Paula Gil Baizan, Meg Sattler and Lars Peter Nissen review 2021 and look forward towards 2022 in the humanitarian world.
Transcript
Welcome to Trumanitarian. I'm your host Lars Peter Nissen. 2O21 has been a uniquely difficult year. The pandemic has continued to disrupt lives and reshape humanitarian outcomes across the world and it's been hard not only to cope with the year, but also to make sense out of it. What does this year actually mean for us in the long run? To help me both with the coping and with the sense making, I turned to the fence of the pod, Paula Gil Baizan and Meg Sattler. Paula is the global lead for innovation and digital in NRC and Meg is the director of Ground Truth Solutions. That turned out to be a really good ideaboth Meg and Paula have really interesting takes on 2O21 and great ideas and wishes for 2O22. We had a fantastic conversation, and I hope you will enjoy it. If you enjoy listening to trim Unitarian, why don't you rate us on wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review. It really helps us. You can also follow us on Twitter, on LinkedIn and as always, we appreciate your feedback either on social media or on email. You can reach us on info@trumanitarian.org. Enjoy the conversation.
Lars Peter Nissen:Meg and Paula, thank you for coming and Happy New Year.
Paula Gil Baizan:Yes, hi. Thank you for having us again, Lars
Meg Sattler:Happy New Year to you too.
Lars Peter Nissen:So we agreed to have a look at 2O21 and what kind of a year that was and at least for me, it has been quite a brutal year. It was it was a really tough year, I actually can't remember the last time I was this bashed at the end of the year and I don't know, Meg, What what has you been your your top line takeaway from 21?
Meg Sattler:Oh, God. I think, um, you know what, at the end of last year, I was so exhausted, which I didn't even realise until after Christmas, that I basically spent the week after Christmas unable to get off the couch. And I read this great book called Girl Woman Other, which I think everyone else read two years ago when it came out but I was a bit behind the eight ball. Nothing to do with the aid sector. But it's a really interesting book that sort of explores the lives of a number of different women, primarily black women in the UK, and something that I realised when reading that was that book is very much about complexity, and about how, you know, we're sort of very quick to speak in these grandiose statements and tweets and platitudes but if you scratch the surface even a little bit, there's so much complexity that then requires you to sort of work out how you should operate within that complexity in a way that's practical. And it sort of made me realise, unexpectedly, that that's something that I think in the aid sector, at least at this kind of global discussion level, we've become pretty unable to do. You know, I think there's a lot of like, yelling out things that sound really good, a lot of pretty basic critique. And I would say that that comes from myself as well. But it really sort of opened my eyes to the fact that I think coming into this year, what I really want to see is a lot more practical, real discussion, even if it doesn't sound that exciting about how the sector could actually improve. I think, obviously, accountability, I'm sure we'll get to that in a minute, but I've got a lot to say about that. But I think one of the crises that stood out to me last year was Haiti, again, just in the sense that I think Haiti has become this real barometer for the system, in a way, you know. It's this country that has this fraught and ongoing relationship with aid, it's got various communities who are just so tired of foreign intervention. I was there after the quake in 2o1o, like a lot of us. I was there again after Hurricane Matthew. And now we're working on it, this time after this most recent quake. And it just really struck me that Haiti is so often held up in the accountability space as this turning point in accountability, where we were getting it wrong, and that was really blown up and everyone became aware of it, and then all these great structures were put in place. And working on it now, it's just been such a hard... you know, a cold hard lesson in the fact that none of that stuff remains and none of it really worked. You know, now in this response, it's like, accountability is there because it's in the sitrep anbd someone saying, you know, there's an evaluation of accountability to affected populations. But there's still no evidence that you can see of people influencing the aid effort. There's still this huge and warranted anger from the community, there's violence, but just purely in terms of reform, I was listening after the quake to Samantha Power talk about Haiti and the money that was pledged from the US and saying, Obviously, you know, this is a crisis and once we go beyond the emergency phase of food and supplies, we'll need to think about long term recovery and development. You know, of course, she was right. But I mean, how many times in that country has everyone had the chance to think about recovery and development and why are we still saying that as though it's an initiative? Like, when do we ever look back and say, Hey, how did that recovery and preparedness and development go last time or, you know, what happened to all these accountability structures? There's quite a lot of interesting stuff happening in Haiti at the local level but to me, it was just such a kind of slap in the face to everyone's efforts on accountability, and a real reminder that, so much of this stuff that we talk about just still sort of means nothing in a lot of these places where it really should. So I'm sure we're gonna go into a lot of the reasons why but I just... that's a crisis to me this year that stood out to me, just in the sort of lack of reform in the international system that was so obvious from the way that that response is being rolled out.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, and I guess what you're saying is, it's the contrast between this inability to change, and then the cyclical, never changing reality on the ground, that that's painful.
Unknown Speaker:Yeah, and I think it's the fact that still, you know, we... no matter what we talk about and say that we believe in, and I think this is what I was sort of getting at before, it's like the same things are just rolled out again, and again, and again, even though we know that work, even though affected people tell us that they don't work, you know, it's still like, here's the food aid, and then here's this, and you'll have to line up to get it and then we'll do some cash, but around the cash, there's not going to be any thought, or there's probably thought, but there's no real evidence of how people feel that that is helping them to be able to manage their own lives. And it's just the fact that we're still surprised time and time again that this is what's happening, when we use these massive machines of agencies that are sort of incapable of innovation to do the same thing again, and again and just expect some sort of magical different result because we've put a few buzzwords into a sitrep is something that I think we really need to burst right open into this year. Otherwise, we're just never going to see that turning point that I think we're all quite desperate to see.
