This transcipt is autogenerated and may include errors

Nwabundo: Welcome to Fresh Humanitarian Perspectives. Today, we’ll be speaking with… Vandi. Hyelladi. Who is the programme manager and deputy consortium lead at Save the Children International, based in Jigawa, Nigeria. In this conversation with Vandi, we’ll be speaking with him as a humanitarian leader, who is blazing the trail in the humanitarian sector across Nigeria. and globally. His work has influenced communities, inspired others, and contributed to positive change. Welcome, Vandi.

Vandi Hyelladi: Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here.

Nwabundo: Excellent. So, this episode, we’re having today. We’ll uncover your humanitarian story. For the benefit of our listeners, let me share how we met. We met at HX Abuja. and had lunch together, and you shared a very compelling story about your humanitarian journey, and I thought. The rest of all our community members need to hear this story, because it’s not only inspiring, they have so many lessons to draw from it. With that, Vandi, tell us a bit about yourself. Tell us a bit about yourself. What inspired you, and how did this journey begin?

Vandi Hyelladi: Well, thank you again, Nwabundo. Yeah. I always ask myself that myself, how did I get here? But, for me, I would like… To start by seeing… I found purpose before I knew what to call it. When people see me today as a deputy consortium lead with Save the Children International, Nigeria, they often assume that I always knew exactly where I was headed. The truth is, I didn’t. I grew up carrying more expectations than answers. My parents wanted me to become a doctor. I loved the prestige it represented, I wouldn’t lie. While secretly, on my own, I was dreaming of becoming a pilot. I entered the university very, very young, after a very… Well… Challenging high school days, you know, coming from a poor, background. But, for me, I think… I was confused about my directions, and I studied zoology. After graduating, I handed that degree to my parents, because it was tilted towards the medicine they wanted me to read. Back to the university, started all over again, studied economics. By then, adulthood had arrived. I understood that survival, responsibility, and purpose do not always arrive together. So one thing, however, never changed. I loved helping people. My mother was known for connecting people to hope. Sometimes she gives advice, encouragement, referrals, practical support. So, for me, without realizing it, I was learning the service beginning long before it became even a profession for me. So everything changed one evening. When I was watching Hotel Rwanda, it’s a movie about the whole Rwandan conflict in the 90s. While everyone fled danger, one humanitarian aid worker drove towards it to rescue children. I remember asking myself, who risks everything for strangers? Like, this lady in the movie was not even an African, and she was in Africa, and then running towards danger while even Africans were running away from him. I didn’t know what humanitarian work was then, but something inside me came alive when I saw that. I still didn’t know how to enter the sector, like, to be the whole humanitarian or development aid worker, so I focused on excellence wherever I found myself. I graduated among the best students during my time. I received many awards during my National Youth Service, my school days. And even during my master’s degree, I was a valedictorian. So, for me, I strive to… Excellence in everything I do. So, looking back, excellence was opening doors before purpose walked through them. Eventually, I secured a respected government job. It offered me stability, but not fulfillment. One day, I was being publicly humiliated. Oh, okay. So I was just trying to express my… where the turning point was for me.

Nwabundo: Hmm…

Vandi Hyelladi: You know, as a serviceman working in one of the uniform organizations here in Nigeria, And, My boss came in and was harassing me on where I packed my very old vehicle. So it was a moment of thought for me, and I was thinking, is this how I want my life to be? Even though I was confused on the direction. Well. The later end of it is that I left, I resigned, and my family was devastated by my decision, because everybody looked at it as if it was a very secured place to be, like, to have a government job, job security, stable income, but for me to walk away from it was really not… the usual thing a young, you know, graduate was going to be or do in Nigeria. So my family was very disappointed. I remembered my mom not talking to me for quite a while for that decision. Well, My journey here started when I met a guy, Maxwell, that gave me an opportunity to volunteer in his organization. And from there… the passion grew even bigger, and then I started getting exposed to the humanitarian and development sector. 13 years today. Wow. Here I am in Save the Children International.

