64. The Percolator

[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:48 - 3:56)

It has been a while since we last published an episode of Trumanitarian. We don't have a particularly valid excuse for that, apart from the fact that my day job has been interfering with my hobby, this podcast, and so we're sorry about that. But we are back, and we have a number of really interesting episodes lined up for you. We begin with a discussion of humanitarian exchange, a new conference that is being organized by the Humanitarian Leadership Academy. For the past couple of months, I have worked as part of the advisory committee that HLA has put together to design the conference. And I think it's a really interesting experiment that may contribute with something new and important to the humanitarian sector. I don't know how you feel about humanitarian conferences, but in my experience, they tend to be either sales shows for the latest water purification tablets and flashlights, or they're very rigid affairs where very important people read very important statements from a pulpit. For me, that often results in me spending most of my time networking and drinking too much coffee, and I rarely engage seriously with the actual content of the conference. For me, the exception is HNPW in Geneva every year, and Cato and Gilles' annual conference in Champery that I find to be delightfully geeky affairs where new thinking is developed. Humanitarian exchange tries to do something slightly different from your average conference. The thinking is that in order to meet the challenges of the future, we need to mobilize a new generation of humanitarians. And HLA has set the ambitious target of mobilizing a million humanitarians over a decade through humanitarian exchange. That's a really interesting and ambitious goal to have for a conference. And as you will hear in my conversation with Dominic Courage from HLA and Francis Iwa, who is the founder and CEO of the Ugandan NGO Kafumi, a lot of thinking has gone into what such a platform would do for us and how we ensure that it actually connects to frontline humanitarians, that the information percolates through the system and actually reaches people who need it the most. If you're interested in learning more about humanitarian exchange and joining the conference, check out the website Humanitarian Letter X Change. So HumanitarianXChange.org. I hope you enjoy the conversation. The sound is not up to the quality we would normally like it to be, to be honest. But I hope you can suffer through that and benefit from the really interesting perspectives from Francis and Dominic. Enjoy the conversation. Today, I'm joined in the studio by two colleagues, Francis Iwa, who is joining us from the Pearl of Africa, Uganda, and Dominic Courage, who is from, I don't know what the UK is to Europe, but you're in the UK.

[Dominic Courage] (3:56 - 3:58)

Yeah, in London.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:58 - 4:05)

All right.

And Francis, let's begin with you. Would you please introduce yourself to the audience? What's your background?

[Francis Iwa] (4:06 - 4:57)

[Lars Peter Nissen] (4:58 - 5:12)

Thank you very much. And our second guest is Dominic Courage, who comes in from the UK. He's the deputy director of external relations at the Humanitarian Leadership Academy. And Dominic, tell us a bit about your background.

[Dominic Courage] (5:13 - 6:14)

So, well, I've been in the humanitarian sector for just a bit over 10 years. And before that, I was in the engineering sector, consulting with a company called Arup. And I've always had a bit of an outsider's perspective from that sense. And I've always, I suppose, my career has always been defined in some way by some sort of change. So as in the humanitarian sector, starting out as a shelter specialist, setting construction standards, got involved in reconfiguring Save the Children. And now with the HLA, we're really looking at changing and developing how the sector learns and transforms. And then I've always been involved in collaboration. I guess all my work's been involved, whether it's building an Olympics or a collaborative cash delivery network. It's always about people working together and seeing what they all can offer and coming together.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (6:15 - 6:30)

Well, maybe let me start by, because people might not be familiar with the Humanitarian Leadership Academy. The HLA exists to strengthen people's skills and capacity and develop the sector through learning. It's part of Save the Children, but it really has autonomy to focus more widely on the sector. We've got a global response-based presence covering six regions. And we cover everything from leadership coaching, diploma level courses, self-placed digital learning. And our CAIA platform has over 700,000 registered learners and we're approaching a million completed courses. So that coupled with an ever-growing sort of research and evidence base around what we do really inspires us about where the sector's going. Our learners bring back incredible stories of how they're developing themselves and how they're facing adversity every day. And if we're going to find hope anywhere in the sector today, then maybe it's in that new generation that are super, super self-motivated, energetic and developing impact every day. But the way we see it in the HLA is there's two big problems. One is that there are simply not enough humanitarians in the world today. By one measure, there were two and a half million professional humanitarians worldwide.