Lars Peter Nissen:Paula, what's on your mind.
Paula Gil Baizan:So I love that Meg started to talk about a book because I was thinking the same. I ended this year, finishing the The Overstory by Richard powers, which is basically a really long book about people that like trees and live around trees and work with trees and, basically, not to give out like a spoiler, but they realised how important trees are as like beings that surround us. And I've been trying to kind of do a lot of learning around the long now and being able to put things into perspective, because this year has been personally really hard for me. And I think it's been really hard for other people around the world. But my my coping strategy has been to try to figure out how this one year fits in the long term history of my life. So I've read this book, and I've tried to understand how does the timeline of the very short term that I kind of experienced this year fits within other things that are happening around me and I think I've been trying to do the same for my work. And because I finished the year being quite angry in terms of how people were talking about innovation and what innovation means for the sector. And the fact that we don't really do innovation, what we do is product development, but we don't really do innovation in terms of trying to push ourselves to think about different business models in the way that we deliver stuff. So I thought, okay, let's let's put things into perspective and this is how I ended up the year. And I think... I don't necessarily think that everything is getting better, but I've tried to figure out what are the things that are in fact getting better. So for me, one of the things that stood out from last year is the fact that, for example, Colombia is granting resident right to Venezuelan refugees. This is part of the world that is close to me where I've worked in the past quite a lot. And this is a massive achievement. I wouldn't necessarily say that this is directly linked to any humanitarian intervention. But it's a massive step forward in a region that has struggled with this for a long time. Other good things, internet shutdowns, my friends, are going down. Maybe they're they're being like, extended for longer. But if you compare, like the numbers from 2O19, to 2O21, we had less internet shutdowns, even though it's still like a humongous problem. The Rohingyas have kind of sued Facebook for their inability to control data. So I think there are things that are that are not necessarily moving in the sector. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the things that surround the sector and people's ability to have a better life when they're affected by conflict is not getting better. The fact that we continue to suck, does not mean that the rest of the system that's around people's ability to cope continues to suck.
Lars Peter Nissen:No, I really agree with that Paula and I think the I sometimes think back at the last State of the World Humanitarian System report that ALNAP does and I remember the last slide, they did of the presentation, which basically was, "the world is changing..." No, sorry. "The humanitarian sector is changing, but the world around us is changing faster." So I think that says two things on one side, the gap between what we should be and what we are is growing and becoming bigger. But on the other hand, also, there is a tremendous amount of positive developments going on at the country level at that granular level that you were speaking about, Meg. But it's just not because of us. And I think that as a community, I think that what we have to come to terms with is, what the heck is our role? What is our contribution? How do we get on the train?
Paula Gil Baizan:But it's also a little bit unfair to say that nothing is changing because of us. Because I think sometimes we tend to think of the bigger picture at the macro level. Are we as humanitarians changing the world? Like, are we giving people what they need when they need it? The answer is no at the macro level. But at the micro level, I saw maybe 10, 15 projects, where I work that were truly inspirational and truly change the way people live in their day to day at the micro neighbourhood level. So I think we also need to try to understand where is our impact intended for? Is it is it like at the micro boutique level where we're where we should be winning? Or is that the ending poverty fighting hunger sort of level that we should be focusing on? Because I I don't necessarily think we're doing very well by pretending that we have to be winning at both.
Lars Peter Nissen:I think you're absolutely right, Paula. And I think the crime maybe is that that's not what we pretend to do, that's not the discourse. I think we are sort of a bandaid pretending to be a solution to the root causes of all the ills in the world. And I think maybe that's the problem. Maybe we just have to, as you said when we were warming up to this episode, embrace the suck. Just embrace the fact that this is probably maybe as good as we get. Do you think that's right?
Paula Gil Baizan:I would never say that what we have to deal with embrace the suck so fully. I think as a coping strategy, we have to embrace the suck, but as a as a sector that is big, like an industry, it's unacceptable that that's our strategy. Like, our strategy should be able to push us forward to think about new ways of delivering service, and new ways of understanding how we design that service, and mechanisms of accountability to hold those in check transparently when we are too afraid to do what we should be doing. As a sector, that's what we should be doing. I think, going back to this idea of the long now, I don't necessarily see a lot of leadership in the humanitarian sector now being a good ancestor. And I would like people in this like new year to ask themselves that question: Am I in a position of management, being a good ancestor with the decisions that I'm taking in terms of how do we invest in new things? How do we develop new approaches? How do I let go of this like business model that I pretend it works for me. That's what I would like.
