49. Honest Competition

Lars Peter Nissen: 00:59

Raj Kumar is an influential figure in the aid industry. I met him earlier this year at Devex world. And I was immediately attracted to his clear thinking and can do attitude. Raj is the co founder of Devex, and he has a deep understanding of what moves and shakes the aid world and where we are headed. He has written about this in his book The business of changing the world, where he describes the disruption that aid has undergone in the past years. I invited him on Trumanitarian to ask him whether he can see a similar disruption taking place in the humanitarian sector.

Raj makes the point that governments together with a few core institutions continue to dominate the aid industry, and that this holds back change. He calls for honest competition between different ideas, approaches and business models, and sees this as a way to move towards retail aid. So away from the wholesale approach we have today, where we treat everybody in the same way towards a much more tailored, individually adapted type of support that meets the needs and wants of the individuals we serve. He also asks the question of whether we as individuals working in humanitarian agencies are bold enough in terms of taking risk of whether we are playing it too safe. "Take risks get fired, why not? Life is short." as he says in the interview, I leave it to you to decide whether to follow the advice or whether school fees, mortgages and other realities in the hamster wheel will mean that you opt for a somewhat more subtle approach to being a change agent, out of personal experiences, just want to say that no matter what you do, if you have a partner, then please do not forget to inform him or her before you make radical choices. Enjoy the conversation.

Raj Kumar, welcome to humanitarian.

Raj Kumar: 03:00

Oh, thanks, Lars. Peter, it's great to be here.

Lars Peter Nissen: 03:03

You are the president, the editor in chief and the co founder of Devex. And maybe let's begin with that what what is Devex? And why did you found it? Why did you start it?

Raj Kumar: 03:13

Yeah, we're a niche organisation. So we cover, our reporters, journalists are covering global development and humanitarian aid and sustainability and global health and kind of this broad world that we generally refer to as global development. And I guess, since we're on a podcast, I can give you the long story that we get started. I, you can tell from my name, I have Indian roots, I grew up part of my life in India. My dad was from Kerala from South India, and I used to go there a lot when I was when I was young. And, you know, I got, I got to see up close and personal what some of the issues are, that we all talk about in global development. And, and I was very fortunate that I had an aunt and an uncle, who were development scholars, they were political scientists, they studied the dairy cooperative movement in India. They ended up studying, you know, the nursing sector and other development issues around Southeast Asia. But they used to take me when I was just a little kid to village visits, they would talk to me about these issues. So you know, even when I was really young, my sister and I had an idea that there was this thing called development, that there were that there was this World Bank, and there were these nonprofits and that you know, that we had some sense that there was this whole world of development and humanitarian work happening. And so we both I guess, got bitten by the bug to go do something and with our lives in the sector, and I ended up not doing really anything in the sector with my life. I went to college I studied a little bit but I never really worked in development. And I ended up working in politics, running campaigns and things like that. And somewhere along the way, I ended up starting a news organisation a media company called Smart Portfolio that I was focused on the stock market. And this is with a few friends. And we ended up selling that this is during the .com boom, to another news organisation media company in that financial space, I knew a little bit about the news media a little bit the media business, by no means an expert, and I decided, I really want to go to graduate school to kind of change things around and get my life on this development track and do something in this field. And I attended the government school at Harvard's Kennedy School. And when I was there, I just started asking a million questions to everybody I could, including one of my close friends who was working at one of the big USAID contractors, just about how things work in this space. And it became pretty clear to me quickly that, that it was sort of surprising there was no online community or platform or basic source of news and information.

You know, everybody would tell me like, I'd say, How do I get a job when I graduate? And they would say, go to Washington, DC, and go to cocktail parties. And that's how it works. And I thought, really, this is the isn't this a mission driven sector, like it's really about cocktail parties in Washington, DC, but apparently was and so myself and my friends, and we were just ignorant enough, which you need a little bit when you're starting something new, to think, Oh, this is an easy problem to solve, you know, we can we'll build the website, we'll put all the projects, all the jobs, all the funding all the news, but just put it all on the website, and this will democratise our industry, everyone will come flocking to it. And, you know, it'll be it'll be really powerful and beneficial to the world, and a great social enterprise at the same time. So that's what we thought and turned out. It was an idea as a little bit before, it's time, I guess, you know, we thought this whole revolution was coming in the aid sector, and that, you know, there would be competition and drive for results. And, you know, the Internet was going to disrupt everything has had so many other spaces. And the truth is, it really didn't. And so seven or eight years in, we were still running this out of my apartment, we were, you know, we were very small office, we were just we were very small scale. And then it took a while before I think kind of the market dynamics caught up and some of what we were doing, pushing the market to say that there needs to be more open competition. And, you know, knowing what's going on knowing what's working, what's not actually matters, results matter. And we need to have an open competition for jobs and for funding. And just finally, some of that started to click. And, you know, now, Devex is a news organisation. We're an independent organisation, we have journalists around the world about 150 staff around the world. I mean, you know, us Lars Peter from coming to Devex World recently, this summer. So you got a taste for what we do, but we do...