Thanks Dominic. So Francis, I'd be interested in your take on this. I mean, you have rounded the humanitarian sector. You work for some of the big organizations. You now run an organization. You founded yourself in Uganda. Is sort of street art and poetry what you need to make Kafumi run or?

My take, I think, having done the round, so to speak, and come back home has a slight different twist to it. Because if we look at humanitarians and we're looking at communities, local communities, we actually do see a lot of humanitarians within the communities. But their platform is very local. Their platform is limited to their communities. Many of them do not even have access to global platforms, for example. Now, in terms of the linkages between humanitarianism at the local level and addressing issues before they really become major crisis, I think there is leadership that is needed at the local level, at the national level, and certainly collaborations with the international level. Because the hope that leadership should bring should initially, I think, start at the local level. Because that, in my view, is able to bring duty bearers and rights holders together. Being able to address problems in real time before it becomes a crisis. Because we've seen that increasingly the scale and scope of humanitarian crisis is so huge, yet the resources needed to address those problems are far, far, you know, they're not that many. And some of the solutions really are very local without requiring resources. Some of the solutions are linked to understanding, rather making informed decisions based on information. But this is where, in terms of collaboration and also conversations on the issues, to bring out local level leadership, national level leadership, we need to unpack a lot of these issues. So that, you know, the first level conversation, first level knowledge is first of all the local knowledge. That has to be repackaged. And my thinking is that we are so much a right up, you know, urbanization, but within the local communities, we've got, you know, oral traditions, for example, you know, folklores and stuff like that. How do we tap into those resources? How do we use platforms, you know, whether it's local, you know, sessions or, you know, drama, music, dance, so that we are all hands on deck. And we also adapt, you know, new innovative approaches that will actually empower, especially youth, women, because to bring about change, we need the numbers. The numbers are really the youth, but a lot of the youth do not make informed choices and decisions because the information is not packaged in a manner that, you know, they are able to make informed choices.

So listening to both of you, you are describing the same problem. We know that we will be faced with more frequent and more severe crisis. We know that we are nowhere close to having enough manpower or resources to cope with the future. Dominic, you talk about we must have a million humanitarians. That's a great scaling target to take. Francis, you say these people already exist. They're there in the villages. The youth is there engaged. They are humanitarians, but there's a lack of connectedness, right? And so my question is, Dominic, how does a conference in the UK create that connectedness to those people Francis are talking about doing humanitarian work in the villages? What, how are you trying to get out of the headquarters, out of the capitals and reach out? How can you do that with a conference?

Well, great question. I mean, we're starting in London because for practical reasons, but also because it is a humanitarian hub. But what we're able to do that perhaps others can't is how we can connect across a global network. So we've got 1.2 million followers in the HLA on social media. And when we put out a registration for something like this, then we get an incredible response. So already, just within a handful of weeks, we've got 1,800 people registered. And 80% of those are not from what you might call the global north. They're from our learners all over the world. And they're already engaged. As Francis says, they're already energetic and engaged across the sector, but lack that connectedness, lack a place to go. And what we wanna do with a conference like this, even though it starts in London, is to move it peripatetically around the world so that we expand that network and we make it stronger and make it more connected, not just through events, but through the digital community that we'll build from it and the work streams and the collaborations that will run through the year from the network that will develop over time. So that's where we see there's a real potential to connect, build those connections that Francis is describing as missing.

Thank you for that, Dominic. It sounds great. But I'd like to ask you, Francis, from your point of view, the people you meet in Uganda who have this leadership potential, you see doing amazing work every day. What are the obstacles for them connecting to something like HX?