Meg Sattler:That's such an important point. And I was having a conversation the other day with a friend about the fact that when you work on specifically trying to sort of innovate or reform or catalyse some sort of change in the sector, you start thinking about different accountability mechanisms and this friend said, Well, why don't you sort of use the media more, you know, the media could really sort of bring all of this down and expose everything and that's kind of what its role is in a number of other sectors. But I said, my worry with that is that there's such a delicate balance in the aid world, because on the one hand, you know, going back to this complexity point, you really need to reform it, it needs a massive reformation because it just is so archaic in the way that its biggest structures are formulated, but we don't want to bring the whole thing down because as Paula said, you know, we've all met people who rely on humanitarian aid and for them, it has been life changing at various points and will continue to be. And it's a bit of a delicate dance, I think sometimes, and again, you know, we sort of tend to get carried away and talk about it, like, everything sucks, and everything external is great, and why don't we draw from them more or whatever, whereas what I think we need to do is to sort of be more realistic about what might be working, what's not, who do we need to listen to, who do we need to bring in who's not in this space already who would sort of have more creative solutions? I was quite... Thinking about this year and what was exciting for me, which touches on something that you've both mentioned, is this sort of rise of the non-humanitarian humanitarian. You know, we're seeing a lot of people who are sort of activists in the humanitarian space, because I think increasingly, people are realising that they can't rely primarily on governments or Big Aid to do what needs to be done in the face of humanitarian crises. So you see these people who are really risking everything, you know, pulling people out of oceans and doing sea rescues for refugees and trying to formulate community sponsorship programmes, as we're seeing in my community here, and I think those groups and those people are so important because they're challenging status quos in a way that really sort of makes us all think about, you know, what does it mean to make a difference? What does it mean to be impartial? Is that even possible anymore, at the moment in the face of the rise of the far right, and the pandemic, meaning that, you know, everyone's got an excuse to close the border... So I think we're going to have to sort of be a bit more loose with how we define humanitarianism, if we're going to be able to maximise it going into 2O22.
Lars Peter Nissen:You both spoke about things that have given you hope this year and I was thinking really what gave me hope I... I did come across a couple of spectacular individuals who I think, are doing really amazing work, and I've had a couple of them on the show. But at the same time, if I contrast that to, for example, Afghanistan, the House of Cards that just crumbled faster than we could ever have have imagined and how painful that was to see and how I think bankrupt that left us after 20 years of intervention in that country. I must admit, I am probably pretty much at a low point this this new year. I got deeply frustrated when I saw that happed and I also had the same sort of cyclical experience as you mentioned, you opened with, Meg, with the Typhoon Rai in the Philippines, contrasting that to Typhoon Haiyan and just how similar it was in some of the problems that we, years after and after, so much time and effort spent on that, have not been able to address. And so I I am frustrated and I agree with you, though. I don't think that that we are looking at sort of a disruptive strategy as the way forward. I don't think we can we can throw away what is there and it does make a tremendous amount of sense, but we have such a massive problem in terms of the discourse we have... My YouTube feed over Christmas suddenly was fooled with a little WFP commercial, trying to persuade me to keep them 80 cents per child or something, I mean... so I mean... that whole ritual we perform around the story we tell the world about who we are just becomes increasingly difficult for me to swallow. I have to admit that.
Paula Gil Baizan:Yes, but I don't know, when you talk about Afghanistan, what I want the to say is, Have you seen the Sahel? As in, it's not like it's something that happened to us once and it's never gonna happen again, like, look at the Sahel where we have military, sort of, forces from the UN and other countries stationed here for years and and we have incredible, you know, instability and inability to organise elections and commit to plans, etc, etc. So it's, it's going to happen again. But the question that this kind of brings up for me is, is this really our business? Like, should we really be in the business of trying to figure out the politics behind crisis? Or should really be in the business of trying to understand what is it exactly that is at the root cause of people not being able to cope when those political crisis materialise. So there's this new organisation created by one of the brains behind give directly, or basically, they have figured out that what they're going to do is they're going to take young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and they're going to help them get into higher education. And the way they're going to do that is by helping them access the tests and be successful at the university level. But also to give them the money that you need to have parked in your account, if you are ever going to have a visa for a European country, which is the equivalent of 10,000 euros. And their long term goal here is that by educating more people, then these people will be able to go back to their countries of origin and be better, do better, but also to be able to bring different experiences to young people who are otherwise disenfranchised. I don't know if that goes back to like our traditional give me 80 cents to fight world hunger, but I think it goes back to what Meg was saying in terms of how do we understand humanitarian assistance, because I'd rather invest in that level than trying to figure out how to solve, like, the politics of conflict that are brewing in a place like Mali, for example.
Meg Sattler:If I can add to that, I think where we can get better, and I think on my wish list for 2O22, in terms of things to take off Twitter and put into the real world, one would be this whole discussion around the Nexus and what the Nexus actually means. And I think... I was thinking about it this morning on my dog walk... just about, you know, we're sort of we really quick to talk about root causes, you know, root causes are things like wars, and as you say, Is that our business? We're not going to fix that. You know, who do we think we are, if we think we should be spending our time as those who have been brought in to be the bandaid, to rather sort of think about those questions? But I think where we can get better is on this crossover between development and humanitarian programming, which in most places, at least the ones that I've engaged with recently, it's talked about and there are meetings and there's a desire to improve upon it, but there's just so far to go in practical terms to sort of do what Paula was talking about where... You know, if you look at Afghanistan, for example, there's all this discussion about aid spending there, and what aid is provided now and what needs to happen there and you see the appeals and it's on the news, even here, where nothing that's not Australian is on the news here. But I think, you know, they're still talking about this handing out the blankets and what food is required, but actually what is happening in Afghanistan now is not that people are needing food, necessarily. I mean, they are, but it's because they're losing their jobs, or because they're working as health workers and they're not being paid, and then they're getting evicted and there's like a whole process around them that means that they're completely unable to cope as soon as a shock comes their way. That's also what we saw in COVID. You know, everyone that we spoke to pretty much in the Central African Republic and Chad was saying the thing with COVID was that it just tipped them over the edge. And so whatever programming is happening there on the development side is obviously not enough. It's enough to sort of keep people going, but it's it never seems to be designed in such a way that it actually enables people to manage their lives in the face of any shock major or minor. And I think there's a lot there in terms of country strategies that if the right people got together and stopped siloing every single facet of aid work, I think there's a lot there that we probably could be doing a fair bit better on.
