69. Stuck?

[Lars Peter Nissen] (1:06 - 5:16)

[Harpinder Athwal Collacott] (5:17 - 7:06)

You can. I had a lovely experience actually today in the lunch queue, which is what I'm going to kick off with. And it was a bit of a serendipitous experience because this time last year I was in Poland and in Ukraine meeting some of our partners that we're working with. And lo and behold, one of those partners is here in the room and came and grabbed me in the lunch queue. Wonderful to meet her, but what really struck me was just the pride and appreciation she had for the work we had done. Our partnership had come to an end and we'd worked with them. They are... Maryslava's organization is called Ukrainian House Foundation. They do a lot of work with Polish migrants as they come in. And we'd supported them as a partner. And they were someone we worked right on the front lines as migrants were coming over the borders. And she spoke about the appreciation she had for the partnership, the pride she had for it, but also the ease in which we had been able to work together. And that was really striking from my perspective because it's been a theme throughout today about how do we work better with others, with partners, particularly in that local context as well that we're obviously as INGOs challenged to do. But also the nature of that partnership for me was the fact that it really challenged us as an NGO to work differently. And I think for me that's been a theme of today as well of how do we challenge ourselves to do things differently so that we can rapidly transform in a very fast changing and challenging world that we find ourselves in. There's a number of other themes that struck me today as well, but there was a real sense of how do we do partnerships better, which I feel I'm going to hopefully be able to reflect a little bit on in today's discussion.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (7:07 - 7:10)

Thank you. Jacek, what stood out for you?

[Jacek Siadkowski] (7:12 - 8:49)

My perspective probably is a little bit different because I'm a very much outsider of the humanitarian space. This is my first time in such a conference, and I came here with a fresh mind without prior experience working with the people here. And throughout the whole day, I have this very difficult feeling that the whole room feels somehow stuck. That there are so many discussions about what should change the humanitarian sector. But for me, those hypotheses or definitions or ideas are new, but sometimes people speak out those ideas with energy, with joy, with hope. And somehow, the rooms I was in today were more like bored and kind of exhausted. I think I'm still thinking what must happen in this room to unleash this energy to actually walk the talk, not only to talk about what should change, but rather what should happen here to motivate people to go out from this room and start those difficult conversations and translating them on how we change those organizations. Is this about shifting the incentives to the system? What is actually there that is creating this energy? We are talking about those changes, but I'm not sure if we really believe they will happen.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (8:51 - 8:57)

Good. From beautiful collaboration to stuckness. Francis.

Thank you. First of all, apprehensions about an in-person engagement and how wrong am I.

Being in this room, the energy in this room, the discussions, has, I think, just given me renewed energy. Because the why is very clear. From the conversations, I think we are all on the same page in terms of the what, the why. A bit of challenge on the how and who will do what. But I think from the discussions and the conversations, each and every one of us ought to be bold because if we are stationary, there won't be any change. For change to happen, it's going to be disruptive. And I think we ought to own up and say that we will be part of the change. I haven't monitored the online conversations and discussions, but my first take was, right, okay, flown all the way from Uganda, how many local voices are here? But from the conversation, clearly those voices are also represented. I thought I was feeling out of place, but I found that I'm actually well-situated in here. As a founding member of a local organization, and you're constantly being on a treadmill because you're losing staff, you don't have systems supported, to be away is quite a painful decision because time away is actually a resource lost. And that is very, very difficult to recover because you are your own fundraising team almost. So when you are not there, that is like a set in your back. But the knowledge, the discussions in here, I think is such invigorating that it gives me a lot of energy that was the right decision to be in this room because the answers are actually in this room as well. Thank you.

Fantastic. Thank you. Andrew.

