable that, but we're not intending those tools to be a replacement for other forms of participation and engagement that we know are really important and that engender a lot of change, right? I think all of this kind of mutual aid communities that are increasingly being discussed are about being hyper-localized and hyper-connected to

very specific groups, right? And then they feed up feedback with one another to help create and figure out where funding should go, what kind of funding is needed and so on, right? And in order to create something like that, that kind of scaffolding, think that tech tools often operate on a scale that can be hard to maintain that intimacy, which is why it's important to be so mindful of that. So that's, think, where a very quick sense of where I'd hope we'd go with tech.

tools, whether it should be existing tools or not, I think it's always better to try to use existing tools. So much money has already gone into it, so much funding and time that there's no need to build new things when we already have a lot that works or could work with some tinkering and more focus and emphasis, especially in that kind of mode, as I mentioned just now. So that, I think, would be.

nearly always better than spending more money, more time creating another tool that then you need to also teach people how to use and fine tune to their needs and so forth. I think though the push that is happening at the funding level is one that is more interested in technology and is one that is interested in like quote unquote new technologies, right? And I won't say the A word just yet. I'm sure that someone else will say it, but I think that like

then it's likely there'll be more of a push to utilize those tools, at least to integrate them into existing tools or kind of build on top of them, but also potentially to replace wholesale some like really critical parts of participation and engagement. I know we focus a lot on collecting feedback, but that's only the beginning to a degree of what is.

And it's potentially, relatively speaking, the kind of more straightforward part in that we understand how to collect feedback. We can measure that we've collected feedback or what have you. But measuring or understanding or tracking how that then permeates the rest of the system is much less clear. And I think that tools are likely to replace a lot of that initial collection, maybe some of the processing, but allow humanitarians to sit well.

in bigger or further up the chain within organisations to feel like that feedback box has been ticked. So there's one thing of what I would like and what I'd hope for and how I think we ought to use technology. And I can dig more into any of those things. But I think on the other hand, that's how we have demonstrated, or humanitarians have broadly demonstrated, they're inclined towards using tools. And I think that that is often an instance of

cost cutting, replacement, and not a lot of reflection on how that might fit into a larger system or ensure change across the system. I think it's often a way to just replace the current mode of working. So without that larger reflection of how we should use tools, how we should innovate, I think it's likely that these tools kind of get inserted in business as usual, so to speak.

Where we are right now in this in the current moment of the sector, whatever comes out of this system, how do we make sure Keto that we don't slip backwards and instead we use this moment to accelerate? How do we make sure that exclusion is not amplified by tech tools? It's not just about including those who are tech literate or literate in general. Yet how do we design? How do we?

decide how to use tech as a sector in order to make sure that we're continuing to advance in our inclusion goals and in genuine participation and not just including local humanitarians, but the communities who are affected by crises themselves.

Yeah, I think this is a really huge and critical question. If there's one kind of succinct way to put it, I think it's be willing not to use tech and be willing to say no to the use of tech. Because I think the inclination is towards using technology, right? And I think oftentimes we try very hard to figure out ways to make it work. think biometrics is a good example of that. We think like, how can we make it safer? How can we protect the data?

have real data, do we not? Like all of these questions and conversations, but never on the table is there a moment where folks say like, maybe we just shouldn't use it. Maybe it's too hard for us to use it safely, responsibly, thoughtfully, that we should think about alternatives in a really meaningful way. So I guess that's a kind of like glib way to put it. I think what that breaks down into is one, actually having a very clear comparative of what are the different.

Like what is the problem? Firstly, very one is very clear analysis of what is the problem, and I think that that's really where we start. Other folks have said this in addition to myself. I've said it more eloquently as well, but having a clear understanding of the use case in a specific understanding of these case. I know that I think nor mentioned that we kind of use community in this kind of broad way because it's easier, but it is really important with all my designing tools using tools, deploying them that we actually have a very specific understanding beforehand of.

both the use case and those who might end up utilizing this tool. The second is to have a comparative. I think it's easy to want to use the kind shiniest tool with the most compute power. And there's maybe an embedded assumption there that more compute power means we can scale more or reach more people and process more data. And sometimes that's true and sometimes that's not. And I think that that's because of the third thing I would say, which is be much more attendant to the cost of using tech.