Our reporters are covering the news and global development, humanitarian and global health sustainability every day, publishes newsletters, we have an audience of about a million development professionals, aid workers, we host dozens and dozens of events all over the world, where our journalists, you know, try to address these issues live on stage or virtually. And we're really trying to drive the development conversation and the humanitarian and global health conversation around you know, our slogan, which is basically do good do it. Well, it's like, you know, it's not enough to do good. How do you drive our industry towards doing it? Well, so that's the long story of what Devex is and how I got into it.

Lars Peter Nissen: 08:32

In your book, you wrote a book in 2019, called the business of changing the world, you sort of describe how how the aid sector has been disrupted, actually, over the past years. Now, for you what, what are the main elements in that disruption? And what drives it? Why do you think it happened?

Raj Kumar: 08:48

I think a few things. You know, I talked about in the book, how I was wrong about the aid industry being disrupted back in the year 2000. And I went back and kind of read about, well, what was that Internet revolution all about? And there was a famous paper written by Michael Porter, and probably a lot of people in the audience now because he's done a lot in this space. And he and a colleague analysed it and said, basically three big things happen that caused this internet revolution, there was, of course, new technology. So it really disruptive technologies, there was a change in what customers demanded. And there were new regulations. And I think those three elements took like two more decades or so for the development sector, but they ultimately have come. So the new tech is pretty clear. It's things like cash transfers, right? Like you can now you can do digital ID, you can send money around the world at very low cost, you can directly communicate like you and I are video high quality, you know, across the world. And so, you know, technology has really changed from the old days of like somebody putting on their Safari suit, and travelling to some, you know, in some very colonial mindset to some far flung part of the world like it's really different development humanitarian work now, it's mostly run by people who live in their own countries. And, you know, it's not this expat driven model as much as it was sort of, there's a lot of that still, but so technology's done a lot of that. I think what customers want has really shifted because of all the private money.

Lars Peter Nissen: 10:16

So who are the customers?

Raj Kumar: 10:19

Well, the donors in this case, so originally, it was all government, it was like five governments, you know, we would, there were a lot more acronyms than that, you know, UNICEF and these UN agencies and big NGOs. But if you actually looked at where the money came from, it was mostly a few rich governments. And those governments follow their government procurement procedures, which are very risk averse. And what shifted after the year 2000. Was there a lot of new customers so big foundations, Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, you know, they some of these studies got so big they overtook the original the Rockefellers and the Fords are tiny in comparison to some of what's coming now. You know, Gates is now saying there'll be at 9 billion in annual funding in a few years. So I mean, they're, they're bigger than most governments. So you just did, there's enormous amount of private philanthropic wealth, then there's just like crowdfunding. So average people donate 10 bucks, 50 bucks, 100 bucks. And you know, that's grown into a massive multibillion dollar sector. Then you have corporates, both their corporate philanthropy and lots of companies doing few 100 million a year and giving like IKEA Foundation or Lego foundation. But then also corporates like working in development, like Starbucks, working with fat with farmers to make sure their coffee is sustainably grown, and no kids are working on the fields. So the space is just radically transformed all this new money. And that money came in with a different orientation than the government money. The government money was all about risk aversion, and foreign policy goals, right, taking credit. This private sector money often it had like an actual result, it was after like Starbucks, saying, I need the coffee and you really good even though it's coming from one of the poorest countries in the world, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Guatemala, you know, wherever we get our coffee from these days. So that orientation around results started to shift. So customers demand is something different from our sector. And at the same time, there's always new technology to actually deliver something different. And then finally, I think, regulation, that's the third thing, it ultimately all influenced even like USA AID and DFID and the World Bank and all these groups started changing their own regulations around development and saying, oh, maybe more of the money can be spent locally, maybe we can untie some of the aid. Maybe it doesn't all have to be project oriented, maybe we have tiered funding, maybe we can actually make investments in, in social enterprises. Right. So I think there just been those same factors you see in private industry happened in development. And I think they've transformed our space and are transforming our space. Now, naturally, this sector is much more driven by government. And as a result, it's a lot slower to move. And it's less of a true market. You know, the people who are ultimately trying to serve like you ask that really good question, who's the customer, the people we're ultimately trying to serve have very little voice in this, you know, and we still talk about them as beneficiaries, like, you know, manna from heaven is coming down to them, we still have an orientation where they're not the customer. And as a result, I think this disruption is slower. But it's coming increasingly, it's coming.