Paula Gil Baizan:But isn't that like, a lot to do with how we understand the problem to start with, Meg? So if you were asking those people who are losing their jobs, or not being able to get a proper salary, etc, that they already have the answer. It's us who are constantly going back and saying, Let me see, what can I offer here from my two books that I can give you. But this... the people themselves experiencing the problem, they already know what the solution is. So I think, without wanting to end in the same place where where we always end up is? Can we just like, listen to what they need and just give it to them? Like, how hard can this business model be? Seriously.
Meg Sattler:No, but I think it's hard because of, I mean, if you take that as your starting point, that both of these processes, or all of them, if you include, you know, peace programming, or recovery, or you know, whatever silos we've created, if they all started from the place that Paula just mentioned, we become the barrier and we do that by... I mean, a very clear example is a conversation that I had with a donor in a country recently (I'll try not to give too much away). but we were talking about this idea that, you know, there's so much work going on, so much money being poured into certain places for development, programming, and then there's this whole separate aid sector. They're trying to get better at working together. We were talking to them about accountability, specifically, and about what they could be doing. And we had this whole discussion about, well, you know, when... if you take people's preferences, priorities, opinions, what they know, to work, what they know, to not work as the starting point, you know, How do you sort of build on what they know and what they're doing already? If everything else was to flow from that and we're going to keep the structure that we have now, at the very minimum, these two systems that we have need to talk to each other about how we're talking to affected people. And basically, the response to that was on Oh, that's way too hard. Like we will work on the Nexus, but we don't know how to bring accountability to affected people into the Nexus discussion. And I think that there is like at the root of almost everything that is wrong with the way that we facilitate humanitarian aid.
Paula Gil Baizan:Yeah, I agree. I guess I stumbled upon this framework created by a designer, that I posted on Twitter, where he maps out the different levels of design. We're not talking about humanitarian here, we're talking about design in the outside normal world. And he goes from the micro level from like, what's the colour palette that you choose to the very macro level in terms of how do you figure out what's the system in which this thing that you're designing is being inserted in? And I'm hoping that that's the sort of conversation that we can start to have. So that we can understand that we're, we're designing services and products at different levels and not just because we have become experts at choosing the right education, shelter, [inaudible] whatever colour palette, it means that we're getting good at trying to understand how does that fit into the way that the system interacts with what we're proposing to people. But maybe what we need to do going forward is to start the NGO called, Just Give Them What They Need. Because I don't really see any other options in this very big system, that has incentives kind of geared towards pushing forward the supply, to be able to change. I don't necessarily see that people are interested in exploring new ways, actually. That's what innovation should be, right? Innovation should be the motor behind our new ideas for how we work. And I don't necessarily see a lot of people getting excited about that.
Lars Peter Nissen:What I keep on coming back to, when we talk about these things, and when I listened to what you just said, is that if you are any industry where you basically have between three and five providers of services and five customers buying the or services, it's not going to be very dynamic. And for me the key, the root problem, not of the conflicts we're dealing with, but of our inability to change as an industry, boils down to Big Aid--to the extreme concentration of power we have in the sector, both under on the side of the agencies, and on the side of the donors. It is that echo chamber that we need to break. We need to have a more diverse sector, both in terms of where the income comes from, but also in terms of who gets the money. And if before it spread out more equally and before we have more diversity, is not going to change. I saw I see so many parallels to the situation we find in the tech sector. I recently heard about an organisation where a small project had to channel some money through one of the big ones and they charge 30% just to be a mailbox for that money. That's exactly what Apple takes in the app store for any purchase made there. It's just, if you are this big, if you have this much power, you're gonna abuse that power, and you're not going to be pushed to change anything. So I don't think we need to disrupt the sector. But we do need to diversify, we need to surround it with different organisations like the one you described, Paula, and from that diversity, I think that that's our only chance of changing. It's not going to change unless you change the actors.
Paula Gil Baizan:I love that. And I'm hoping that 2O22 will be the year when donors fund aid entrepreneurs.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, exactly. We need much more of an entrepreneurial approach to these things. And Paula, you were talking about leadership, I think earlier in the conversation. And that's something that that's also been on my mind. I also read a book over Christmas by a guy called Thomas Basile, who was the CEO of something called Homeboy Industries in the US, a nonprofit. What was interesting was that he came from a background in a very large, as a CEO of a very large, private sector company. And he reflects a lot on the type of leadership that is required in the private sector and in a nonprofit. And I think we need to talk about that. What kind of leadership do we need? What kind of culture do we need to create internally in the organisation is for us to have an entrepreneurial spirit to have spaces where we reward the risk takers, and not the bean counters who are very good at writing reports to the donors?