So it says the cost associated with design and deployment. There's the cost associated with making sure that folks have the skills necessary to use these tools correctly. There's the skills necessary to fine tune better, right? So as Ellie was talking about enumerators, right? And the fact that there's cost involved in making sure that more languages are represented among enumerators, but also more engagement around like how.

particular words, phrases are translated and how that might be received. Those are all costs associated with the use of technology that I think we often overlook in an age where compute power is increasingly more accessible to us through things like generative AI. I think it's even easier to overlook the cost of that, which means that I think those things all together point to some attempt to demystify technology, certainly, but also get a lot more in-depth about

what we know these tools can and can't do and where we think. At the end of the day, they are just tools, They're not approaches, I don't think fundamentally or methodologies even. They're tools to help facilitate other things that we want to do in the sector, right? We want to have a humanitarian system that is more responsive to the day-to-day needs of the specific community they're helping.

in X place, right? Like that is what we want to do. That is an approach that's it. And then the overall approach might be like, do no harm, right? Like those are approaches. Technology is a tool to help us maybe meet some of those things. And I think reorienting and re situating tech tools is a really important way to, I guess, like we think how we approach our, like our relationship to technology and our reliance on that.

But I think that there are lots of ways obviously to rethink this relationship. And I think there are lots of things that can mediate the relationship. think the other than, you know, the first thing I said, which is be willing to say no and really have that on the table and sincere way. I think the thing that I would bookend this with is that there are humanitarian sectors been doing this work for a long time for all of its sins. And I think that there have been

a lot of lessons learned along the way and lot of clarity around what the sector actually wants to do. And I think nailing that first and understanding that first is actually, and then embedding technology within that is a lot better. But I think it's important to ask whether or not the use of our tech tools is necessary if there's another way. And if the main driver to using it is resources, which are important to be clear, and I think it's important to be realistic, I think it.

we need to question if that is the primary driver every time to use tech tools. What else we'd be using instead if we had the means to do so. And therefore, like if there are ways that we can prioritize that rather than trying to paper over or go for the next best option because we can't actually have the kind of system or setup that we think is the correct way forward.

Thanks, Keto. That's a lot to think about. my takeaway right now is tech can do many things, but maybe Ellie, you can speak to this. How do we make sure it enhances human agency rather than replace it?

Yeah, I was nodding along to pretty much everything you were saying there, Kito.

One thing that really resonated was we have to understand what tech can do and what tech can't do and understand that there's a lot of work going on, including in the CEDAC network at the moment, to try and make sure that as humanitarians, are understanding the capacities and the limitations and the framework within which we make those decisions about when we use tech. One of the...

with the chat GPT and the explosion of large language models and lots of, some of big tech companies come out with, we're serving a thousand languages. There's this idea that, okay, well, language AI pretty much handles communication. And the reality is that is not, it's still very, very far from being the case. So for instance, about 90 % of the training data used to build language models

is in English and another 16 languages. That's pretty small. When you imagine, consider that there are 7,000 plus languages in the world. So at the moment, we can't simply rely on a lot of humanitarians developing digital tools are finding, actually, this isn't working. We're missing people. And structurally, this kind of outsourcing of the human

means that human, who we're missing can very easily become invisible. So what we saw, did a study with GSMA last year and we were seeing that digital platforms tend to hoover up data on users, but they don't tell you who's not able to access it for whatever reason, whether it's digital literacy, whether it's actual functional literacy, whether it's the language.

it.

in which you're engaging, whether it's the... And that means that we can carry on and blindly say, okay, well, great, we've got this fantastic thing. We can give you the breakdown of how many, proportion of women are getting back to us and what the age groups are, but we don't actually know who we're missing. There's good stuff on co-developing with communities. People like Here I Am Studio have been developing really participatory ways to...

develop design technology with communities and not just dump it on them. Of course, emergencies, particularly sudden onset emergencies, it's challenging to do that at speed. Often what ends up happening is that applications developed elsewhere are brought in and dropped. There's been some discussion about how you can adapt that process, you can adapt code design processes. would say that language AI,

is part of the solution because of the real cost challenges. And it can do a lot more. And there are efforts, including by Clear Global and a whole range, in particular, of African tech developers, to build the voice data that is the raw material for having usable language AI, usable speech recognition, usable speech to text, but for marginalized languages.

which otherwise is going to take us a few hundred years for the tech companies to catch up with. Yeah, so there are some positives on where that can go. We have a tool called TWB Voice that's enabling marginalized language speakers from our vast community of marginalized language speakers to start building that data. And humanitarian organizations and other social impact organizations are massive collectors of voice data.