Lars Peter Nissen: 13:25

Now I work predominantly in the humanitarian space. And I can't say that I see quite the same positive development in that small sector. I actually checked the index in your book for humanitarian aid, how much do you actually write about that you have two pages in old book, where you talk about basically cash distributions. And clearly cash is probably the most disruptive technology we've seen in the humanitarian space, but the rest of us for the rest, it seems a little bit stuck. And we seem to still be doing business the way we're doing been doing for a couple of decades. There's a massive criticism inside the sector around decolonizing. Humanitarian Aid, you know, localization, we talk about it. We don't quite see the action you guys have seen in the development space. So why do you think that is? Do you think I'm right, and why do you think that is?

Raj Kumar: 14:20

I think you're right. I think the cash component, though, is is maybe more fundamentally transformative than maybe you're seeing it that might be one point where we disagree a little bit, but I think you're generally right. And I think the reason is, I think the humanitarian sector is even more than the development sector dominated by government. And that includes UN agencies that have, you know, 194 bosses, and, you know, there's just less room for risk taking. There's more entrenched bureaucratic structures. And, you know, the humanitarian sector is about 10% of total global development. But within that the dominant force is so much these UN agencies and NGOs as well. But government funding is a really good piece of it. And that's partly because the people who are coming with private money, they typically don't want to fund humanitarian response. You know, the corporates want to work in middle- income countries or stable low income countries, the foundation's want to work on things like malaria, and you know, things that they can kind of point to results around. And humanitarian is a really frustrating spaces, often you're just trying to get back to zero, you know, you're not necessarily trying to develop, you're just trying to save people's lives in that moment. And so there's just a lot less philanthropic funding in that space. And I think less innovation as a result, less pressure to drive results. But I just think the cash transfers, space is actually big. Like, I think the fact that you can digitalize the people you can send the money directly is is creating a competitive force inside this space. And I think as humanitarian crises get more, more prolonged, get deeper, get more widespread. And as government funding is harder to come by, there's going to be just more and more pressure from donor governments to say, Wait a second, what are we buying with this humanitarian funding, and it will take some time to be fully disrupted. But I do think we're going to start to see more and more change in the humanitarian part of development too.

Lars Peter Nissen: 16:37

So I do agree with you actually, on cash being fundamentally transformative for the sector, I just don't think it's enough. And I also think that there is a massive risk because cash lends itself very well to centralising power to economies of scale, if you want. And I think what we can see is that it's obviously the very big players who become the big channels for money. And as we often work in spaces where the government is not necessarily in favour of what we do, I just worry about the depletion of the humanitarian ecosystem, if you want that so much power is concentrated in a few hands, that we simply won't be able to pick up all the pieces, if you understand what I mean.

Raj Kumar: 17:21

I think that cash transfers might go through a further evolution where they become more decentralised. Right, and there's a, there's a technological shift part of its blockchain, but where you can start to both have transparency around these monetary flows, you can have more peer to peer funding. And you see some of that, like in a crisis like Ukraine, where average people can stand up and say, you know, I'll take a family into my home or I'll help fund a particular school or programme. You know, the, the technology is now moving to the point where it doesn't have to be the centralised Of course, it will be when it's government funded. And governments will still prefer to give money to one agency and that agency will handle the distribution. But I think the humanitarian space could start to really transform and grow. The more these decentralising, you know, decentralised finance technologies become a part of what we consider cash transfers.