Nwabundo: 13 years, okay. Can we take a pause? Because you have… you have gisted us quite a lot about the journey, and I feel like I feel like we need to just recap. Hold on, because I’m really excited about your journey. So, you started off, in your mind, you wanted to be a pilot. Yes. Typical, typical, you know, African households is doctor, lawyer, yeah, doctor or lawyer. Your parents wanted to be a doctor. And then you, good child ofid, went to study zoology for your first degree, you said, and then you handed it to your parents. That made me laugh when you said…

Vandi Hyelladi: Yeah, I actually did, because I never used that certificate. Up till now, I don’t use it, so… And then the bit, I didn’t tell you about it, you know, in Nigeria, while you’re studying a science course like zoology, if you want to study medicine, you would have to write the university tertiary examination, what we call UTME here.

Vandi Hyelladi: apply for a job. So, I wrote UTME for all the years I spent in school. So I wrote UTME five times, actually looking for admission.

Nwabundo: Wow.

Vandi Hyelladi: And I never got it. So, when I finished, I said, okay, maybe that’s, God telling me that that’s not my path. I gave them their certificate and just pursued… at that time, I was getting older, like I said, so…

Nwabundo: For context, for context, UTME… their UTME exams is an annual exam, right? It’s not… it’s done every year, it’s not done more than once a year, is it?

Vandi Hyelladi: Yes, so it happens once.

Nwabundo: So you took it 5 times, which means it took you 5 years to get into… to get him to study medicine. What this is pulling… this is… what I’m hearing is resilience and tenacity here, because… Five years is a long time to wait to do something you don’t actually want to do.

Vandi Hyelladi: Yes.

Nwabundo: to the… So I wanted us to sit with that, because there’s some other things you mentioned. You mentioned how, you know, excellence was always your watchword. From… from in everything you did. Which is why, obviously, because I… as a Nigerian myself, I know there are ways to get to achieve things or to do things, but you chose the excellent path. Even though it took you so long, and for something that you didn’t want. So that says a lot already. And then, after that, you handed over the documents, and went back to study your love, or what you wanted, which was economics, you said.

Vandi Hyelladi: Exactly. So, along the way, you know, I lost passion for medicine. Of course, you know, they didn’t happen in the public system. I didn’t come from an affluent home, so I couldn’t afford private universities. So, within the public universities, if I was going to study medicine, it was going to take me another 6, 7 years. And I didn’t have the luxury of time because I was getting older, responsibilities were piling, and so on and so forth. So I just chose… The next best option I had, which was economics, and I still did well. if you ask me personally, I would just say, one lesson from my journey. is… Your career is what you do, right? But your purpose is who you become while doing it.

Nwabundo: So…

Vandi Hyelladi: When your purpose aligns with your career. then your work becomes a service. Like, you feel happy doing it. Service becomes impact. And then impact becomes your legacy. So, many people see me today and think, okay, I’ve always planned it, I’ve planned to grow in this career and be where I am today. But for me, I just see it was, just… Purpose aligning with… Passion. Resilience, sustaining. efforts, and excellence. So… but I wouldn’t say this is my final boss stop, because I feel that my story is still being written, and I hope it reminds someone that, purpose often finds us long before we learn. What case?

Nwabundo: These are such powerful words. I want us to also go back again, sorry, what you said…You, of course got a good job in many levels. A uniform job in Nigeria is a very good job, especially working with the government. And you were doing that job, which was quite… it was good for you at the time, and you said everything changed when you were watching Hotel Rwanda, which is… a popular film. Well, it was popular in its time, and it’s still quite popular. about the Rwandan crisis, and you said that you saw someone running towards danger, or towards danger to help people, when people from… people, locals, were running away from it. That is such an incredible picture that you painted. And made you wonder. what is this? What’s happening? Who’s this person? Remembering also, you had also mentioned that you already have a service background. And… you loved helping people. That is the baseline. For me, hearing you speak is What do you love doing? That’s why I heard you. And that’s why what you watched resonated with you, because many people I’m sure have watched Hotel Rwanda and did not have the same feeling that you had, like, oh, wow, this is interesting, why is she running towards… instead, maybe they would have… some people would think, is this person silly? Why are you running towards danger?

