By Helen Guyatt
Over the past year, the Start Network has been working to better understand what it means to be locally led. In November 2021, we published an iterative framework that identified 11 elements of change needed to transform the Start Network into a locally led network, supporting local humanitarian action. We defined a locally led humanitarian system as one in which local and national actors are at the centre and are the primary determinants of how resources are invested and how crises are prepared for and responded to.
During the last 12 months, we have conducted interviews with communities, governments and implementing agencies. In this article we consolidate evidence and learning based on these interviews, which gathered people’s perceptions and lived experiences related to the value and challenges of having local actors lead on decision-making and action within the humanitarian system. We listened to interviewees’ reflections on how being local facilitated relevant and innovative emergency responses.
In two recent evaluations (following assistance for flooding in Pakistan and a cold wave in Guatemala) we asked 64 people about the differences they saw between local non-governmental organisations (LNGOs) and international NGOs (INGOs). The open-ended questions were: What is the major difference between local NGOs and INGOs? What is the added value of LNGOs? What are the risks? It was noteworthy that 13 people stated they were not sure about the exact differences between these NGO types.
Read the full article on ODI-HPN