Lars Peter Nissen: 18:13

I was wondering, you know, you describe the role of all these nice billionaires that you have in the development space will come in and solve one problem after another. What would it take for us to get one of those interested in humanitarian action and actually made a massive investment sort of structurally in in the humans and sector and try to get us up to speed?

Raj Kumar: 18:31

Well, I'm not sure everybody would feel as nice about these billionaires, there's certainly a lot of debate about their role. And, you know, sometimes it's disruptive, not in a good way. But you know, by and large, there's been a lot of good things that private laundry have done, no doubt. So, yeah, I think in the humanitarian space, the reason why the billionaires are less excited is because they see less potential to make that investment and see that direct impact. And it's the same reason they're not as active and things like global education, you know, it's just they look at it, they say it's highly regulated, highly political, you know, my money can't transform the whole space. Whereas they're much more attracted to spaces like global health, because there, you can invest in a new technology, like a vaccine or a new medicine, and then you can even work directly to get it delivered. And they just feel like in the humanitarian sector, it's more stuck. It's more bureaucratic. So I think what it will take is some ability for social entrepreneurs in the space for, you know, some of the humanitarian nonprofits that are that are leading on transformation, to show that we've got a big idea. And it's an idea driven by technology, it's one that you can actually measure results. And we can show direct attribution, you know, more you put one more Euro one more dollar in and we can show this result. And I think that's sort of the missing piece and foundations are starting to do more in this space. You know, there are IKEA Foundation is one. I mean, they're their foundations that are really interested in transforming the sector. They're just looking for more opportunity. I think I think if the opportunities show up more entrepreneurs create these great opportunities to have more effect. There will be more funding coming.

Lars Peter Nissen: 20:17

Yeah. Because I think especially in these days, where you have the combination of just getting out of the pen pandemic, we have Ukraine, the war in Ukraine and the global ripple effects. And you have climate change. Just take Pakistan, the floods there and look at how little attention actually that terrible, terrible crisis gets. I think we do need to collaborate more across the humanitarian development divide, if you want, we call it the Nexus, working across the Nexus. I actually don't even know what you call it in the developing community. But when I was at the VIX, world, one thing that struck me was they are talking about our problems, but with a different language, or in a different setting. And I don't often hear this in the conferences I go to. Does that resonate with you?

Raj Kumar: 21:02

Yeah, well, it does. It does. I'd say a couple of things. One we explicitly try at Devex, we tried at Devex world to not say we're the development community and over there as the humanitarian community, we explicitly say, No, this is all one thing. And I really believe it is I think the the fact that we're still thinking of it as two separate communities is mostly driven, by the way governments fund their budgets. It's not driven by reality on the ground, it's not driven by how people experience their lives, like they people don't have like a humanitarian emergency today and a development need tomorrow. It's all the same thing, basically. And I think the one way out of it might actually be and it's kind of a mental model problem, as well as a government funding problem. But it might be putting climate first. You know, I think there's a chance because we've been looking for so long about what's the right language, you know, how do we talk about what we do? Even the word development isn't great. You know, it's not that descriptive of what we're, I think, the ethos of what we're all trying to do. And it's possible that if we talk about climate first, that can subsume everything, you know, because the nice thing about climate is, it's it's an emergency for everyone. It's not just an emergency, if you're in a poor country, it's embers, the rich country, everybody has to face this, it's truly global. And it's both a humanitarian and development challenge. So, you know, maybe there's a new lens, we can put on this work. And maybe that can help drive a different kind of funding, so that you're funding, you know, nature based infrastructure in Karachi, because you know, there's going to be flooding, not just now, not next week, there's going to be flooding for a long, we're gonna be living with this. So we need to find a way to both handle the emergencies when they come and do the adaptation work, that's a little more long term. And we need to see it as something led by the people living in that community not led by some donor 1000s of miles away, that maybe there's a way we can kind of reconceived the whole project that we're a part of. But yeah, I agree with you. This is an artificial construct, you know, that we've developed, and I think it's hurting us, it's hurting that the impact that we can have.