Paula Gil Baizan:Another another book that I'm reading now, it's called the quiet before. And it's a book that maps out the origins of radical ideas. And I'm reading it because I'm personally pretty desperate, trying to understand how, professionally, do I position myself to make a difference? I've already been on the side of the aid entrepreneures and I really liked it, but it's not very sustainable. And I've already been on like, the very senior position, and that is just not tenable because organisations don't like critical thinking. It's hard, right? So now I'm here, in this level of innovation, trying to understand is this where we change something that I feel very passionate about and one of the things that I've been kind of learning from this book is that we tend to think of revolutions as very loud, right? I've seen like, people being frustrated with pans, like banging on the streets, but the ideas that actually fuel change, and revolutionary change, have traditionally been conceived in very quiet spaces. Like small corners, right? Where people imagine an alternative reality that is not necessarily very loud, it's actually very quiet, but then it seeps like an ink blot in water. And I'm wondering if this is where where we need to invest more in those spaces where people start reimagining a different way of being that then becomes so, you know, pervasive that it's difficult to kill.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, I think that's fascinating, Paula, and I agree with that. I think where... what I'm thinking from from the space I'm in is, How can we drive some of all of the resources from from the big organisations towards the, sort of, quiet places you're talking about, where where the thinking is happening and where the ideas are being generated, but where there's no resource, there's no market for this? Nobody seems to have an interest in actually being an angel investor for new kinds of organisation. So engineering these sorts of solutions. And I think that's what I find frustrating is that the bandwidth, the resources, are by and large sucked up by Big Aid, and they are not going to create the change we need.
Paula Gil Baizan:Yeah, but I'm wondering if we're just getting it all wrong. So instead of fighting Big Aid, maybe what we should be doing is realising that there's a lot of people that work at the micro level in this Big Aid industry that believes things need to be done in a different way. So how about empowering and resourcing those people so that they start to do small quiet movements in the way they do stuff. And eventually, that move will be so big that it will have moved Big Aid.
Lars Peter Nissen:I would love to think that would work. Because I do agree with you. I'm not actually shooting at all the incredibly committed and creative and fantastic people who work in these organisations. What I'm saying is that what I have seen is again and again, and I think you have had this experience as well, the two of you, is that maybe somebody launches something fantastic, and you have hope, and maybe this will change things and so on, but after a year or two gravity sets in, because the logic is just not that. The logic is directed towards where the money comes from. It's essentially maximising turnover and minimising risk. And that will eventually kill a lot of those good initiatives that do appear in the cracks of the big system. I mean, for me, the ECB project was a good example of that. That seemed to be able to create some interesting dynamics in some of the biggest NGOs, and then on some random Tuesday, they decided to shut it down. And it disappeared again.
Meg Sattler:I think innovation needs space and it needs creativity and it needs diversity. And none of those things can happen in a sector that, as you say, Lars Peter, cannot let go of this concentration of power in global capitals and big organisations. I think we see big agencies trying to manage innovation, and that's sort of important, and I know that, you know, Paula is obviously working on that every day, and it does work to an extent, but I think... I don't know, I think we have a real opportunity when it comes to innovation to actually let go a little bit and to let other people in. And I don't mean, you know, letting in shiny Harvard graduates who have an idea about a product, I mean, really saying, you know, we can't seem to get localization right, even by the metric of what percentage of money should go to local agencies, but if we just let go and said, well, let's just try that, because innovation is obviously predicated on a degree of experimentation. Just try it. You know, let go of the power and the control and just push that financing somewhere else for a while, and just see what we learn. Because otherwise, I think we're always going to be trying to manage this process of innovation that almost by definition can't be managed by the structures that we have in place already.
Paula Gil Baizan:And if we go back to this very annoying discourse of like cash is their greatest innovation, cash is now considered this great innovation, because it started quietly. It's something that a small group of people starting to do differently, quietly. And it's only until 2O16 That that cash became loud. So for me, that's the thing that we have to learn about cash. How does change happen in the sector? It happens quietly, at the micro level at the programmatic level. I don't necessarily remember any big changes that happened because leadership very loudly decided that things were going to be different from this day forward, and they resource it properly.
Lars Peter Nissen:And Paula, you we spoke about cash, which obviously has been an innovation, and has been really transformative in so many ways. From from your point of view, what else has been the big innovations of the past 10 years, if you want?
Paula Gil Baizan:Gender, for example. It's something that is not linked to product. It's a beautiful paradigm innovation that started literally as a quiet revolution and now no one even talks about it, because it's like duh. Obviously we have a gender expert. Obviously we have a gender focus. But it was not a thing before. I like that quite a lot. I think gender is a great example of a successful pathway.
Lars Peter Nissen:And if I can be positive maybe for the first time in this conversation, I actually think I'm quite hopeful with respect to sort of the whole anticipatory early warning, early action, finding new ways of getting money to the sector early. I think that there is some real energy behind that and there's beginning to be some some concrete results coming out. So one of my hopes in terms of innovation is actually in that space.