When you come to a conference like this, someone often coins a phrase, then it just sticks with you for the rest of the day. And you think about what you're hearing through that phrase. And I think the one for me came right at the start of the day from Sabrina, who talked about humanitarianism's core values. And then I tuned in during the day to think about which of those core values I kept here, repeated, and it was things like trust and ownership and legitimacy and inclusivity and equity, which I suppose all feed into making a partnership meaningful or a collaboration proper. And then I think that sort of really then resonated in the technology innovation sessions I was at. It's for me, and I'm not sort of very technology adept, but it's been quite a technology-fuelled conference. But the issue was raised of the complexity of humanitarian challenges, but the opportunity of digital platforms in a data science revolution. And that's interesting to me as a historian because I think the digital tech revolution we're living through is just as profound and far-reaching and fundamental as that of our Victorian predecessors. And you just can't switch on the radio and look at the television or pick up your mobile phone and not work out that something that's begun in a scientific sphere is now daily washing through to debates about our social life, our political life and our economic life. And I think the question that hung over the technology sessions is, is that new technology going to enhance or undermine community agency? So I'd like to throw that out there because, you know, technological innovation is often occurring at a pace in parts of the Global South. If you think of mobile technology in Africa, that it's not occurring in the Global North. So how is it going to be harnessed and scaled? And how is access to it going to be made more equitable? And how is innovation on the ground going to be better understood? And how is finance going to, innovation finance, going to be there, not just for those in the Global North, but Global South?

So Jacek, you actually worked with Tech. You have created a platform called TIC to the Rescue, where you match-make tech companies and NGOs. And you hear Andrew talking about the hope that technology gives. How come you're so frustrated?

Thank you. Now, Andrew, you led the research project that was also spoken about in the morning session called the International NGOs and the Long Humanitarian Century. And reading through that report, one of the things that really stand out is that when you speak to senior leaders in the sector, there's a profound feeling of stuckness, right? That we are actually not able to change. And it's very interesting to hear Jacek who runs a really innovative shop that provides a lot of promise to deliver exactly on the hopeful future of tech transforming the way we do business and him being frustrated. Now, I think the million-dollar questions or the question that was on my mind when I read your research was, do you think these organizations can change or are we just going to be stuck forever? And if we are stuck, do we need to grow a new generation of humanitarian actions?

A million-dollar question. I'm not sure I have a million-dollar answer for you, but we use this word sort of stuckness and it's sort of caught on. It's a slightly sort of ugly word, but I think it catches a reality and that's why it's caught on. And we spoke to, as part of our sort of fed into our final report, we did interviews with 50 chief execs of leading international aid agencies, did that during COVID. I'm not sure we could have done it outside of COVID actually. That's interesting in itself. But I think they all recognize the imperative of change, to be fair to them. I mean, it's easy to take pot shots at leaders of organizations, but equally, I think the stuckness was that they often found themselves hampered and constrained from implementing it. And there weren't only two reasons that explained that, but if one was to just highlight two for the purpose of this discussion, one would be around what I would call a mixture of the political economy of aid and NGO business models. So it's the money in a way, as you were referring to. And another would be around the perception, and I would say reality of ever expanding governance requirements and both of those things leading to a level of risk aversion. But I think the question also sort of in a way has another bit to it, which is about institutional diversity and a 21st century humanitarian landscape, not just being more visible, which I think it is, but also being much more varied. And if just to take one quote from one of those interviews, one of the chief execs of an NGO that can remain nameless talked about a new reality of international NGOs occupying a very useful place, but a humbler and less dominant one. A humbler and less dominant one. And I think the sort of question then comes is, in a sort of projecting forward a decade's time, what has to happen for that to really become a reality? And I would say that there are sort of, there are two forms of recognition that are crucial to that. One is the obvious place that you'd go to, which is recognition of a changing humanitarian landscape. And I think one of the sessions said today is, how or how not are new actors going to be acknowledged and accepted in that landscape? And recognizing that those new actors are many and varied. So we can talk about states and I think we have to talk about non-Western states. And I think we do have to talk about China and the transition from a Belt and Road initiative to a GDI. We need to talk about diaspora groups. We need to talk about the private and philanthropic foundations which once had their heyday in the interwar period and are coming back and influential in ours. And we have to talk about new social movements of our time. And to coin a phrase from one of the poets, the real power of those new social movements, not least around climate change. That's one form of recognition. But I would argue, and I think this has come up repeatedly today, there's another form of recognition that I would call the politics of recognition. And by that I mean, who gets to call themselves a humanitarian? Who gets to claim that moniker for themselves? And I think that's about civil society. And it's about recognizing that civil society can't just be talked about, whatever the language is, affected populations, but it's about local responders as well. And it's about both of those groups, the recipients of aid and local responders becoming more assertive, having more sense of their own right, becoming more vocal about lack of support and speed of delivery. And to quote my Oxford colleague, Valerie Amos, about having a voice and using it. And a bit of that, I think, not all of it, is about social media, amplifying that effect and giving more sense of urgency to it.