Lars Peter Nissen: 23:19

I also think it's an artificial construct. And I actually really liked your idea of of framing it as climate first, I think that's a great idea. But that there is something about the ability to shift gear, by you, let's say you work with a long term development project in in Pakistan, and suddenly the flood comes, it's a different logic, it's a different gear you have to shift into. And just like, I think that a lot of humans error and sort of have operational tunnel vision and are unable to snap out of that and think, broader and more long term. I also find a lot of development, people have a great difficulty in shifting into that second gear, once the balloon goes up. So it may be artificial, but at least there are two different logics at play. And they don't always sometimes they add tension with each other. Sometimes there's a tension between building capacity and expanding the choices of a community and then suddenly going in with a top down intervention to save lives and, and respond to a crisis.

Raj Kumar: 24:23

I think that's true. I guess I would just argue that increasingly, the top down intervention is the wrong way to go. Yeah, like, yes, there are still examples where that's needed. But there, there are fewer and fewer. Yeah, there's more capacity locally than there ever was before. You can fund local groups much more inexpensively. In fact, if we could somehow, you know, fund in advance, we kind of know which places in the world are likely to face these kinds of climate disruptions and conflict. And if you could fund in advance local organisations, it's much cheaper and to build that resiliency than to wait for the disaster. And then when it comes to keep funding those local groups, give them more so they can do more and do more with cash transfer, there's just so much more we can do that isn't top down. And I think the logic of the humanitarian space still is built around the structures we designed 50 years ago. And kind of following that,

Lars Peter Nissen: 25:20

Yeah. And do earthquake.

Yeah, exactly. So you know, you bring you fly in the experts, you bring in the, you know, the structures, and you go top down, because you don't trust the government, you don't think they have the capacity, you don't trust the local groups, you think they're gonna take the money? You know, there's this kind of antiquated view, okay, sure. It exists to some degree at different places. But in many, many, many cases, the smart thing to do in this environment where we're going to be living with crisis after crisis after crisis, is to actually invest locally, in resilience, and then humanitarian response of the People By the People for themselves, you know, that's going to be much more cost effective, and provide more dignity. And again, that's where I think the cash transfers are particularly disruptive, because that's a, it's a way you can start to see that. And I think it starts to undermine some of the logic of the top down approach, and create some real competition for how we should be spending precious humanitarian dollars.

And so if you had to give a couple of pieces of advice to the ERC, and all of the rest of us in the humanitarian space, what would that be? What should we do differently?

Raj Kumar: 26:31

I think it probably starts with that mindset shift. But very quickly, it's about what are the metrics you're using to decide if you're doing a good job? Yeah, it can't just be, hey, we got there really quick. We worked really hard. We didn't sleep for two weeks. We roughed it, we did everything we could, you know, and that that effort can't be the way we determine whether we're doing a good job or not. It has to be more about how do we measure our result? And some of those metrics have to be around how bad was the emergency to begin with? Was it worse? Because we didn't do enough before the emergency? You know, did we not equip the organisations on the ground? Or the government's on the ground? Did we not give them the tools to build their own resiliency early enough? And that made actually the crisis a lot worse. So, you know, I think, again, I talked about global health and why it gets so much interest in philanthropy, partly because there are clear metrics, it's just a lot easier to measure. And I think cash gives us the opportunity humanitarian space to do a lot more measurement, and to even asked people like, are we doing a good job or not? Do you? Do you find that the response is useful to you? Are you getting what you need? And we can ask them that digitally, at scale, in a way we couldn't before? And let me Ukraine responses, obviously a little bit unique. But look, look at what the Ukrainian government is saying and what NGOs are experiencing. They're like, wow, this government, they know what they're doing. They are they are in the driver's seat. And they're telling us what to do. And a lot of NGOs are coming in and say, well, here's how we think we should do it. UN agencies, here's how we end the government. No, we don't want that. We don't need that. Here's what we need.

Lars Peter Nissen: 28:18

No, clearly Ukraine is an excellent example. Because I NGOs have gotten tonnes of money, right? incredible amounts of money. It's a very assertive very capable civil society and government and you have a full mobilisation of that country, right? Everybody is somehow responding. And they don't really need all our money. I'm sure they would like them, but they're not going to pay the price that we want them to pay in terms of signing 35 pages of an MOU. So for me, that is a really interesting case. But what about Afghanistan? And what about Yemen? What about some of these conflicts where you have an extremely difficult operating environment? How do we develop clear metrics there? And how do we employ the check there? I mean, that's some great limitations in some of the places we work.