Meg Sattler:I think there's a real opportunity. I mean, I talk a lot about how, particularly when it comes to accountability, the big UN players in the aid space really get a free pass. You know they, as we've said, they sort of dominate financing, they're not necessarily structured for accountability, the power structures within them are a bit archaic... But if you flip that on its head a little bit, I think there is appetite for some sort of reckoning within that system. Obviously, the UN, as a bureaucracy can be a pretty toxic place and it's not a place where structures, by and large, allow for innovation or creativity, but something that I am excited about increasingly, the more that I just think about the time that we exist in, and a lot of global things that are coming together at once that enable people to feel that they can speak out more, coupled with pressure that comes from popular movements from the media and from social media, I think I'm actually increasingly excited about the fact that the change may come from within when it comes to the UN. I think we, and by we I mean I, have said for a long time, doners need to be putting more pressure on, you know, et cetera, et cetera... But actually, I'm starting to think that might come from the interns, who, just looking at what smart young people are thinking and saying and demanding these days, they're going to want to see these big agencies being the diverse, world changing structures that they wanted to join, they're going to speak out, they're going to be probably annoying, as Paula said, but I think they're going to get more and more popular support as their peers then get into media roles and politics and they get into leadership roles. And I think then with the right pressure from donors and a couple of external sources, we might see some change. And that in itself, would be a huge breeding ground for innovation. I'm being very positive and maybe it's not warranted, but I just feel like that change is probably going to come at some point just because of the way that the world is going.
Paula Gil Baizan:Yeah, I'm hoping that the whole discourse around innovation will change in 2O22. Because I think COVID gave us the space to think about innovation in terms of digital products, and how great it is to link up innovation with digital because you can actually see the results. And as a donor, you can fund it, you can bring the private sector. But I'm hoping that we will now realise that if we don't have a more systemic perception of what we're designing, then we're basically not doing our job. And innovation at the systemic level does not necessarily have to do with product as much as it has to do with paradigm. So the whole sort of narrative around what we celebrate, and how we celebrate it in innovation in terms of what we fund and what we invest in, will hopefully change and that's how we will see probably more entrepreneurs, but also more intrapreneurs, being supported in this big organisation.
Lars Peter Nissen:Paula, could you just let us know what is an intrapreneur?
Paula Gil Baizan:So an intrapreneur is person that works within an organisation and has an idea and wants to pursue change, which is basically the equivalent of talking about all these very annoying, disruptive, critical people that work in big organisations and have almost like a personal project for change.
Lars Peter Nissen:I really admire your faith in the intrapreneur because I happen to think that the beige minds are there for a reason it's not... they didn't start out as being beige or... but the reason they actually rose to the level they're at is exactly that they overtime became beige. And that's why we have this culture and these organisations. But I will... I really admire and enjoy your optimism so I'll just shut up with my UN bashing and maybe turn the attention to to something else, namely, the organisations that we work for make. We are small, independent actors (Ground Truth Solutions and ACAPS) and maybe more on the entrepreneurial side of things. How successful have we been in being transformative and are we the future?
Meg Sattler:It's a good question. And I think I would say it would be very arrogant to assume that we had been particularly transformational, but I think what we've done is we've been annoying at the right times, and we've presented alternatives at the right times, which have made I think broader reform seem possible. I think we're still coming up against this whole system that we've been talking about, you know, for the past hour or so. That means that there's a limit to what small organisations can achieve. There's also a limit to what we should achieve, in a way, because I think particularly when it comes to the stuff that we work on, you know, what we're trying to do, and I think what you're trying to do at ACAPS is to show that there's a different way of doing things, to make sure that the right information is getting to the right people so that they can make better decisions, but then you hope that they're going to either make those decisions, or do their part of that sort of work to mean that they're getting their information from the right places, they're listening to the right people, they're changing things that need to be changed. I think if I was reflecting on Ground Truth, I think we've had a bit of success in terms of putting certain issues on the agenda at the right levels, in terms of providing a bit of a wake up call for when things aren't working. Have we reformed the whole sector? Absolutely not. I think now, what needs to happen is that we continue to do our very small part. But we need to increasingly, I think, demand that Big Aid does its part on the other sides so that that work becomes more meaningful. So I think that, you know, small, scrappy organisations like ours are always going to have their role, I think you need a degree of independence. I mean, we've been thinking recently about this. You know, can we claim to be independent, the more that we work with, you know, for example, the humanitarian programm cycle, humanitarian country teams, the system, as it were, I think you do your best, and then you come up against roadblocks at a certain point, and then there's really not much more that you can do after that. So I think we need to sort of put much more energy into the advocacy part of what we're doing. And not get confused with reform ourselves. Because I sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable when people say, Oh, you know, you're doing accountability, or you're this or you're that. And you know, we're not, we're just sort of trying to catalyse something. But if that thing isn't willing to change, then there's really a limit to how much those things can be successful. So I guess in short, I think they are required because they are... organisations like ours, a small agile, they're not bound by all of the same constraints that make these big organisations so clunky, but unless the big organisations are prepared to also change, then there's always going to be a limit to what organisations like ours can achieve.