Vandi Hyelladi: Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, in the movie, she was warned by her peers not to step out of the hotel where she was. But her passion was way, way, way stronger than any danger that everyone saw. So, the lady drove out, took those children, took them to the IDP camp, and I was like, it took me quite a while. You know, the movie is so touching, very emotional, given that it is even a depiction of a real situation. Like, it was accounts of people that experienced it. So knowing that it was a true life story, and somebody doing that, for me, that part stuck. better than any other part. There were other parts that were outstanding and very pleasuring, but that part was particularly sticking to me, and at the end of the day. It made me to think. And what is more, you know, outstanding to me is that the lady in question wasn’t even looking African. In fact, she was European in build. And I’m like, why do you take such risk and sacrifice a lot in a country where you don’t even belong? Like. it’s not your country, it’s not your people, so I felt there was more to this than what meets the eye. And that was, for me. the trigger point. And when it happened that I was in public service, and I was humiliated, spoken down upon. And… The part I didn’t tell you is that it didn’t end at being humiliated and spoken down upon. I was actually locked up. So we have We call it the provost. So, when any uniformed officer misbehaves, you are locked there to cool down a bit, so that you have a conversation with your superior officers later, and then you get some warnings or something. And while I was locked up in there, I was thinking, is this the life I want for myself? Because, number one, I was just doing it because my parents felt there was job security, and then there was this prestige about being a uniformed person. But I didn’t have satisfaction, so… Immediately, I was released. Some weeks later, I ran away. And voila! I volunteered at it, and here I am.

Nwabundo: Wow. So you started… your first foray in the humanitarian sector was as a volunteer.

Vandi Hyelladi: Yes, yes, I was paid nothing. nothing.

Nwabundo: It came from salary to nothing.

Vandi Hyelladi: To nothing, to nothing. And to tell you the disparity, I was earning about, let’s say, 100 USD per month. As a startup in the government. I came back to zero. So, to survive, I had to now look for a job. as a volunteer teacher in a Christian secondary school that paid me less than 16 euro in a month.

Nwabundo: Hmm. So…

Vandi Hyelladi: if you put that together, I was having about 16 euro, that means around 19, 20 USD per month, as against 100, 110 USD at that time, and I was volunteering for community service for free. So I had a lot on my hands, and very minimal finances to work on. So I couldn’t come to my family for help. I was told very clearly by my mom. I threw it away, I should face it myself. But I’m glad she’s happy about me today.

Nwabundo: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it’s not easy to be a whole, leading a consortium.

Vandi Hyelladi: Wait.

Nwabundi: So, this is a good segue into our next… the next part of our conversation around crisis and challenges, because I can imagine that You know, earning zero was a bit of a challenge. at the start of your career, but obviously your passion sounds like your passion was driving you more, and the knowledge that where you were before was not where you wanted to be. I think that those are powerful things that could really drive someone to do things, even with the challenges of not having means financially. Well, tell me a bit more about the journey so far, from that point where you started volunteering in the sector, what are some of the challenges that you have… that you may have faced, you know, within… because… and you can continue in the… in the line of, you know, the storytelling, which I’m really enjoying, where after… after… I mean, after volunteering, how you, you know. Do your first ever paid role, and some of the things that Happened along the way.

Vandi Hyelladi: a lot actually happened, you know. Of course, you’ve mentioned the key, which is, financial, constraints that I had starting off in my career. Because, you know, the general perception of a typical African child from a you know, poor to average background is that you finish school, you get a good job, and then you take care of your parents. Basically, that is the cyclic nature of thoughts that we have. But for me, I had finished school with a lot of sacrifices, because I have two first degrees, so my parents had very high expectations. from me, hoping that I was going to help out in the house, and then with minimal, finances at that time, I couldn’t do much, so it, you know, affected our relationship for a bit, so that was the first challenge I faced. But over time, I had faced many challenges. For instance, challenges of moving between organizations and locations within Nigeria, and outside Nigeria. Particularly going to locations where you have constraints in the… The culture there, but you have to still remain respectful. You have to, you know, love what you do, and love the people, appreciate their challenges, support, and build local solutions together with them. So these were all things I had faced in my career, within my path. Particularly, I think my first break came when I became an acting team leader. I was working for, an organisation. the Danish Refugee Council, actually. And, I went to a totally different setup from what I was used to all growing up here in Nigeria. So, I went to a very… Conservative society where everything you do is scrutinized based on the eye of our social-religious perspectives and everything. And it was kind of hard for me to adjust. But the good part is that in this career. you have good support, especially mentorship and coaching. If you have good bosses or good mentors, then it helps you navigate such challenges with ease. Right now, if you ask me, as a deputy consortium lead, what my biggest challenge is. is… I would say it’s balancing compassion with difficult operational decisions. Sometimes you see communities that will lose everything. The only thing that will be remaining in such communities would be hope. But as a leader, You would have to take hard choices. But while you take that hard choice, you have to know behind your mind that you must maintain humanity. So this is my biggest challenge now. To take hard choices as a leader. While maintaining your humanity. It might sound very easy to somebody that is not in this situation, but it’s quite difficult when you face it as a person.