Thank you. And Harpinder, I think you know what's coming now. Because you are one of these stock CEOs of one of the incumbents, one of the big, very professional agencies. And so what's your plan with this stock? How are you going to take Mercy Corps into a different space? And how will you do that?

It's a good question. And I'm just going to say, when you did your research, I wasn't leading an implementing agency at that time. I was leading a think tank. So I was probably sitting more in your seat than I am in mine. I've been in my role now for about 18 months. And it's a big transition, going from a think tank, where we spend a lot of time thinking about these things, to actually looking at how do you actually make change happen? How do you transform what is largely a huge beast, but not just the organization in itself. We sit in an ecosystem. I think that's really important. We are part of an ecosystem. INGOs do not operate independent of that ecosystem. We're part of a donor, UN agencies, implementing organization, but also even think tanks are part of that ecosystem. And that whole ecosystem needs to shift and change and reform. It can't be just the INGOs in and of themselves, because we are part of a system that is created in which we belong. And I think there's a lot of opportunity here. There's a lot of work that's being done by organizations. We are being pushed by situations like this, where we're having these dialogues and being very open about the challenges we're facing, but also by some of the global processes, the grand bargain. I know we've spoken about that last Peter's a few times, about the importance of the grand bargain, which really brought the issues of where transformation really needs to happen to the forefront. And it's pushing the ecosystem to really think about how it reforms. We need leadership now. We've got a lot on paper. We really need leaders of key institutions that can lead that change and drive that transformation. I'm putting words into actions. And what does that look like? For us as an organization, that looks like really being intentional about how we partner with other organizations, not subcontracting, but really partnering. And I'm not even talking about partnering with organizations similar to us. What excites me is about partnering with organizations we would never think to partner with, because that's where change really happens. When you bring two like-minded or two unlike-minded organizations together, you will have great attraction from the friction that you create, as opposed to working with people who are already thinking and acting like you. We need to sit in each other's shoes. We need to be uncomfortable, and we need to challenge our way of doing things. And that's really important for us. One of the things we're doing, which really excites me, is our equity investment. We've got Mercy Corps Ventures. Mercy Corps Ventures is raising money from DFIs and other investors, a lot of them philanthropic, a lot of them are individual wealthy people who want to do good with their money, but they want to invest in SMEs. They want to put that money into high-risk initiatives, and we are that impact investing model. We're selecting climate-resilient SMEs, possible climate-smart technology companies that are starting out in highly fragile contexts, and we're investing in them. And then we're generating new income for them. We've generated about 400 million of that follow-on investment for 47 companies around the world. That's exciting. That's challenging. But boy, is it difficult, because the failure rates of a number of these partners is huge for us. And many of my country directors will say, no, we can't work with the partners you're bringing through ventures, because they're not strong enough to deliver our projects with us. And that's the challenge we've got, is that in the humanitarian system, we've got to, in one hand, bring the partners up to a place where they can partner with other sides of our same organization to be able to deliver some very complex programming and take in large donor funding as well. But the donor ecosystem needs to change with that, and also the UN. We don't have much presence from the UN here, but they are critical partners in this change. And if we don't have a level playing field where the UN creates space for more small organizations to be able to go after funding that would not naturally go to the UN, we're not going to see that change happen. So I'm a big advocate of the wider ecosystem change that needs to be driven.