If we could find as a sector a way to safely, ethically and collaboratively harness that so that you have a pool of data that can be used for social impact and for the development of those technologies to listen better to people, then we will have moved a long way on. So that's one of my Christmas present lists, I think. We could pull that together collectively to have an ecosystem that works for smaller organizations that can't afford to invest in

in all of that high tech.

Be great.

i should mention that elie was on the panel last week the panel is about innovation and co-design and had really great practical recommendations for how to genuinely involve people affected communities right from the start and let them lead the way and design programs that actually meet their needs and wants but i want to ask besides funding where the bottlenecks in having that genuine kind of co-design of it

innovation, innovative programs, innovative tools. I don't think it's just funding. I think there's also a sectoral philosophical problem.

Who's willing to take that one on?

I think a lot of the things that we've been talking about today is around top-down power structures and we're not responding to communities because that's not where the money comes from. We put lot of resources and human resources and time into reporting to donors who fund us to be able to do the work to serve communities. So a lot of the reasons or the questions that you've been asking is that it's a colonial upside-down structure. If the communities had the resources and were

the ones deciding what services they wanted. We would be listening to them better, we would be responding to them much more quickly, and we would have very localised, contextualised, language-appropriate data to help inform that. I think the key and all of the reasons why we're not getting to where we want to be is the fundamental power structures that undermine the whole system that we're working in.

bare minimum, whatever the humanitarian system looks like in the future, I think we can all agree that communities, and not just local humanitarians, but communities, must have a seat at the table. But maybe we can go a little bit further and ask, what if we let communities steer aid? So Sophie, how radical can we be in this moment, in this crisis moment?

I don't know. As everyone keeps saying, and as we'll hear on every panel this week, the sector is in free fall, we're in crisis. If we're not going to be radical now, then when? I think as others on the panel have said, there are two very distinct ways this crisis can play out. It can play out as unfortunately we're already seeing with power holders in the sector serving their own interests.

and taking decisions about what they can most easily provide and what continues to give them a seat at the table. Or we can completely flip things, as you've just very eloquently said, that the sector would look extremely different. I don't think there would be a sector at all if people in crisis were calling the shots. And if we were genuinely starting from a picture of people's needs and then pulling resources from the international system in a way that makes sense for them, the sector would look very different. I wonder if I could just flash through a couple of slides.

just because we have this hot off the press data. Is that doable? No. Thank you very much. Yeah, I just want to give a quick snapshot of where we are now. the headline question for the panel is, how successful have we been in shifting the power or how are we doing on shifting the power? Something that all of these organizations are working on. The approach I'm about to take is going to be basic, but for me,

This moment, this crisis is the acid test of how we're doing. And I just want to give a quick scorecard based on the evidence that we pulled together. No, no worries at all. I'll get slowly started. So the first couple of slides I had prepared were on the scale of cuts, which I'm sure you don't need reminding of. Let me just flash through them really quickly. The point of reminding you of the scale of these cuts is

So if we're not taking these decisions about cutting from the perspective of people in crisis and what they need and prefer, as discussed, there's gonna be a lot of waste. Waste of money, waste of lives, waste of livelihoods, waste of opportunities. So how are we doing? Looking at the last two years of data pre-cuts, we can see four things. One, international aid as currently construed is not coming close to meeting people's basic needs. We asked people across 12 countries,

Is humanitarian aid meeting your basic needs, meeting your most important needs? And you'll see on average, most people said no. That's for a number of reasons, but I wanted to pull out this quote from Somalia, which is that the top down exercise of ticking the box and saying, yes, we've done some fake science and we deem your needs to be met is very, different to how people experience their own needs. And after three years of drought in Somalia, agencies were still handing out one $30 transfer and ticking the box.

And as we heard loud and clear from Somalia, that is not even a drop in the bucket compared to what we've lost. This isn't helping us at all. At the end of the week, the money is gone. We're back in the same precarious situation.

Number two, think.

and maybe most relevant to this group, we know that aid is not getting to the people who need it most and that there is specific vulnerable groups who consistently lose out. And we've heard a lot of that on this panel in particular from Ellie about who those groups are. And maybe Ellie, to your point, there are people who aren't even involved in these surveys who are losing out who we don't know about. But communities themselves say, you're targeting to the wrong people. A quote here from Sudan, why are the people who are healthy and able to go and get a job getting money when people living with disabilities and elderly people are missing out?