Paula Gil Baizan:But if we go back to this discussion about innovation, I think there's also almost like the gift to organisations like yours to be the great innovators. Because if you look at an organisation like yours, Meg, it has been really successful because you're offering a product that people perhaps didn't even know they need it, right, and they want it. I've seen it from like many different places how successful your product is. But I'm also wondering, like, how amazing it would be if organisations like yours, Megan, and yours, Lars would would be the ones who are constantly innovating, right, and giving us giving us products that we we just didn't realise we actually needed to improve our work. And by using those products, you're changing the way we work.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, I agree with actually what both of you said I think, I don't think we have been transformational either. I think I think we've done okay. I think we have managed to bring some new thinking to the sector and to a certain extent have that be adopted as the way we do business now. I think it's really important when you are a small agile organisation like ours to never forget that you are complement. You are complementary strategy. You're not the main deal here. You are an irritant to the system or catalyst or whatever you want to call it, and that some things can be moved forward, but at the end of the day, you are one trick pony for our, in our case, we sit in Geneva and write some reports or sit somewhere and write some reports, and it does have an influence, but you're not the main deal. And so I think having that humility is really important. And then as you say, Paula, to also continue to blow yourself up. And and not fall too much in love with your own products, but but continue to challenge and push the limit and understand that it is true, the example that we can provide are the proof of concepts and the irritant part, the catalysts that we can have an impact. But again, for me, the maybe the most important thing is, you have to know what you're not. You have to know that you're not everything, and that you don't replace the mainstream humanitarian organisations.
Meg Sattler:I think you both raised a really important point now about what organisations like ours need to be very aware of, and this is something that we're definitely thinking about this year, is that you can't, if you have a product, and you know, I think for Ground Truth, a lot of people see that product, for example, as being perception surveys, that that's not what you just continue to roll out. As soon as something has become sort of accepted or is a thing that more and more people want to use, I think that's the point at which a small organisation like ours, which at its heart should be an innovator, because we have this space to be able to be that, we can't just sort of scale up a certain product because then in a way we become part of the problem. I think what we need to do is to keep pushing that envelope and saying okay, well, if we... if our objective is about, you know, improving the way that the humanitarian sector listens to crisis affected people, what are some ways that we could do that? And what are some ways that we could work harder to make various people listen to those voices? And what are things we could do to make sure that there's enough external carrots and sticks that there is some sort of incentive for any of that to happen in the first place. And I think that's where we're going into 2O22, which is very exciting, because I think sometimes people assume that we're just kind of rolling out surveys, but actually what we're doing is much more than that. And we really want to make sure that we're continuing to push that envelope, and you know, sometimes probably making mistakes or doing things that don't necessarily work that because we have that ability to be, you know, agile or whatever the word is, and, and try and push things further and be an irritant, I really liked that word, and be a bit bolder, I think also in what we're saying, based on what we're learning from people, because again, we can be that more than you can be if you're working in one of these big bureaucracies. And that's where I think we need to keep challenging ourselves constantly, and making sure that we're not just sort of perpetuating any status quo.
So we've spoken a lot about 2O21. But what about 2O22? What would you like to see happen in the coming year?
Paula Gil Baizan:I think I'd like to see 2O22 being the year where all of the disruptors come out of the closet, as in like the year where we actually not only give them a microphone and the spotlight, but also like the almost like the space for people who think differently, to be able to come forward and get some support for those ideas. Because I think there's a lot there's a lot of hunger at the at the field level to do things differently on a daily basis. It's just that it's hard between having to fill in the log frame, like Meg was saying, but also like trying to keep everyone happy to be able to do things differently, but I see bouts of programmatic brilliance every year--people who are getting close to communities every single day. So I would like 2O22 to be the year where the character of the humanitarian disrupter is seen with the same glamour as the character of any senior leader. Because I think if we are able to like shift who gets to set the agenda, in terms of what is new in the sector, we will slowly but surely move into a different place. As long as I think disruptors are seen as a pain in the butt to like follow Meg's Austrialian tone, It's going to be really hard for us to reimagine and reinvent ourselves. It's going to be really hard to actually make some of those big changes that need to happen at the micro level for them to actually have any effects on the macro level. So I'd like to I'd like 2O22 not to be the year of innovation, I'd like 2O22 to be the year where we rethink why we invest in innovation and who are the actual innovators?
Meg Sattler:Well, I think something for me, obviously, is this whole question around accountability to affected populations which now you know, this year and last year, is really having its moment in the sun. You have Martin Griffiths now coming out and saying this is going to be such a priority for him, there's a lot of people looking for answers, but I think when it comes to accountability this year, I think it's really important for actually all of us to just pause, and maybe get our heads out of the sand or out of our own assets, if I'm going to be more Australian about it. I think where we've gone wrong with accountability to affected people, I think we really took a wrong turn somewhere and we felt the need to define it, as as international humanitarian practitioners, for our sector. And we set about saying, this is what accountability to affected people means for us. And it became this technical skill that then leaders were sort of looking to these various accountability, quote unquote, experts to provide them with guidance on how to engage communities. And I think that all went wrong. I think if we thought about accountability in a normal way, you know, and stopped delegating it, if we thought, you know, what are various other structures in the world like business or healthcare or democratic government or banking or you know, any sort of human system that organises a certain type of work, they have various structures in place to make them more accountable. And they don't always work, but the end goal of those efforts, by and large, is to hold people in positions of power accountable for their actions, particularly when they have a lot of stakeholders in the general public. So it's about leaders, decision makers, people who have been entrusted with a lot of power to do things that have implications for other everyday people, and the way that they do that, and the way that those structures are held to account, is not singular. You know, there are various elements, there's internal checks and balances, transparency, reporting and communication, feedback from customers or constituents, communication lines with those constituents, there's audits, there's the role of the media, there's investigative journalism... And so I think what I would love to see this year, is the focus shifting from this acronym of AAP or Accountability to Affected Populations as this cute little add on, by way of activities, to actually understanding that accountability is not separate, whether it's accountability to affected people, accountability to donors, you know, we always say, and I think I used to say this, we're accountable to donors, but we're not accountable to affect your people. But actually, we're not accountable to anyone. You know, maybe we're filling out the right forms, and we're populating the right log frames, and we're counting the right number of blankets and buckets and balancing the books. But how can we possibly be accountable to donors, and how can donors possibly be accountable to their taxpayers if aid is not working for those it's supposed to be helping, and it's not listening to them? But I think what I really want to see this year, and I think there's some moves in that direction, you know, in Geneva, that I'm sort of excited about, is that the problem actually now needs a power shift. And it won't be addressed by all these disparate activities. I think this needs to be the year where, in parallel, voices of crisis affected people are louder than ever, but that the behaviour of powerful decision makers is different--that they're behaving differently, that they're listening, they're responding, they're held accountable for listening and responding and co-designing and being transparent. They're not just held to account for having mechanisms or doing things under this banner of this acronym of AAP. And I think this year, if we see evidence that there is actually people in leadership positions feeling that accountability is their personal problem, I think we're gonna see the shift that we have been waiting for for a long time. And I'm hopeful that that may happen to some degree, but I think there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen for it to work, but I just think that's where this sort of advocacy pressure needs to be going into this year. So I just wanted to throw that in there because obviously I had to have my accountability two cents.