Thank you. Now, Francis, you've successfully founded and you lead Kafumi, which is one of the strongest leading organizations we have in Ugandan civil society. We talk a lot about localization, but a concern of mine is that, you know, if we talk political economy, business model, bureaucracy, all the things that Andrew has mentioned gets the big organization stuck, aren't you going to end up exactly in the same situation? So how will you work to avoid the trap of Kafumi ending up in the same stuckness as the INGOs?

Yeah. Thank you for bringing that perspective. And there's a question online that really speaks well to what you just said. It is, who should take responsibility for amplifying the voice of the affected populations and local responders, the people who are inherently marginalized on all counts, funding politics, economy, and are dealing with a crisis? So how do we amplify? We've spoken a lot about business models and incentives. How do we amplify the voices of the populations we serve? How does that fit in?

Yeah, I mean, as part of the, you know, this, how do we bring the human back in humanity, humanitarians, for example? And I think communication, you know, if we take, say, art, we take the poems we just listened to, music, drama, these are universal languages. A lot of the conversations happen in English, in, you know, the official languages, for example. It's as if those affected by the crisis don't have a voice. But they might be, you know, from an oral tradition, but that is still a very powerful voice. Question is, what platforms and spaces exist for them to have that voice, you know, heard? Because that will actually inform change in policy, probably form, you know, public opinion, especially where public opinion can drive changes in policy. Might not be the case in my country, but that, I think, means that we've got to map all those spaces and opportunities. And I spoke about the Near Network, for example, but that is operating at the global level. Do we have the same space at the national level so that that then is amplified at the national level, but also linked to the global? So that the global conversations must percolate right through to the community and vice versa. That's when you really hear the voices of those affected. If it's about us, without us in the space, in the room. And I think it's a discussion that wants to exclude us. Do we feel inclusive? If you speak about an international community, are we in or are we out? Which community?

We'll take one more question from online, and then if there's a question in the room, we'll take that afterwards. The question is, you say that the ecosystem needs to change, and change needs leaders to drive that change. We will need multiple leads in the sector to come together and do this. How are we going to do this? And when are we going to do this?

I'm not the humanitarian guy, so I'll tell the obvious thing, which maybe is, you know, stupid enough to resonate with you. I think it's everyone's responsibility, right? In every single room you are sitting in, you have to take responsibility. And taking responsibility is also taking a risk. Someone might laugh at you. You are sitting in the room with the donor, right? And donor has this, you know, old-style concept about what should be done. Like, you need to say, no, we won't do it, right? It's stupid. And then, you know, when people start to say no, say, there's a better idea, we didn't include this voice, the local voice in this room, then start, then the change starts to happen, right? I think this is that easy and that difficult. But, you know, you have 600 people here, couple of thousand, you know, online. If everyone makes a decision today that starting from tomorrow, I'm making change in my environment, in my work and in my life, then, you know, change will start to happen. If we go home today thinking, okay, so we were discussing this, you know, needs and problems again, you know, like, okay, will my leadership start doing something about it? Then no way that the change will happen.

Thank you. Andrew, where do you see the change coming from? Where's the potential for disruption, if you want?