And we know across context that women, people living with disabilities, children and the elderly consistently left out. Three, we know that there's a really significant mismatch between what people say are their priority needs and the aid that they're receiving. It's maybe unfair to use South Duffer as the example here because access constraints mean that getting any aid to South Duffer has been really difficult. But let's use it for the sake of argument. You'll see that people are telling us loud and clear food is their primary need.

And what are people receiving? People are receiving buckets and blankets. It's maybe a stereotypical example, but we see this across context. What people are getting and what people need are misaligned. And that is our most basic duty as humanitarians, to understand what's needed and deliver those resources. And we're not doing it. 40 % of people we spoke to in DRC say they resell the aid that they receive to get something better. Not a surprise to anyone in this room. And also from DRC, I pulled out this quote because it keeps me awake at night.

This is a community and really dire need to our surprise. They gave us mosquito nets. We didn't need them. We had nets from the last intervention. This community was saying we need health care and we need food and they were getting mosquito nets again. That's really basic. And then finally, people still don't have a meaningful say in the assistance designed to serve them. So the chart on the left shows how many people have fed into decisions around the aid that they receive. And the chart on the right says if you have provided feedback, how do you how?

great is your trust that that feedback will be acted upon. And I think we can see that that's not working. So these are four really basic indicators, which for me as an asset test of how have we shifted the power at this critical moment, give us a resounding no, there's still a really long way to go. But back to your question, this is a crisis. This is a moment of where decisions are being made and where there is an opportunity to influence those decisions. And I think all of our organizations on this panel

and others of you in the room have a real duty to come together, put organisational hats aside, throw away silos and say, what information can we get to power holders right now? How can we better connect community groups and members of the IAC that are making these cutting decisions to ensure that we're not, just to go back a couple of slides, wasting money, lives and livelihoods by getting the wrong stuff to the wrong people at the wrong time. So that's my basic take on the question. I'll hand over to much cleverer people to give a more nuanced answer.

Go ahead, Norris.

Thank you. I've been hearing so many interesting points here and have had some time to reflect on them now. just want to loop back to a few points and still emphasize a few things. Kito, I think you were saying demystifying technology and that really resonated with me. It's just a simple word to say that, you know, to describe something that obviously has been crossing my and my colleagues minds all the time. Something that we've really been running into is

all actors around us wanting to duplicate the same system and starting to build from scratch something that parts of which we may have developed parts of which you have already developed parts of which we can easily develop or add to our already existing systems. And I think this is very crucial at this point. Let's not waste more money on replicating the same tools. It has already been mentioned. I think it's okay to have the technology being

built and used by people who also know about it. Not everyone has to be a technology expert. As you said as well, it's about the approach. It's maybe broadening your capacity to deal with it. If you can't explain processes around safety and security in the technology system that you're using, maybe it's actually not good enough. In other words, let's just not waste more money and time on it. And let's really...

take stock of what exists. can see some efforts happening on the national level. What technology and what innovation, what systems are NGOs using? Let's make an overview because we don't really know yet. Also something that I've been thinking about is I would like to see more examples of good donorship or approaches that have really worked and structures and coordination mechanisms where indeed the power was.

partially shifted or where there's really good examples of how involvement of the community has led to better programming, better outcomes, whatnot. I was doing some research ahead of this panel and it was really hard to find something. I mean, I could find some small examples here and there, but I couldn't find a good overview. yeah, for me it could be much more visible and we can do a little bit more naming and shaming in my opinion that would really help.

We speak a lot about not having solutions oriented tech, not having problem solution oriented tech. But also what if we turn that all on its head by looking or starting with the assets, not of the tech developers or the donors, but of the affected communities. So not only having more of an emphasis on problems oriented tech, but also having

solutions oriented tech from the ground up looking at the assets of people and allowing empowering them enabling them getting out of their way to let them innovate themselves i'm wondering if there is a way of using your tools and methodologies to enable that

Yeah, I can reply and I'm happy to hand over to others. Yes, I mean, I couldn't agree more. One of our latest endeavors in the Sahel region and Turkey, we're actually looking into handing over the ability to operate our digital engagement platform completely to local and national civil society organizations so that they can continue to use these tools and I'm sure add to them, adjust them, change, work on them together.

also after the project period ends. And this is a model that we are looking to replicate in other contexts as well. Obviously, we need to learn from this current process and see how we can add to it, how we can complement to it. The key thing here, I think, is making the time and efforts available to do that. You cannot expect a

partner or community member to come up with a solution to a problem that we've been struggling with for the past fifty years. You have to first make sure that you're starting off on somehow the same level in terms of access to information and then you can of course see what the community comes up with. yeah, have no doubt that that's a much better approach. we're in favor of it and also would really advocate to donors to very concretely.

encourage these kinds of mechanisms where there is a lot of flexibility of working in the manner that you see fit and that the partners in countries see fit and where they get ownership over technology. Thank you.