Nwabundo: Hmm. Combining compassion. with the things that need to get done. Yeah, I can’t see how that would be… It will be a real challenge, especially in this sector that we work in. And… Do you… do… do you… are you happy to share any… Actual examples of… That’s… that type of scenario that may have happened, not recent, maybe… From FAPA.

Vandi Hyelladi: Absolutely, absolutely. So, in the peak of the crisis in the Northeast between 2014 To 2016, or thereabout. So, we’re working in one of the most… very troubled and dangerous communities in one of the northeastern states, UB State. You might have heard about it. It was one of… it’s one of the base states that was most affected by the insurgency in Nigeria. And… we had… A situation. where… We couldn’t help all the communities. And fortunately… unfortunately for us, let me put it this way, is that the relationship between the communities are very intertwined. Because of their proximity. Now, it was two things. Concentrate, and help out the most vulnerable and the most needy at that time using the mega resources we had, or spreading it across everyone, so that everybody has a bit of support, only that the relapse would be quick, and it would be immediate. So we had to make a decision. And, well, we just came up with the fact that we need to help the most weak among the society. So we had to focus on children, women, and survivors of You know, gender-based violence, or kidnappings or abductions by the insurgents, like those that were… that were released, or were gotten back by the army. And, for me, it was just choice between bad situations, but you just have to choose, you know, the one that you feel will make the most impact. So it’s very sad to be in this situation where, you know. both sides. It’s like you’re fighting a lost battle, but somehow you just have to keep the hope alive, you know? These are two bad situations. You hope everybody had food to eat, you hope everybody had clean water to drink, you hope everybody had some shelter over their heads, and you hope That people have some. Even if it is, you know, a reasonable ration. You know, to maintain their nutrition. But you’d find out that the needs would be so vast, and the population would be so dynamic, the demographic composition so complex, and you would just have to choose between conflicting priorities, and you’d have to settle for the lesser evil. It’s very painful. Very cool. Cool. Yeah.

Nwabundo: Absolutely, and I think that’s… that’s your service, that’s your service speaking, and that’s that desire, that passion to… to provide service. I’m speaking, and I 100% relate with what you’re saying, and I think just to almost, like, bring it to what’s happening, you know, in the sector now, all the conversations that people are having around collaboration. Yeah. You know, making sure that when people or organizations go into different communities, they are working together with the NGOs that already exist there, or the INGOs already exist there, because and sorry, this is kind of going off… off the… off the point of our conversation, but it’s just reminding me, because those are some of the conversations we had at HX Abuja, is Yeah. You can’t come into your community not knowing what’s happening, because imagine you come there choosing to help the most vulnerable, because that’s where you see the greatest need. And then if another organization comes in there choosing the most vulnerable, again. It just means that there are some people that continually get ignored because they’re not the most vulnerable. But if there’s more collaboration, exactly, you know, but if there’s more collaboration amongst us, and we’re working together, so all the NGOs working together will be in that area. There’s more… it spreads out more, you know, the people… more people are reached. More people who might not necessarily fit into You know, what’s…

Vandi Hyelladi: Owen.

Nwabundo: Different edges.

Vandi Hyelladi: And, you know, I… I… at this point, I think you… you struck Something that I think would be helpful if I share. Sometimes, when we work, we are tempted to believe we know what is best for this.

Vandi Hyelladi: Right? We treat the communities as beneficiaries, or these are the global standards, these are the fair standards, these are these standards, minimum thresholds, and all those things. But when you interact with them, you would find out that there is more juice to the lemon than what you’re seeing, right? Because when you interact, they give you these perspectives, and you’d find out that some things you think, or you thought in your mind, that are life-saving might not actually be the priority for them.