Paula Gil Baizan:I'm hoping that 2O22 is also the year where we pour in the right measure our ability to change the system as a humanitarian sector and we start to value and appreciate all of the things that are humanitarian that can have, and should have, the labour that are happening around us and despite us, so that we can almost use them as a trampoline, instead of constantly trying to defend who gets to own the values and who gets to own the label of humanitarian. Because there's, there's so many good and cool things that are happening around people that it's a wasted opportunity when we're not celebrating, applauding them, riding those waves and kind of enabling more impact. And it made me think of that, because I'm.. I've got, like, in my hands, this brand new book. But it's called Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, which is a collection of stories by Hilma Wolitzer, which is this amazing feminist, and they're just like, stories about people's lives, and the stories of women's lives, and I think I'm going to try and understand in 2O22, how to focus on the micro to see whether that investment at that micro level can actually produce bigger change, not only in terms of me, and how I approach my own life, but also in terms of how I support innovators that I work with in my organisation and outside.
Lars Peter Nissen:I think for me, what I would love to see this year is... I think, a focus on leadership and culture inside the organisations, I think that speaks to some of the things the two of you have mentioned, I think we need to be bolder, as we said. I think we need to push it and be less afraid of being unpopular, of not getting the promotion or whatever. I think everybody in this sector has a space and has some buttons they can push. I think we should push them and be bolder and less worried about what happens. And then more at the institutional level, I would hope that that we begin to understand better what we are not good at. Because if we understand our weaknesses and our limitations, then we will naturally seek out partners who can complement our weakness. And I think it is, it is true that collaboration between fundamentally different actors that we can create some value and that we can create some some of that energy we need to drive us forward. So for me, leadership, boldness, collaboration, and a bit of institutional humility, would be really fantastic. And then I am really excited about anticipatory analysis, I think I think we will see some development there and maybe a shift in the financial model, or beginning shift in the financial model, which could be quite transformative. And then I want to go out and find some new friends in the sense that I want to find some people I don't know who are doing really exciting stuff. Because Paula, you are absolutely right, they're out there. And they're already working on the solutions, and I want to connect with them. So that that's what I hope for 22.
Meg Sattler:I think 2O21 was the time for our, our self indulgent tweets and our platitudes. And I think let's make 2O22 The year of really trying to turn them into some sort of imperfect, practical solution or way of doing things differently. And if we can't do that, rather than just endlessly talking about it, let's try and find someone who can. And I think that's where we really have the opportunity now to sort of look to different voices and different actors and really try and make this the year that so many new brains and voices come into this sector and just try and make it what it needs to be in the face of this absolutely overwhelming need.
Lars Peter Nissen:Thank you, both of you, for for coming on the show. And having this conversation has been very therapeutic for me at least. I feel ready to face 2O22 in some shape or form. One theme that I think we have had throughout this conversation, and you started off with it, Meg, in a sense, Paula, you just brought it up again, is this link between the global and the local micro level, the concepts and then the actual context of how do we engineer more concrete solutions. So what I'd like to do is to invite you to come back to the show, to Trumanitarian, over the course of the year with some concrete examples of what we actually managed to do in terms of innovating and pushing this forward so that won't just be this sort of top level stocktaking that we've done today, but actually some concrete examples of progress that we can see and that we are excited about. And so if you're game, I'd love to have you come in a couple of times over the course of the year to to discuss the progress that we're making.
Paula Gil Baizan:I'm absolutely game for that because I think having a space to put forward, and new areas of investment, or new people you should be talking to, is part of this like humanitarian spring that we've been talking about. So absolutely game and thank you for the invitation, Lars Peter.
Meg Sattler:Yeah, thanks so much again for having us, as usual. I think we really enjoy these conversations. And happy New Year.
Lars Peter Nissen:Happy New Year.
Paula Gil Baizan:Happy New Year.