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Promoting localised, women-led approaches to humanitarian responses: A briefing note

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An opportunity for change

ActionAid works directly with local partners who are embedded in the community and have a strong understanding of local needs. After Hurricane Matthew devastated southwest Haiti in October 2016, ActionAid Haiti and Konbit Peyizan Grandans (KPGA), a locally rooted civil society organisation which has been an ActionAid partner since 2007, launched a humanitarian response in four communes. They established women-led community committees in each of the four communes, which then determined beneficiary criteria, and then planned and undertook response activities. This operational approach devolves power and funding to the most vulnerable women affected by a disaster. It lays the foundations of ActionAid’s call for a more localised international humanitarian system and locally led responses to specific crises.

Governments and NGOs in developing countries are calling for humanitarian responses to be more local or national in nature, and less international. This is because the current international humanitarian system, despite past reforms, concentrates power and funding in the hands of a small group of humanitarian actors who are largely located in richer countries.
This is not only unjust but extremely ineffective. It marginalises the skills, knowledge and capacities of thousands of local and national NGOs working on the frontline in times of emergency. ActionAid believes that strengthening local leadership in humanitarian responses – especially by women – is key to the effectiveness of such responses.
Localising humanitarian action involves shifting financial and other resources, as well as power and agency, to local and national responders.
This shift must have women and women’s organisations at its forefront, bringing their invaluable contextual knowledge, skills, resources and experiences to emergency preparedness, response and resilience building. This will help reduce the male-dominated and gender biased international humanitarian system we currently have, and make responses to humanitarian crises more effective and gender transformative.
The World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in Istanbul in 2016 provided a unique opportunity for governments, UN agencies and civil society actors to set an ambitious agenda for empowering women and girls as change agents and leaders of such a ‘localisation agenda’. We now need to translate the commitments and collective agreements reached in Istanbul into concrete action.