Is the localisation agenda working for women-led organisations?

The unequal benefits of localisation to different types of national actors in the humanitarian sector is an issue that concerns many humanitarian actors, perhaps none more so than women-led organisations (WLOs). Women’s issues go unnoticed because the localisation platform is not available to them. As Executive Director of Hope Restoration South Sudan, I know this all too well. In humanitarian settings, we WLOs have to form our own networks and make our voices heard, often defying cultural norms about women’s roles. We pursue agendas that challenge traditional structures, cultures and ways of working, which are essential to bringing aid to the women and girls who need it most.

It is in this context that civil society organisations and WLOs across South Sudan work tirelessly to deliver critical lifesaving services to hard-to-reach communities. We can do this because we employ local staff: we work throughout the rainy season, and we stay and deliver to our communities even when the fighting is going on around us. However, we struggle to operate when we lack the necessary resources to carry out our work and to continue to provide these lifesaving services to our communities, who have suffered from decades of conflict. In South Sudan today, there is intense competition between international and national non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for humanitarian resources. The bulk of the funding goes to United Nations (UN) agencies and international NGOs, and the smallest portion to national NGOs. Within national civil society, by far the smallest portion of funding goes to WLOs.

WLO experiences of localisation

For many WLOs, the localisation agenda has contributed further barriers to our painstaking efforts to build equal partnerships and direct relationships with international donors and agencies. As men-led national organisations have increased their operational capacity and resource base through localisation structures, they too often become additional tiers between WLOs working at community level and the international actors that we seek to coordinate and partner with to scale our programming and influence humanitarian decision-making. Though localisation broadly aims to empower local actors and institutions in humanitarian settings, the simplistic application of policies by organisations with a checklist to demonstrate progress toward localisation has been counterproductive.

In South Sudan, we see international agencies flock to a small number of national NGOs that already work with another international agency, instead of pursuing partnerships with local NGOs in their target areas, working in the relevant sector. The clustering of international agencies around well-established national NGOs that have met the due diligence requirements of an international NGO or UN agency actually entrenches the unequal power relationships within the humanitarian system that were the original focus of the localisation agenda.

There are several ways in which WLOs have been excluded from the benefits of localisation. Firstly, gender bias and discrimination within the humanitarian system is almost as pervasive as international bias. WLOs are overlooked as humanitarian actors or dismissed as ‘development actors’ due to our unwillingness to ignore the root causes of risks and vulnerabilities facing women and girls in emergency settings. WLOs have had to fight for recognition as contributors to humanitarian policy discussions, and have been undervalued in humanitarian decision-making processes at both national and global levels. Stereotypes and perceptions about women’s leadership abilities, caring responsibilities, and ironically, assumptions about cultural barriers, further perpetuate exclusionary practices; in South Sudan, we see this especially at the state and county levels. This leads to limited representation and participation of WLOs in humanitarian coordination mechanisms, partnerships and networks that shape both localisation dialogues and humanitarian response, which in turn, further diminishes the visibility and influence of WLOs in shaping policies and practices.

This is further entrenched by the barriers faced by WLOs in accessing the funding, resources and capacity-building that enable participation in coordination, planning, decision-making and policy dialogues in the humanitarian system. We see across diverse contexts that WLOs’ lack of access to indirect cost support hinders their ability to participate in and benefit from localisation initiatives and approaches that are intended to address these same challenges.

Reimagining the balance of power

Power imbalances within the humanitarian sector cannot be described simply as ‘local versus international’. The same structures that privilege international perspectives, education and technical knowledge also prop up other kinds of unequal power dynamics that entrench bias, whether based on ethnic identity, language, religion, gender, etc. The colonial mindset that underpins the humanitarian system not only favours international actors, but also those who can be most easily compared to international actors, which often means the elites. Whether elite status is based on education, location in the capital city, English language skills, or experience working as national staff for international organisations, we see the confluence of these different elite characteristics in the national NGOs with the most success in finding a place at the table of localisation.

The objective of WLOs is not to become the elites, but to point out and address the power imbalances that localisation efforts have so far been based on. Targets that measure progress based on percentage reduction for international actors at the same time as percentage increase for national actors would never be able to measure change on the ground from localisation policies, whether positive or negative, because the system of cause and effect is not so simple. If the real intention of localisation initiatives is to more effectively address the needs of affected communities during an emergency, then the logical starting point is not just to reduce the concentration of power among international actors, but amongst any kind of actors separate from affected communities. Smaller and more specialised local actors like WLOs are able to be effective humanitarian actors because they are not elites, they are from the community. If this effectiveness is what we want from the humanitarian system, the only option is to deconstruct the power imbalances that keep decision-making furthest away from local communities.

Conclusion

Support to WLOs to strategise and to design humanitarian interventions and the resources to reinforce our own initiatives is the only sure-fire way to show how WLO-led humanitarian response works differently. We need not just to be consulted, but also to lead. If WLOs are only used as implementers for delivery of services to women and girls designed by UN and INGO teams, there will never be a leap forward in effectiveness or efficiency of humanitarian response to the unique needs of women and girls. The perception of collaboration between WLOs and other actors as focused on strengthening the capacity of only WLOs, instead of strengthening the effectiveness and responsiveness of humanitarian assistance in total, is a very significant stumbling block preventing progress being made.

Too much of the localisation discussion still presents local actors as contributing insights and experience to internationally owned and operated top-down humanitarian responses, instead of more collaborative locally led and designed responses which fully utilise the skills, knowledge and capacity of local actors. In the case of WLOs, reconfiguring humanitarian decision-making structures to allow for local leadership by WLOs is key to strengthening the effectiveness of humanitarian response in the near term, and to transitioning between different phases of the humanitarian–development nexus beyond the emergency phase.

Angelina Nyajima is Executive Director of Hope Restoration South Sudan.