Vandi Hyelladi: We went to a community, In, one of the places I worked before. And the idea was to target a certain proportion of males and females alike for cash transfer. And when we went, we did the community entry, we discussed, and then we went into this dialogue to understand the dynamics, current dynamics of the community as at that time. And it was shocking for me to see That the female said, here, they trust their men. And if we have to give the cash, we should prioritize the husbands first. The husbands have the responsibility of taking all aspects of the family life and livelihoods of the whole family, the mother, the children, and everyone, you know, involved, are first. So we’re asking, but why? We have seen that in some places, when you prioritize men, they have other priorities, like some would You know, go and take care of themselves, living out the families. So, but the mothers have this compassion to, you know, support the children and everything. And they said, no, it’s not like that here. Now, this is vis-a-vis a proposal that was saying we should target 70% females. But this is what is coming from the community.

Vandi Hyelladi: So, we had a conversation. This is what they say. Can we have a structured way of testing this hypothesis? And we try it out. At the end, it worked superbly. no gender-based violence, no neglect, at least it was kept to barest minimums. You can’t say 100% there was no challenges, but it significantly was successful. So, for me, I think it’s high time we move from treating communities like beneficiaries and moving them into partners. They are partners. They understand their challenges. They are facing. So, partnering with the communities to devise local solutions for their problems brings out more impact than assuming that this formula fits all situations, so far as the situations are similar. And again, we need to know as… development or humanitarian aid workers as organizations, as different stakeholders in this sector, that the real owners of sustainable change is the community. Absolutely. to… if they don’t take the driving seat, it just becomes a temporary fix to a permanent challenge. So, the communities must be treated as… Partners are not… beneficiaries.

Vandi Hyelladi: I’ve seen over my career.

Nwabundo: Hmm. Absolutely. Thank you, thank you for dropping those gems

Vandi Hyelladi: Yes, yes.

Nwabundo: It’s very good to hear that experience that you shared. Because these are… I mean, I know we’ve probably heard, you know, examples like this over and over again. What I think is important for us to keep on hearing these examples, keep on reiterating these points, so that as we go into communities and collaborate with fellow INGOs, we’re considering, and not even considering, prioritizing the voices of the communities that we’re going to serve, so thank you very much for this.

Vandi Hyelladi: Yeah, you’re welcome.

Nwabundo: So, I have a few more questions, if you don’t mind.

Nwabundo: Here, we’re going into your personal definition of humanitarian leadership. You know, when you look at leadership right now in our sector, in our very, traumatized sector, if I can call it traumatized. How would you… how would you define Humanitarian? What do you think is needed today? In the sector, in terms of leadership qualities. What would you say is needed?

Vandi Hyelladi: So… for me, given how I went into this sector. the opportunities that this sector availed me, and the great, great colleagues I’ve had, and I’m still having today in this sector. I’ve narrowed leadership down to one single thing. And for me, leadership is not standing in front, or taking lead, or giving instructions. but leadership. It’s standing with people. It’s collaboration. Especially when those people have no voice. It’s partnership. It’s keeping the hope alive. If you cannot Make the hope of one depressed, one deprived, one underserved, One… disadvantaged person. to stay alive, then I think… You, as a person, needs to review if you are a leader or not. And when it comes to the qualities that I see, as leaders. If you come to the quality that I see. We should have as leaders in this sector. The first that hits for me would be humility, because it takes humility to identify potentials in others. It takes humility to see the good in others, even when the situation is looking bad. You have to have courage, you have to have integrity, you have to be curious, you have to be very dynamic and innovative. You have to be resilient. But in all these aspects, The ability to collaborate across culture with humility. For me, is the most important quality that we should have as leaders in this sector. Because it helps us to appreciate The juice, and the main content. Of our relationship with the communities and the people we serve. So that is what I’ll think. About leader and qualities of leaders in our segment.

Nwabundo: You’re absolutely correct, because, I mean, not… I absolutely agree with you. Humility, I would have never thought that would be the… main… the first thing you would say, I don’t… I don’t know what I was expecting, but… when he said it, I said, wow, that is so true. Humility, humility, and… I believe this spreads across Not just people who are… who have been in the sector, because who are probably the ones who struggle the most with humility. I’ve been here for 50 years, I know everything. Exactly. And I think it spreads also across young humanitarians coming in, right? Would you say that, you know, someone who is just starting out in the sector, that is also a quality that they will need to always bear in mind?