Thanks Norah. now I'm going to open up the floor to any questions online or in person. please go ahead. Just turn on your microphone.

Good morning everyone. My name is Siri Karen. I work for OJAN Action for Africa. OJAN Action for Africa is a women's rights advocate. We are a fund. We resource women's rights organizations across Africa. And it was quite interesting when Sophie was presenting the map where we saw that most of the crises are in Africa. We have

contracted crisis, have acute crisis, we have crisis coming and going, it's really complex and we are living in a really a poly crisis within the context. So it's really interesting to hear how you discuss about tech being maybe a solution, but also recognizing that maybe for the African context, there are things that you need to consider to ensure that communities actually

have access and can use technology. So it's not a question, but I wanted to share what we do, how we see and how we collect the needs of people that we serve. She mentioned that we should stop considering the community as a whole. And at Ojan Aswan for Africa, that's what we do. We are focused more on women. How do women experience crisis?

Because we know that in crisis they are the ones that bear the brunt during crisis, it political, environmental and everything. So they are the ones who actually bear the brunt and they are the ones who are at the forefront of responding to crisis, even before the humanitarians actually intervening. They are the ones at the forefront. So what we are hearing, what the need actually, because the question was what do communities need during crisis?

From our own perspective, what we are hearing is that when we look at women's rights organization, usually they are the women's rights defenders who are the front line. So some of the things that we are hearing, which is really quite different from what you have been sharing lately during the panel, is that women's rights defenders want to have access to more protection mechanism.

For instance, take for those who work in the climate area where they work against extractivism, they are the ones who are mostly killed from corporate or mining companies because of the kind of work that they do. So women human rights defenders are requesting for more protection mechanisms that they don't usually need. They are requesting for more sustainability of their activism and what they are requesting for is more...

around healing spaces because having been in a context of crisis where you are the forefront of responding for a long period of time, you start feeling depressed, you're burnt out, you're isolated from your family. And so there is a lot of call around curating healing spaces for women human rights defenders. That's how they can sustain their activism. We also are receiving from the people that we serve.

They want more access to decision-making spaces. Sophie spoke about that. And Elie also spoke about the fact that they can have access, but language continues to be a barrier. For instance, in this hall, there is nobody representing the community. There's no one speaking from the perspective of what they actually are living within the community. So that's also something that they are requesting for.

visa issues continue to be a problem for women in Africa to actually access these spaces. So yeah, I wanted to just bring that aspect of the community not being just one person, but also looking at those who are pushed at the margin, the women, women with disabilities, marginalized women from indigenous groups. Yeah, we are also then centering their needs and really putting forward to

people who are then developing the tech tools so that it's quite inclusive of the people that actually need them.

Thank you, that was really interesting. What we've been seeing on Loop, where people can report independently and anonymously, is that human rights workers, specifically women, are the most sophisticated in their knowledge about safe use of technology. And so they are often, no, in this particular context, in the area that I'm working on, this is a risk to me, where my data goes in this specific area is a risk to me, therefore I need to use a different tool. So we've really been...

working with those groups, but how can we increase the safety and the protection of the input channels that we're using in this country for the specific use case, for example, and in other countries. And we've seen human rights groups, specifically women's groups, designing and developing very specific communication channels which are safe based on their specific risk factors. And I think that's been really amazing innovation that we're trying to learn from and increase the safety of the use of

Talk to Luke, for example, among others.

Thank you for your intervention. Just want to have a brief reflection on it. Because you said there is no one from the community, for instance, here. And just wanted to share that this is something that we have discussed as a panel. Because of course we were aware of that. And personally, from your opinion side, we actually brought the community directly with live interpretation so they could speak in their own languages from different countries that we work in, Syria, Yemen.