Raj Kumar: 29:04

Yeah, you know, at Devex World we had the former Deputy Interior Minister of Afghanistan, she was the highest ranking woman in that government. And I asked her what her lessons learned are, and a big one was that we kind of wasted the opportunity to invest more locally. And we would bring in our own parallel structures, we would send in lots of advisors, but we wouldn't just build up the government ministries, like someone like herself, just build up her own capability, her own team's capability. And so again, when we left, of course, that that led to some of the immediate destruction of the capability of the government. So I think the lesson in Afghanistan is more about what happens when you don't invest enough in resilience and local capability. And you're so concerned with corruption, you're so concerned with wasting $1 that you you become really risk averse. And it becomes a very foreign led intervention that just doesn't get routed locally. And so now you're right. Yeah, you have a humanitarian crisis on top of it. And you say, what do we do, but at some point, you just have to start investing in the local organisations, and giving them putting them in the driver's seat. I'm less familiar with the case in Yemen. But I think it's a similar story, in that these are not one off crises. It's a it's a multi year extended crisis. So when you know that you can't, you have to, at some point, have a track that says, Okay, maybe we're doing some other humanitarian response. We're flying in food and medicine, but at the same time, we're trying to invest in local organisations. Because if we don't do that, you'll simply never get out of this.

Lars Peter Nissen: 30:49

I don't know a single humanitarian that disagrees with that. Yes, we produce the same outcome time after time. That's, that's the thing that is so frustrating about this one.

Raj Kumar: 31:00

I mean, I think I think it's possible to have some change inside these organisations, as you say, all the humanitarians I talked to they want the change. It's more about the institutional structures they find themselves in. So I think you need some change agents within the humanitarian agencies, certainly, you need some more leadership among some of the people running these agencies to say, I want to take some more risks, you know? Yes, they have governments that, you know, member states, they have boards, take risks and get fired. Try, like, you know, why not? Your life is short, I think it's worth taking some risks. Sometimes, if you think you're, you're on the right path, Even if you're your bosses think it's not the right path. But then I also think we need some, we need some more social entrepreneurship on the outside of them, there's a lot but we need, we need that to start to get to the point where it can really compete. And and I think where you can really start to have some some honest competition, that's going to put pressure on the traditional humanitarian agencies to have where we do kind of have to work look differently. Look, there's a there's a way there's a methodology for funding local organisations. That look, it's proved to have results, there is better resilience, like look at the cost effectiveness, the more we can show that the harder it is to defend the current model. I think we need that competition in this in this space, I think it's coming. I think there's a lot a lot of exciting innovation, it's just, it's not happening fast enough, or at the scale, we would all want to see, but it's coming.

Lars Peter Nissen: 32:38

And so obviously, cash and something like gift directly is one really good example of this honest competition, you talk about. What what are some of the other projects or initiatives you see that really gives you hope?

Raj Kumar: 32:51

Well, I talk a lot in my book about this idea of retail aid. And I think cash transfers are One really good example of it, but it's not the only one. And essentially, what I'm the point I'm making is that we traditionally have looked at this as a wholesale industry, you know, we say we're gonna go in, and we're gonna serve 20 million people in Yemen. And I think now we're more and more moving in a direction of saying, Well, I can actually pinpoint individual and talk to that person, because it's cheap enough to do it. And they have the cell phone, and they have the connectivity and okay, not everyone, but the trend line is very clear the direction that's going and to be able to directly communicate with someone and figure out what is it that they need? And how can I best serve them? And yeah, cash may sometimes be it. Maybe it's digital cash and a wallet, they can use to go buy things and certain merchants you know, if this is done in a transparent way, maybe on a blockchain, you can actually see, where's the money flowing? What are people buying? What do they actually need, you know, maybe it's more around education, and you can deliver that. So kids who are you know, in a, in a refugee status can get some education digitally, at least temporarily, until they're able to get into a proper school, or maybe it's around health information. And so I just think there's more and more opportunity around this idea of retail, a, you know, just directly connecting with a person in need as an individual, and I think that's what I would want, you know, if my neighbourhood got flooded, and I was on the run with my kids or something, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want some one size fits all programme. Yeah, of course, it might be nice to have a place where you go and you get a bag, it's filled with all of your basic needs or something, okay? But especially if this is going to go on for months, or years. At some point, I won't be able to talk to somebody and say, Well, this is what I specifically these are my direct personal needs, especially for marginalised communities or people living with disabilities or other other communities that often fall through the cracks during humanitarian response like this is You want to feel like you can talk to somebody and get something tailored to you. And that might sound, it might have sounded impossible in the past, it's not impossible anymore, it's very doable at this stage. So that's kind of that's the direction I see us heading in is empowering more local groups. More peer to peer, you know, humanitarian aid should be more peer to peer, it shouldn't be this top down un thing that could be a part of it, but should be facilitating look at all the incredible generosity of families in Eastern Europe, in Poland and elsewhere that took in refugees, like they, they did something governments could never do. And I think we just need to be facilitating that and not seeing that as like a separate part of the human. We don't control that. Right, that's a problem or something. No, that's, that's a good thing. And that's we should be facilitating that sort of activity.