Like I said, our membership is diverse. Many of them actually do not have access to the internet, let alone phones they do have, for example. But in terms of the opportunities for connectedness, this is where networks and platforms become very, very important. The biggest challenge, of course, is that the interconnectedness that has to be made possible needs to be resourced because coordination is time. Coordination requires quite a bit of resources. You need to have the right fit. And it's constant communication. And if some of our members are not connected to a network at the national level, sub-national level, then it becomes very challenging to actually connect to a continental or international platform. But fortunately, we do have different level of organizations, international organizations.

We just mentioned Zambia Children, for example, a few other international NGOs. And ever since the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul and the Grand Bargain, commitments, particularly on the localization agenda, it's kind of taking traction in terms of the conversation that the interconnectedness of the issues requires support. But that requires a bit of a mindset shift and change because I think the humanitarian aid architecture has been designed in such a way that for so long to carry DNA of its own, that to try and do things differently requires a bit of effort and time. If we look at, for example, the relationships between the community-based organizations, women-led organizations, youth-led organizations, and national organizations or even international organizations, we need to address issues of equitable partnerships, for example. How do we address some institutional level support? Because some of the organizations exist as organizations, but if you look at how they're structured as an institution, that an international organization would define what an institution is, then yeah, it requires a little bit of different methods of work. And because the relationships have been a lot more short-term, there haven't been a lot of long-term institutional level partnerships. So you have a very high turnover of organizational institutions and the space then does become a bit chaotic. So that requires quite a bit of deliberate effort.

So, Francis, it's great to hear you talk about partnership and equal partnerships. And I guess, Dominic, the key question to you is, you work inside one of the biggest organizations we have in the industry. Save the Children is one of the big five, if you want. And how do you, from that position, try to really give voice to people who come from much smaller organizations? How do you construct an equal partnership in that situation?

Yeah, I mean, the power dynamics are present. What the HLA has is a degree of autonomy from Save the Children. We're really set up to focus on the sector and focus on how we develop the sector. So I guess with that reach into learners, local organizations, we're able to set up a platform that endeavors to be, recognize those differences in power, but to have a mutual exchange of power and bring different people to the table on an equitable level. And then it's really up to delegates. We can only create the conditions for that conversation to happen. But what we can do is maybe strip away as many of the encumbrances of many of the preconceptions that prevent people from using their power appropriately and prevent them from meeting on equal terms to say, what's the problem? How can we solve it together? What can you bring to this conversation? And what can we bring? Whether that's a specialist in Save the Children or a corporate or a funder, but what's the problem? How can we solve it? And can we meet together to do that? And then we really need to foster that, protect it and protect it from sort of influences that might break that down.

And Francis, in your experience, what does a good partnership look like?

Very difficult to have an equal partnership, but equitable partnership is possible. So an appreciation of our different skill sets, knowledge levels, and also our access to different spaces, the echo of our voices. I mean, if we took all this into account, then we can look at equitable partnerships in that light, so that there's a more complementarity, that there's no one size fits all. But certainly good partnerships, I think, in addition to the partnership principles, look at issues of sustainability, for example. I mean, risk aversion is, I think, one of the biggest problems. And a lot of the partnerships that we do see now are more contractual relationships and a transfer of risk sort of state. But there's not much appreciation of the level of risks that actually a national entity is exposed to within the context that they operate in, whether it's in terms of financial risk, or reputation risk, or even just operating within one's own community. Now, the humanitarian imperative for a local actor might expose it to different sorts of risks than the humanitarian imperative for an international organization. Now, definitely also, you did speak about the voices, because for far so long, voices of national actors, I think, even representation is kind of drowned. And oftentimes, local actors, I mean, we are a classic example. We are on a constant treadmill, so to speak, to identify, train, and lose some of our very best. So in a vicious cycle of capacity building, capacity strengthening. So I think when the partnerships do address the question of sustainability and attention on different levels, then we are also looking at advocacy through our own voices, because I think it's very important, where, for example, public opinion informs policy. I think it's very vital then to have actually the voices that are affected, to actually voice these issues, whether it's in reports or in these kinds of conversations, because oftentimes, within the local context, there might be very high risk of our voices, but through a partnership, we can actually address some of our local level challenges at a different platform, but through the partnership, using a voice that is probably having more people-to-people connection is also enhanced, in addition to institution-to-institution, organization-to-organization, because I think what really drives organizations are the people.