I think in two ways. But, I mean, I, you know, before that, I would just preface it by saying that I, we had this when we were, we spent three years on our project on the past, present and future on international NGOs. And at times, I think we, despite the quality of discussion we had, we felt the discussions were just becoming a bit circular and we were going round and round. And I've heard that said about the conference today, but it's tough. And it's tough for a few reasons. And we shouldn't be surprised. It's tough because of the scale of technological revolution we're living through. We've talked about that. It's tough because of the climate crisis, which, you know, is set, if not already leading to a sort of scale of environmental change, which is beyond most people's experience. And it's tough, let's face it, because of the geopolitical upheaval we're experiencing, which I would say as a historian is probably, you know, the third wave of geopolitical upheaval we've had since the Second World War. We went through decolonisation, arguably an unfinished process. We went through the Cold War and now we're living through something more complex still, where the changes are going along east, west, north, south. And then within the western bloc, within the southern bloc and eastern bloc as well. And I think probably, you know, the two axes are firstly, as was rightly said, something around sort of partnerships. And I think all of those things are going to require very different sorts of partnerships, not partnerships just within the international NGO or within the humanitarian sector, but they're all going to require different sorts of partnerships and absolutely with the private sector and business, you know, of a scale and ambition that perhaps the humanitarian sector isn't accustomed to. And the ability to strike up very different relationships with government, yeah, and has been emphasised by a number of people today to retain, I think, a degree of independence. Independence is never absolute, yeah, but not to be completely instrumentalised by governments who want to use humanitarian NGOs for very different purposes and perhaps to remind ourselves, you know, in this room that DFID was once DFID and not FCDO. That was because of Harrod Wilson and Barbara Castle. That was because of Barbara Castle thought it was a rather good idea to have a development ministry that didn't major in amateur charity and wasn't an extension of British foreign policy. So striking relations with your own government is important. That's the partnerships, but you can't get away from the power and civil society thing. I think the grand bargain talks of a participation revolution. I'm a historian. That participation revolution has been six or seven decades in the making, yeah. It's not a, you know, it may be more loud, a lot more noise around it. And I think just to finish with a quote from one of my UN colleagues who can remain nameless, but it sort of sums up the civil society issue for me. And, you know, refugee crisis today, refugee crisis in the past, usually half or more of the problem is never touched by an international organisation. Yeah, it's sort of touched by civil society, often in non-institutionalised forms. And the quote is this. If all the noise around humanitarian action comes primarily and predominantly from the international organisations, then we're at risk of excluding half of the world that's working in humanitarian space.

That's powerful. Do we have a question from the room?

Hi. There's, I guess, been a lot of exhaustion in some of the conversations from like the environment that we now live in, you know, a year or two years of like one coup after another, what's happening in Palestine, like this disintegration of security in so many contexts that we not only have to get on with our jobs in amongst, you know, our staff suffer from them, the beneficiaries or clients or however you want to define them, communities we work with suffer from them. But we don't want to touch, or I guess there's a distance between us and discussions about security or state building and these kinds of more political issues. And now they're really getting in our way. And I know, obviously, we all here because we believe in the principles of impartiality and neutrality, all these important things. But when those issues are now in our way and creating crisis after crisis after crisis, how do we start talking about the gap in state building, the failure in security, if this is actually the major challenge? You know, it feels like we're not confronting the biggest challenge that's in front of us. I don't know if that's, I should have thought about that more before I articulated it, but I hope that makes sense.

If I can try to read back what you said. I think what you're saying is we're stuck with the humanitarian principles and they seem to be more an obstacle rather than an enabler today. And so do we need to grow up as an industry, drop the humanitarian principles and get into a much more political state building security position to be able to operate in today's environment? Is that OK?