Lebanon into a HMPW conversation twice. And the reason that we've decided to not do it right now is because we cannot give back something concrete and tangible enough after this conversation. And so we want to involve the community really in conversations where we can build something, move forward. we've seen a lack of interest in these more high level conversations where there is very little output, not to say that these conversations aren't important.

just to take you along. And so I guess we've decided as the panel to speak from all the experiences and barriers that we come across in our daily work. But obviously it's important to have a community member. One little thing about the safety. Yeah, you're describing a very serious concern, of course, for these women to have their voices heard. Just want to add that

In my opinion, it's really important to, whatever approach you take, of course, look at the maybe international safety standards, et cetera, ISO certified, making sure GDPR, et cetera, but also to look from a really practical level built in all these communication tools, checks and balances to make sure things are as safe as possible. So in your opinion, for instance, we make sure that whenever someone answers a question,

a real substantial question which can be about sensitive topics, that this question never lingers on the phone of that participant. So in case the phone gets confiscated, there will be very little evidence of the European conversation. Just to say that I think, thank you for putting it on our radar.

Ito, saw you had your hand raised. Please go ahead.

Yes.

Thank you, sir. I think it was really a very rich reflections that you shared about how you're doing your work and what you're hearing. And I think there's two big things that I kind of took away from that. One is that when we focus a lot of innovation conversations on the technology itself, what we overlook is the way that people experience the use of technology and the way that it often opens them up to additional harms.

As previously at Enduro, we did a report on environmental justice and digital rights. And I think what we really saw there is that, yes, there are online harms, but actually there is still a lot of very attendant physical immediate harms, some of which are, I think in the short term, more as essential and that people's lives are very much on the line. A lot of defenders, women in particular, are targets of violence and intimidation, right? And that that is when we think about protection,

We can't just think about protecting them online, but we also need to think about protecting them in real life because that is often actually what they're experiencing is in the day-to-day immediate intimidation. I think the corollary to that is that when we center technology so much as the solution, I think there are some tensions that start to emerge around

having a lot of big tools that do a lot of things, not anything specifically well, not designed for any particular use case, but also using that as a main conduit for how we collect feedback, right? Because I think built into a lot of those systems is assumptions around data maximization, right? And collecting as much information as we can. And even when we try to strip it out to a degree and try to reduce ways, it's, know, identifying information and so on, I still think that there are a lot of...

risks that are really hard for us to foresee with initial data collection in this moment in time. that as other technological tools evolve, those pieces of information that we thought were previously due risk might actually be opened up to risk, which is why I think that also considering both that kind of immediate protection need, but also not overlooking the importance of alternative tools that are maybe less quote unquote high tech.

but that have a bigger capacity to protect and build into it because they're not as networked or because they're not connecting as much identifiable data. So I think there's a lot of really important lessons for us to take from that about what immediately is impacting those who are doing frontline work. And I think in many ways, arguably are doing potentially the most critical part of the work, right? If we don't have evidence of these things, then there's nothing to...

prove that they happened, right? So, but also that also on the other side of that, that the kind of tools that are being used are not fit for purpose. And I think that's because the frontier of technology overlooks what are really attendant concerns in other spaces. And that's a gap that we really need to be mindful of.

Thanks Kito. Someone online has asked a question and it actually speaks to your point about designing tools that are fit for purpose. It's from Samuel Monnet from GTS, Grand Truth Solutions. He wrote very eloquently, in discussions about improving humanitarian aid, we often draw parallels with the private sector treating aid recipients as customers of the system. However, given that funding primarily comes from donors,

Could it be argued that donors are, in fact, the true customers of the humanitarian system? And if so, does this dynamic risk incentivizing humanitarian actors to prioritize donor expectations over the needs and priorities of affected communities? So who wants to take that one on?

I'm reminded of the expression there's no such thing as a free lunch if it's free then you're what's for dinner.

I'm going to stop that.

You

So Samuel.

please go ahead.

Thank you so much. So my name is Chamaka Ozomba. I also work with urgent action fund Africa. so I would start by saying, yeah, Alex and Sophie has started up on this and it's just to call us to begin to, should I say interrogate why we do what we do? So starting with, for instance, what is the

But I said reason for the quest for understanding the needs of communities. So are we doing it because OK, so this is what you said and this is what we're going to do. Or are we doing it because we actually want to walk with communities as partners? We so even going on the conversation that we haven't seen them as. People who need something also forgetting that they understand their realities and their context, right? And they can equally.