How do we do that?

Investing in data, investing in and sharing that, that data across the board, I think is a really starting point because whether it's, since Istanbul, what gets discussed in Geneva, Istanbul, New York, London, oftentimes does not really percolate down to the community level. And because the information for making informed decisions, the decisions that can hold duty bearers at all levels to account, then we are not really having the critical mass, so to speak, to bring about a conversation that links. So that some of the decisions that our own governments take, for example, can be challenged by uninformed population. And like I said at the beginning, looking at our demographics, then you'd really want to really have a very empowered youthful population to make informed decisions so that what will unfold into a crisis, you invest in mitigation, invest in preparedness, so that, for example, if policies and legal frameworks are being developed, then actually the communities that are affected get a very good understanding of what policies and legal laws are actually being developed to address those issues. And that, in my view, is really what will probably be needed before we even look for money.

So first of all, Dominique, I think we have a rebrand coming up. I think you should call it the humanitarian percolator rather than humanitarian exchange.

We all need a coffee.

And so let's go a bit granular here. How are you going to make sure that it does become a percolator? How are you going to make sure that it's not just another party we have in the capital somewhere discussing the problems we always have, but how would you design this platform so that something gets into the local community and makes a difference there, makes decision makers more accountable at the local level? How can you do that with a one-day conference in London?

Yeah, I mean, a one-day conference in London is going to, you never know what might come out of a couple of conversations. So there's a bit of alchemy there. But I think it's really, as I say, about what follows. So if we can have a successful launch and really bring people together on a different agenda from the ones that circulate and for 20 years have circulated in the humanitarian sector, then we can start to build a bit of that human connection. You know, Francis is talking about data. That's incredibly important and we generate lots of data. But the human trust, the human connection that you can build when you start working together on something, when you start connecting, when you start looking at the problem from a different perspective from the one that you have entrenched in your position wherever you sit in the system. Then that has enormous potential. And that's why, you know, in the way that we're setting this up, we're trying to do this as much as possible with real, really active participation at its core. So, yeah, there'll be, there'll be incredible, there'll be stimulus. You know, we've got incredible speakers. Baroness Amos from the former UN humanitarian chief is speaking, the deputy finance minister of Somalia. We've got climate activist Sabrina Fernandez. Mariam Nemozi, anchor from Al Jazeera. So there'll be that stimulus and that invitation to think differently. But then that will be centred around conversation and connection. And then what follows from that is we really want to see work streams running so that people have the opportunity to, in small and big ways, to connect and to work together across the year. So whether that, you know, and those problems are not predefined. They're defined by the meetings that happen and the discussions that happen. And that's where, when you have a majority of people attending the conference who are not from the global north, but from communities around the world, humanitarian responders around the world, then the conversation should naturally centre around where they're coming from. And the collaboration that follows should centre around that. And that should be a great way to connect to all of the networks that are out there near GNDR, you know, the START network. There are many out there, but we can help to connect those up in a conversation that just gives people that opportunity.