Lars Peter Nissen: 35:53

And, of course, I mean, we have seen to a certain extent, companies, such as Airbnb, or Amazon also actually got getting involved in in making their services available to people on the move. So I mean, I do get it, it is coming. And for me, maybe the biggest takeaway from this conversation is that unless we find some new money, from new types of money to come in, I don't see that change happening very quickly.

Raj Kumar: 36:16

I think new money can help feed the innovation. But I also don't think it's the only thing I also think we need to see more leadership. You know, let's see some leaders within the traditional humanitarian sector willing to take some more risks, you know, put down their bureaucratic lens and say, I'm going to disrupt things. And you know, again, I'm willing to lose my job over, why not? Push a little bit more. And then, and then I think we need to see more from the government donors, and they're gonna eventually land there, because there's not enough money. You know, the government donors are already pulling back their overall Oda budgets, there's not enough money for them to deal with this new world we're in with, with the climate, emergency driving far more disasters all over. And it's going to be in poor countries, it's going to be in middle income countries and big cities are going to be affected. So and plus the conflict is still going up. So yeah, I just think we we are going to have, we have to change. And part of it is the new money to drive the innovation is not the only thing now there has to be kind of political change, leadership change.

Lars Peter Nissen: 37:31

So climate first, eventually, we will have to change because this will be so overwhelming that we cannot continue to ignore the inefficiencies of the way it functions. And hopefully, we will move towards a more retail oriented humanitarian modality with with with more peer to peer collaboration, is that some of the main conclusions out of the out of this conversation?

Raj Kumar: 37:55

Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, a lot of what is foreign aid is a selfish, right, it's driven by selfish motives as much as humanitarian ones. And I think we just have to make the case more clearly to rich country governments, that this humanitarian work is not just a nice thing to do, you know, in some far off land, this is like, existential for them, too. And it's, it's about, you know, a world that needs stability and needs people to not be having to move. And, and so if they see the results as imperative, like it really does matter, for every pound, or euro, or dollar or yen you invest, it really does matter what you get out of that. And that you protect that community from the next disaster, you don't just briefly solve some current thing, because the next one is next week, you know, it's coming, it's going to keep coming. If we can change that mindset, I think that will drive more competition in the space, too. And I think, by the way, that's one reason why cash transfers have done so well, in the humanitarian sector. It's because the British, the Europeans, and the Americans somehow decided, you know, what, even though we're a little scared about this, because we're scared of being called in front of Congress or parliament and told that we're giving away you know, hard earned taxpayer dollars in cash, and it got wasted or stolen or, you know, even though they're a bit scared about it, they decided to take some risks there, because they saw they needed to, they saw the sector isn't working, we're gonna have to somehow turn this from a niche area. That doesn't get a lot of attention. And as a result, you know, it doesn't have that microscope, but it needs we need to really take a much harder look at it. And I mean, that's what we're committed to doing index, right. We're, our journalists are out there, covering the institutions and trying to say, okay, what are they doing that's working? Sure, we'll cover what they're doing this work. And that's important too, but also what's not working, you know, where is there a lack of accountability and trying to really drive those those conversations. And you know, and the when, when people, members of parliament or members of Congress are reading our news coverage and it's driving, you know, some of the way they think about these issues. That's part of that. That's part of why journalism I think is so important in this space.

Lars Peter Nissen: 40:26

Ross, thank you so much for coming on humanitarian and thank you for this conversation. It's been excellent to have have this discussion with you as always, you have fresh and hypo smart perspective on on these issues, and I really, really appreciate your time.

Raj Kumar: 40:42

It's been a it's been a real pleasure. I love the podcast and it's great to have this conversation with you.