Provide the solutions that that is needed and cause to the importance of working with local groups, local community and community groups, initiatives, collectives, however they are formed. Yeah, and listening to them right? So listening not for the sake of listening, but listening for the sake of working with them and based on your research is said like the needs of.

the community system talking about need for livelihood and economic and then there's the other aspect of food. And that calls to mind that, yes, some organizations, okay, this is what you need and this is 50 % of this, this, so this is what we're going to do. But then forgetting that as you have all mentioned as well, that even in communities, they're not homogeneous, right? My needs are different from the needs of my neighbor. So why should there be trade-offs? Why should...

it be one over the other as opposed to, how do I put it, doing these things collectively. So not the vessels, but an addition to each other. And I know this might be difficult, right? In a very, should I say utopian space, right? It would be ideal, but this then calls for the area around

collaboration. So if our interest is for the community, then it shouldn't be about what my organization is doing and then taking the credit. It should be about how we can work together to do what is best for that particular community. So if in terms of collaborations, whether it's mutual aid or whether it's crisis response networks, but we're doing this collectively to be able to meet the need of that community.

So this is something that we continue to learn as an organization as a joint action fund because of our like, what I say, over 20 years of experience working in crisis response, right? Supporting communities and giving them the resources that they need as opposed to coming into the space and doing it. And this is what we've seen that works. And would I say maybe, and then also the willingness to listen and learn. And it's very important that we continue to.

Interrogate the power that we hold, but as a humanitarian as funders as and willing to share and shift. So this is something that I say that I am encouraging. Humanitarian actors to also embody and adopt and and there were conversations that you mentioned where we were yesterday as well as some conversations I've heard that when oftentimes as I said.

these groups are the forefront, right? But then when the bigger organizations come in and they're relegated as opposed to working with those structures and those networks. And then after you leave and in case of a brutal crisis, what then happens? So yeah, this is just to bring that. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. You've really beautifully captured a lot of the, I think the points that we were trying to get at today in the panel. And before we have someone respond, I just want to say, I really love your question too, because I come from an anthropological background. And so for me, it's all about context. And I wanted to bring up that yesterday and in AI for Good conference, someone made the comparison of having

the pointing to the importance of having doctors who are trained for years to understand things deeply and contextually. But they also run tests and we can compare those tests to data extraction, to understanding systematically through people's consumption habits, through scientific methods, top down. But we also still need those doctors and those doctors should be running the program. So.

what would happen if we really listen to communities i guess and during the question that you've more eloquently said back to the panel

of that one I'm afraid but just quickly in response to your comment. Yeah it's a great point and as you say it came out really strongly in the event yesterday. One thing that really jumps out of our research at Ground Tree Solutions is exactly that community saying what do you guys think we're doing until you come along? We're not just sitting there waiting for humanitarian aid. This afternoon I'm on a panel about Anticipatory Action, community-led Anticipatory Action and we worked in Chad and Nigeria.

with flood affected communities, all of whom told us we have a whole plan in place. Like as soon as we see the first indications that there's a flood coming and that's both meteorological information when we can access it and traditional forecasting methods, the whole community goes to work. We have a whole method. We put sandbags in place. The women are cooking meals to make sure that the workers have enough to eat. We have community-based anticipatory action that happens. And then often when external support comes in, they completely ignore what's happened. They duplicate it. They do something different.

It's disrespectful and it's frustrating. We had exactly the same or similar feedback from Gaza with people saying, know, when international actors couldn't access Gaza, couldn't get aid into Gaza, they couldn't get enough of talking to us, of listening to what we had to say, of trying to support our efforts. The minute they got access, they rolled in, they didn't talk to us, they gave people whatever, and then they rolled out again. Last night I was speaking to someone at that event from Syria who was saying, you know, why are we talking about communities only in terms of what we can give them?

Why can't we facilitate access for the private sector? Why can't we open up business opportunities and see what the communities are able to do for themselves? So think this is super important. And I think also in the context of what we want on the decision making tables this week, this element of what community led efforts look like and how external actors can better support them should be really front and center. So thanks for raising it.

Does anyone want to come in on this as well? Alex?

So what would happen if we really listened? I don't think we'd be here. One, we wouldn't have an HMPW every year. Two, we probably wouldn't exist as global services. Communities would be designing their own systems. They would be asking and calling down support from tech solutions or individuals or specialists to come in and help in areas that they think is relevant and appropriate for them. And we're not the only system. We talk about the sector is falling, but...

We are one of many sectors in an individual community's environment. So we often have feedback about the government, local ministries, what's happening there, human rights actors, a whole different sector, development, et cetera. And so it's all overlapping and it's all a part of one human, one community, one family's experiences. So we wouldn't have silos in that way. The silos would be contextualized around different needs of communities.

Things would look very different from my perspective.