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I think, I think I think about it in a few ways. So when we think about change in the humanitarian sector, there's going to be change through all of the amazing reform efforts that have been going on, but it'll only go so far. And often social change comes from the edges and comes from unexpected places. And that's where we think this new generation is going to be so important. Many of them might not know yet that they're humanitarians, but they will become it, or they already are, and they don't know what system, they're not connected into a system in the way that they could be. But if we can get that critical mass, we've called it a million, it takes three and a half percent of the population in resistance to overthrow dictatorship. So a million humanitarians can really see change in the humanitarian sector. But I suppose in 10 years time, we hope for some of those circular conversations to fade away, for that zero sum perspective on localization to really be a connected perspective and maybe for disillusionment to be replaced by a bit of hope. So in 10 years time, some of those new conversations will hopefully have matured and become some of the mainstream. And we'll have seen it because there's engagement from what now feels like periphery, from the edges, from people who are outside the sector, really engaging in the inside of the sector and meeting on a mutual level and having that curiosity. And so you will see something from somewhere, from some of these conversations, start to take a really big part of what humanitarianism looks like in the future. You know, when you build a community like that, then you can really see magical things happen. You know, we're fortunate to have partnered with Brandfuel, an incredible events and creative agency. They launched something called One Young World. They helped to launch it 10 years ago. That's now had $1.3 billion of social impact delivered by youth ambassadors. So that kind of change isn't measured in log frames or KPIs or metrics. It's about viral change and about inventiveness and social movements that start at the edges can really, if they're founded in solid principles and shared purpose, can really take hold. So, you know, we hope in 10 years' time to have seen a million humanitarians in all different ways engaged in more mutual conversation and the real ecosystemic shifts for the sector that come from the edges.

And Francis, you will be in London on the 20th of February. You are spending time and energy participating in humanitarian exchange. For you, what would you be happy to see? Which change do you hope to see in 10 years' time?

My success story would be that actually communities that are affected by crisis are really awakened to make a correlation between their own resources at local levels and the service that they need that, you know, must happen, must, you know, they must get in real time. And if the assistance comes from, you know, from beyond the borders, then that should be seen as a bonus. But that should also bring out, you know, the interconnectedness of humanity that, you know, irrespective where any problem happens, somebody, the other side of the globe, you know, must, you know, feel that they are part of this, whether it's through climate change or, you know, COVID. And that, I hope and I believe, you know, would actually enhance a lot of, you know, governance deficits that are oftentimes part of the problem. If we look at, for example, some of the endemic crisis that we're dealing with don't seem to be breaking the vicious cycle. I think that boldness is required. Now, bold decisions can only come about when certainly, you know, the communities affected by a crisis are able to pull together and realize that actually they are not alone, you know, in the challenge that they can count on the interconnectedness, on the international community, on partnerships that are beyond the local community.

Francis and Dominique, thank you so much for coming on True Meditarian and for a great conversation. I really look forward to seeing both of you in the Humanitarian Percolator on the 20th of February next year, where we will be radical, we'll be bold. But of course, it's not going to be much fun if it's just the three of us there in London. So, Dominique, what can people do to get involved with Humanitarian Exchange?

Well, I mean, first of all, registration is open, so you can register to be online or in person. And invite someone unexpected. Invite someone who you wouldn't normally connect with, who wouldn't normally attend this kind of thing. It's really about who's in the room. And do get in touch if you want to, if you want to partner or want to exhibit. And I think maybe just finally, I'd say, sign up for some learning or if you're in a position to encourage your staff to.

There are some great resources out there, whether that's the HLA, there's the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership, Disaster Ready Humantum. But I'm going to say, sign up for some from HLA resources. If you're not already one of the 700,000 people on CAIA, then register there and give it a spin. There's 550 courses to choose from.

That's great, Dominique, but you forgot the most attractive thing about Humanitarian Exchange, namely that we will end the day with a panel that will be broadcast also as a live humanitarian episode, where we will try to take stock of what has been discussed during the day and to see whether we are making any progress, whether we are finding that radical, bold spirit that Francis talked about.

Fantastic. Really looking forward to that. It's going to be a great way to wrap up the day.

Thank you, both of you.

Brilliant. Thanks.

Thank you. Thank you.