Vandi Hyelladi: Absolutely, Nwabundo, absolutely. Let me tell you, I was a victim of that, too, starting out. The passion was there. The courage was there. But I didn’t know the humility to grow fast. So let me share one interesting fact that I didn’t tell you from the beginning. I started from volunteering. Grew into an assistant. became an officer, And I remained an officer. For 6 years. 6 years across 3 organizations as an officer. And I had to ask myself, I said, what is it? And it took one, one. very visionary leader. That is currently my mentor. I’m so proud. He’s a Zimbabwe, and his name is Freeman Muleya. He looked at me and said, Vandi. You have everything it takes to grow. But you have to be humble. If you are not humble, You would fall into the trap of thinking you know it all. And once you are in that trap. Your pet will be so full that you can never develop. And it’s only a matter of time, you will lose your humanity, and it will be around the force. The income and the prestige it brings to you. Those words stuck to me, and for a very long time, I thought about it. When I was able to break out of it, you would not believe I became a technical advisor. from an officer. I was never a manager, I was never a team lead, I became a technical advisor, straight. So sometimes it’s not what we know or what we can do. The basics of our careers as humanitarian and development aid workers is our humanity. When you can do everything, and you lose your humanity, Then… You’ve lost it. And I have seen across this number of years, I’ve worked young, Professionals that come up. Join this sector, and come with fire and everything, but pride takes them down. Because, as it is said, pride comes before a fault. It’s pride that blinds you to seeing that processes and procedures are put in place to protect you and protect the people you serve. It’s pride that makes you see that you can bypass processes and think you can achieve the same outcome. It’s pride that makes you think that you know what is best for the community. It’s pride that makes you think that you know what is best for the people that we serve. while their individual needs are not considered, and their individual opinions are not considered. So all this, for me, I tie it down to pride, which is very, very visible and rampant these days. However, I think We, that have gone ahead, and still are moving forward. Should take it as a responsibility that whoever comes across our path as colleagues, that we mentor them, that we coach them, that we help them groom into very solid professionals that would put humanity and service first before any other thing. Because this is what defines the purpose of a map, and this is what keeps the fire burning for us in this sector. Once we lose it, then all the humanitarian principles that we stand is lost. Our neutrality, our… all the humanitarian principles that we stand for will be lost. So, it is a big thing for me, and it’s absolutely true that right now you see a lot of this, especially among young professionals, you know. panning out and showing itself in a very ugly way. But hopefully we’ll keep You know, advocating for… for professionalism and, humility and service, you know, ahead of anything else. I think you’re muted.

Nwabundo: Yeah, but yeah, gosh, yes, pride. And… And how… How it affects everything. Everything, even more than we can think of, even more than… I think, the extent of how much… Pride can… affect our work as humanitarians. I don’t think we’ve… We fully understand, and I really love how you… brought in mentorship. Because I was going to mention that as well, god bless good mentors.

Vandi Hyelladi: Yeah, absolutely. Oh, man.

Nwabundo: Because I imagine you’d probably still be an officer if somebody hadn’t called it to order.

Vandi Hyelladi: Exactly, right? Exactly, exactly. But more to building professionals for me. Beyond mentorship, we also need to coach.Coaching, we need to delegate responsibilities, because these are all things that Freeman gave me. Gave me the opportunity to make my mistakes, learn from them. forward, keep advancing, you know, giving me counsel and advice and guidance all through the way, but allowing me to make, you know, sufficient mistakes to learn from them, practically. But again, to this. We have to. As people that have gone forward. Create opportunities for those that are coming behind. Let others shine. Let others come and take the touch. Because we would not remain there forever.

Nwabundo: Absolutely.

Vandi Hyelladi: Yes, we might have the passion, we might have the zest and everything now, but Someday, age will catch up. We have to step aside, new leaders will come. So what happens when we don’t take our time and build the leaders as we were built? The whole thing will collapse. So, we will… Advocate for coaching. Mentorship, But again. Let’s not coach a mentor only, but let’s delegate, let’s create opportunities for these young lads, and let us give them opportunity to shine. It’s more joyful to shine together.