We only have a few minutes left, so if anyone wants to make a few closing statements or share some final thoughts, Kita, we haven't forgotten about you.

She's forgotten about us. Go ahead.

Yeah, I also just wanted to quickly respond to you. Thank you for your comment. And I'm seconding what has already been said. But one example came to my mind where I was quite impressed by when talking with our community in Lebanon, Lebanese people, Syrian people about needs and their understanding that aid is limited and has to be divided, no matter how you put it, that there was actually quite a lot of understanding that obviously

Some people are more vulnerable than others. So also let's not fall for the narratives that people with political agendas are imposing on us that communities will or individuals will want to grab as much aid as they can for themselves because indeed their pre-existing relations in those communities that we are only starting to grasp maybe, but that play a role. Yeah, your story, Sophie, also reminded me of another

project that we're going to be engaging in in the coming years, linking up all that scientific evidence that is now being collected around climate change and capturing local practices to deal with climate change, which has been have been ongoing for years, obviously. So it's just thinking that it's really important that we don't only ask communities what would you do, but what have you been doing in the past years? Thank you.

Maybe next year, let's take HNPW to the communities. Let's have this meeting somewhere where crisis-affected communities actually live. Let's have it in a refugee camp. I think one of my big takeaways is we really need to argue that there's a huge return on investment in securing the trust of communities and paying attention to the assets that they have to offer and envisioning ourselves as people who truly are in their service.

and not just blind them with our solutions. Does anyone else have one last thing they'd like to add? No, Ellie? Go ahead.

We have another question.

Right. Thank you. I just have a quick comment also trying to bring all the ideas. Very impressive all the work that you're doing. So congratulations on that. So I come from IOM, but I think one of the issues that we have as international agencies, communities, et cetera, we tend to forget that we are also individuals with multi-layered complex histories ourselves. So sometimes I find myself, of course, representing IOM.

but I also, I'm also an academic, but I'm also a woman and I'm also Mexican and I also have like different voices. So sometimes we might not bring communities to the space, but I think as advocacy, like there are some different elements that we also need to bring to light. So all that multilayered identity, it's really crucial because we do work in an invisible way by having all those different stories in our pockets.

I really wanted to congratulate also the point raised in the front, but I feel that by you being here and raising that voice, communities are being integrated somehow. And these invisible elements are the ones that change the system from inside. So I just wanted to make that reflection because I feel sometimes we tend to forget that. And that's how I have learned the system starts changing. But impressive work, everyone. Thank you so much.

Does anyone want to respond to that?

Kito, go ahead.

Yeah, just quickly, and I'm sure others at the room also have thoughts is that I know that we talked a lot about like what the current situation looks like. What do we know now? What happens if we hand the reins over to communities and there's a big space in between, right? Of like how we get from A to B and I highly doubt it will be a linear route. But I think what the that comment really makes me think about is that the scaffolding that we need to get towards that community led space. And I think one really critical part.

thinking about the point of spaces like H &BW, the point of having panels like this, the point of all the work that I think we're all individually doing is to, in the absence of being able to entirely change the system ourselves immediately in this room, is to think very actively about, and think the things that we can make commitments on are about how we actually choose to platform voices, how we support those who are advocating for their communities, how we support and raise up the

the questions, the intrigue, the multilayeredness of what I think everyone knows and is hearing and how we actually advocate for the importance and significance of that because it's not like there is a deficit of information. think that increasingly that is a main ground truth, think very eloquently in that presentation that demonstrates how we know that there is a gap between what people want and what they're being given. The question is, why are we not acting at all? Why is the system not responding to that? And I think the part of

scaffolding that we need to do is to make the system more responsive to all of these different parts of what we understand, parts of what those who are providing feedback also understand and are communicating. think having more information is useful in the sense that we finally turn, change the situation a bit more to be responsive to that. But I think in the meantime that we shouldn't overlook the importance of

I think a lot more internal advocacy and power shifting within these systems and spaces and trying to make that case much more actively rather than just asserting the importance of participation, but asserting, but explaining, think, and more robustly arguing for the necessity of it in a system that I think is dying now faster, but potentially was not as maybe alive as we thought it was prior to this funding situation.

but I'll hand over to others in their room.

Unfortunately, we have to wrap up, so this is going to be the last... Alright, thank you everyone so much for joining. I think we have a lot of food for thought now. Thank you everyone who attended and thank you for your brilliant questions. And hopefully we can continue this conversation in other spaces.