I knew you were coming to that. There was a quote earlier in one of the panels, which said, humanitarian aid stems the bleeding, but justice heals the wounds. And I think one of the things we're very good at is actually constantly going in, putting that plaster on, going in, putting that plaster on. But we're never going to solve these scenarios if we keep putting that plaster on. We have to come back to that way of how do we all play our role and play that role where there are longer term, sustainable solutions about building security into the system and actually sitting down with communities. When I sit down with communities, when I'm traveling to see my, meet the participants in our projects, the first thing they want is they want to be able to go about their daily work safely. They will always say that. What do you need the most? I want to be able to leave my house and feel safe. That's always the first priority for them. Because if they're not safe, forget food, forget education, forget health. Nothing else matters if they can't leave the house safely. So fundamentally, we have to bring in the issues of creating safe, sustainable, long term states where societies can thrive. That may not be the space for humanitarians as such to play into that, but we have a role to play with regards to supporting and creating the environments where those discussions can happen. And a lot of the work we as an organization do is around that, the peace building nexus with development and security and bringing those two, those three pieces together. So there's a lot that we need to be doing here, but we can't do our work. Myanmar is a good example. We can't operate and do our work in the traditional ways because insecurity is prolific. And actually, the situation doesn't allow for humanitarians to work in the way we used to. We're finding ways around, which is great short term, but it puts a lot of our staff at risk, puts a lot of our staff at risk. And it's only a matter of time before that becomes less of a risk and more of an incident. And so we do need to look at, actually, what are the elements of the various different stakeholders and actors who need to be working much more collaboratively together to find these solutions. Otherwise, we're going to be finding ourselves constantly stuck in this cycle of we've come out of a situation, oh, and five years later, 10 years later, we're back in. Darfur being a good example of that.

I don't have an answer, a complete answer for you, but I think there needs to be greater discussion. And again, we need to be comfortable sitting at the table with partners, security partners, may they be, who we traditionally feel we shouldn't be sitting on that table. We need to challenge ourselves to have those conversations.

We only have a couple of minutes left, and it's a shame. There are plenty of great questions online, and I did ask Dominique for another half an hour, but I was rejected, so we have to wrap it up. And what I'd like to do is just ask you to reflect on what's on your mind as we leave humanitarian exchange today. What do you take with you? Just a short couple of points on that. Andrew, do you want to start?

Francis.

Yeah, thank you. I think Andrew said it for me, but also just partly to answer, you know, the question, but from a rebalancing, you know, society, you know, and also, you know, taking the best of civil society, you know, government, you know, public, you know, private sector into a partnership. If we listen to the poem, I think this morning, you know, Ego, Greed, I mean, we are heading to an existential, you know, problem. Whether it's climate change and stuff like that, but for the reason why I come from, you know, Great Lakes region, Uganda, I mean, there's no reason why there is poverty. It's very rich in terms of resources. Now, if it's not greed and yet we've got enough to actually share globally, then there's a problem somewhere. The architecture is not right for us to see that there's enough. I mean, the cost of a bullet and a bomb and the cost of food, if you put it together, there's enough resources. I think it's just a rebalancing.

Thank you. Thank you. Harpinder?

Gosh, so many things. I think I take away hope. And the reason I take away hope is I think we all care. That's what we're here for. We all care. We're all trying to seek solutions. And actually, we're having some very tough conversations. There was a really tough conversation about Gaza earlier today. And it's really important that we can have these tough conversations and challenge ourselves to think differently. The solutions aren't necessarily easy or clear. But I think we as a sector have been evolving and changing. We've changed and responded quite significantly over time. And we can continue to do that. We're struggling with the how, as I think, Francis, you said at the beginning. We're struggling with the how at the moment. But the how will start to become clearer once we start experimenting more, experiment fast, move quickly, take some risks. And that risk aversion is holding us back at the moment because it's paralyzing us. We need to start sharing more of that risk so that we can move faster, fail quicker, and keep going.

Thank you. Jacek?

One thing that comes to my mind, keep your mind at the people you work for, right? And I don't mean donors. I mean people you help and do everything that it takes to actually help them, really help them, not prove in the report that you helped them.

You know, Trumanitarian, we say we have smart, honest conversations. And I just want to thank this panel for being smart and honest. It's been a great conversation. And it's very enjoyable. And I take the hope with me as well. I think things can change. But we can't change if we don't challenge each other and if we don't have that discomfort of having difficult discussions. And I really appreciate the way you engaged in this discussion. And thank you very much.