Nwabundo: I love that. It is more joyful to shine together. And I’ll just quickly plug in… do a quick plug of the Humanitarian Leadership Academy’s Leadership Coaching Network. Where we are… we invite, people who are interested in Becoming coaches, or people who are looking to be coached. we have a series of applications. I’ll include, the link To some information to this podcast for anyone who is interested in checking out the network, either to join as a coach, or to, be a coachee. or someone who is seeking mentorship as well. We’ve got provision for that at the Humanitarian Leadership Academy, because one of our focuses is supporting leaders in the sector globally. So, we welcome, interest, to a wide… Group of people, so just my quick plug. go back into the conversation. Thank you so much for your time so far with us, Vandi. Honestly, I think that I’ve learned some… as in listening to you, I’m just… Well, I’m really, really grateful, because I think what you’re sharing now is part of… is part of… what we’re saying, you know, being able to teach other people, and being able to share with other people, to encourage, to build, to mentor. There’s something I want to ask, which I’m trying to find a way to build it in, because you shared this with me at lunchtime. it’s something I think our audience is… because we reach a wide group of people, from secondary school to, you know, university to beyond. So… It’s going back to service, because you mentioned that your mom, you watched your mom serve. And I wondered… If at the start of your career. Even before the uniformed role made you realize made you realize how much you love service, or what’s… I know you said that the passion, your purpose, sorry. You found purpose even before you knew what it meant. I want… can you elaborate on what… what made you… what made you say that? What has happened, or what happened before your informed role? That made you… What made you say that? Made you realize that?

Vandi Hyelladi: Yeah, so, thank you. This is a very important thing, and sometimes we are so bothered with the chaos of life that we miss the… Small things that matter. you know… As you grow, At different stages of life, you have different priorities. But what is tied to your purpose and destiny? Would remain constant across all your ages. If you do see, say, or act on something that makes you happy. Fulfilled, and give you inner peace. Watch it critically, because your purpose might be tied to that. When I grew up seeing my mom help out. We didn’t come from an affluent family. We didn’t have You know, resources or money to throw around. But within the space, the small flexibilities that my mom had, she did her best. For some, she gave advice. And she became, like, the chief advisor of the community. Like, people come to her for counsel. And I’m like, how would a grown person meet another grown person to ask, what should I do? You know, that time I didn’t understand what it was, but I felt it was a nice thing. And then, when she reached out to people with the meager resources we had, He took us along. And anytime I do that, I feel happy, I jumped, I laughed, I smiled, and you see the smile on the faces of those that receive, and then it gladdens your heart. And everything just was falling into place. So, for me, I would feel, as a young lad in the secondary school, in the high school, junior, senior, or college level. The first thing you look out for is what makes you happy. While you do it. Let me give you an instance. I was discussing with a friend and saying, I envy those that do sports as professional athletes. And he said, why? I said, imagine getting paid those huge amounts for doing what you love doing. something you’re going to do, even if you’re not giving anything. Like… Is that not a bonus? So, when you pursue what you love doing, all the privileges. And the benefits. Would come as a bonus, because these are things you would do even if you’re not paid, even if you don’t have networks, even if you don’t meet people. Even if you don’t have the prestige and the, you know, flair and glamour that comes with it, you will do it, and you will do it diligently, and with all passion, and all commitment, and all humility. That would be the key ingredient. So, if you see that… Somebody coming out of a difficult situation makes you happy, genuinely, and gives you peace. And focuses your eyes, you know, on doing more for others. When you see your shoulder as a platform for others to stand and grow. than I think… This is enough triggers and direction for you that you might want to consider a career in this sector. or a related sector at different levels. If I want to lead this to my leadership now, Right? It had taught me to lead with empathy. to listen. Listen to people before I act. Even when the facts around are saying different, you have to listen. You have to empower people around you. Whether physically, whether financially, whether in skills, whether in resource, whatever way you can. But make somebody better than what the person was when you met them. You have to, in the final stages, celebrate the success of other people. Because this gives you the platform of knowing that this is the direction you need to take. I’m sorry I’m taking your time, but Sometimes it’s, it’s… it’s, it’s… it’s… elating for me to talk about this. It’s not every time we get opportunity to share our stories, because people see us and they judge us by what they see now.

Nwabundo: What?

Vandi Hyelladi: They don’t get the stages, the steps, the challenges, the obstacles that you’d have to pass to reach this point. Absolutely. And in all, Do what makes you happy.

