The CRGR participates in the meeting of partners Hope and Light in 2021

The Humanitarian sector reached a tipping point in 2020.  It was a year highlighted by a global pandemic, which continues to impact the world in different ways, protracted nature of conflict, and an ever-increasing impact from cyclones, hurricanes, floods, and drought due to climate change. 

This day the Emergency Response Team of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation held the event Hope and Light in 2021!, with the aim of reflecting on how these events such as COVID-19 impacted and changed the humanitarian sector, organizations and people.

This virtual session brought together more than 90 partners from different networks around the world that work in the humanitarian sector, including the Regional Network for Risk Management in Central America.

This meeting of partners, opened the space to learn from some projects and how, despite a challenging year, the work was carried out, including when it meant to adapt and make drastic decisions.

During the day, there was an exchange of experiences acquired at three levels: individual (personal learning), organizational, system (humanitarian sector), and there was also the opportunity to share how the change has influenced the work of local teams and not local.

During 2020, the role of local humanitarian actors, both from the public sector, civil society, and even the private sector, was enhanced as they had to lead and assume a more important role in humanitarian action, as expressed by the participants.

Among the barriers that were identified for local actors to assume greater responsibility were: lack of political will on the part of historically dominant humanitarian actors, lack of internet, community organization is decisive, gaps in technology, overly complicated administrative and compliance requirements by donors, entrenched attitudes that “international” actors have more “capacity” than “local” actors, the language gap, restricted funding, among others.

In the same exercise, it was compiled which would be the key points to facilitates these local actors assume greater responsibility, among those are: access to resources, the change in the way in which resources are allocated and the role of the International NGOs, the use of virtual community access links by local institutions that guarantee these rights, decolonize the aid movement: raise the problem. As well as partnerships with other local organizations, more direct donor engagement, and larger INGOs putting local actors at the forefront (rather than competing for limited funds)

The participants discussed and reflected on the lessons learned as a result of the context experienced during 2020 and at the same time identified how these lessons can help guide collective work in 2021.

In this context, local actors shared some ideas to strengthen humanitarian leadership, among some of them are: maintaining permanent outreach and contact with communities, taking more local ownership, improving community systems and working to strengthen the capacities and competencies of each collaborator involved.

Likewise, non-local actors manifested the different way to work with local actors, among the most are: transferring power and resources to local actors, letting local actors direct, communication and technology, rescue of local knowledge and ancestral practices and advocating with donors for more flexible and direct funding for local actors.

As a result of this session, 2020 was named the year of great learning, and 2021 was viewed as a light of hope, which provides a new opportunity to reinvent itself and create new ways of action from each of the partner organizations. focused on each of their contexts and areas of intervention.