What would happen if in a humanitarian response, all international agencies (UN, IOs, iNGOs, etc.) took 25% of their resources (people and money) and invested in coaching local civil society organisations? And what would happen if part of the requirement was for each local civil society organisations to coach someone in the international organisation?

What if one of the key metrics used to evaluate the ‘efficiency, effectiveness, and success’ of a response was whether or not the local civil society was stronger post response than pre-response? How would that change our approach? What would we stop competing over and what would we start competing over?

My suspicion is that our questions would change and so would our definitions of things like scale, efficiency, effective, and sucess. And likely the skill sets, characters, and mindsets of those we hire would also change.

What change do see happening?

Here’s a link to Local prt.1

Photo by Jason Goodman