Vandi Hyelladi: Exactly. So, you know, with these things that I got from my mom, anywhere I go, I try to find something to do to help others. So during my service year, I was posted to an establishment. It was a government, a public enterprise, it’s government-owned. Tarabh Investment and Properties Limited. It is in Taraba State in Nigeria, where I served. And I was posted to the capital desk. Basically, my role was, stock market monitoring, company appraisals, and so on and so forth. But many of my co-members at that time were posted to schools. Where they are expected to teach young lads. So, in one of these days, I went to visit my friend in one of the schools. It was a government secondary school at Dongar Route. And when I entered, I saw some lads. You know, Trying to ruffle one of the lads also in uniform. And I came and stopped them, and I was like, why do you want to bully this person? Whoa, whoa, whoa, just trying to keep calm and cool and, make everyone, you know, calm down, whatever it is that was provoking them. And one of them said something that struck me. He said they were given an assignment. There was only one of those books in the already dilapidated school library, and this guy took the book from the shelf and refused to return it, making them not to have the necessary resources what I mean by resources now is materials to do their assignment. Now, the assignment had been submitted, and he’s bringing out the book to return to the library, so they wanted to beat him. And… While people were seeing this as a challenge, I saw it as an opportunity. Already in my brain, I was like, okay, how do I have these guys to have access to books? It was already bad that young lads don’t like reading anymore. Not to even talk of being passionate about looking for books to read, but these are a group of young people. That are even fighting and angry that they were deprived of reading a book. So, I swung into inner thoughts and thought, okay, what can I be able to do? I said, okay, let me do something about it. I approached the school management. They are located a dilapidated classroom, block. A single room like that for me. I went to my office, I asked my office, please, can they support me with a computer? And they said, we would support you with your computer, what? So immediately, they told me they were going to support. I went into full action. Well, long story short, I was able to rally around, got people to contribute, I was able to set up a small digital library for the school. where I put 5 desktop computers, and then I approached the American University, then the head of the library was… a friend to my elder sister who was working also with the American University. So through her, she introduced me to him, and he donated one computer set, a desktop computer set, provided a router. Provided, access to about 5 million online books through their library portal. So I was able to set that up. I think that was… I started it as a passion, but just like I told you, it gave me a lot of commendations, because with that project, I got the state commendation, the state governor gave me the commendation, and that landed me my first ever paid job, because I was retained after my youth service, and I started working there for a few months before I joined the uniform work I went for. So, this was very elating for me. And, at a point, our state coordinator for the National Youth Service Corps was so angry at me. I was like. you had the intention of doing something like this, and you redeployed. I said, I don’t understand what you’re saying, sir. He said, this would have landed you a national award, and the government would have sponsored your master’s to any school in the whole world that you wanted to go. I said I didn’t know, I just saw a group of kids that needed books, and I just thought, how do I help as much as I can with the resources I can be able to rally. And in the face of digitization and computerization of schools, I thought. What more would serve more people than an e-library? I wouldn’t have gotten enough books to go around the students in the school, but at least I would give everyone that is really interested access to have Whatever books they wanted to. And one thing I didn’t also tell you is that during our lunch that time, is that To that library, I had also physical books on bookshelf put there, and that was also donated by Books for Africa through a local community-based organization known as Karatu Library Foundation that was founded by someone close to me, Efada Udo. and was co-founded by the then-head of library in the American University, Mattis Pearce. She’s an American. So they started it to support young children that are underprivileged among, you know, others in the community to have access to books just to read and develop themselves. So through, Ifada and Martha, I was able to get some high school books from Books for Africa donated, and I took it to the school and put them on the shelf. It’ll be interesting to know how this library is doing now, because to tell you, it’s been plenty years I was in Taraba. But I think I’ll take it upon myself when next I’m there, I’ll try to go and see if it’s still there. Hopefully, it will still be there, I’m not sure.

Nwabundo: But definitely amazing work with that, honestly. I think when you shared that with me, I thought, okay, this is a… just for context for our listeners, the service here means, a lot of Nigerians, I think it might also be present in other countries, but in Nigeria. And when you finish your university, you have to do one year of serving the country, and what that means is That one year, the country, the government will post you to wherever they deem fit, wherever help is needed, and most times it’s schools, secondary schools, or mostly secondary schools across the country, sometimes in really rural areas, so they’re not necessarily, like, urban, up… you know, upbeat-type areas. It’s very rural, and then you go to teach courses like science, English, math, because there’s usually need for, teachers in those parts of Nigeria. And so, what Vandi is describing is That year, where… and the government pays you that year, because sometimes the salary from the places you’re posted to is not always Okay, and even without that, government pays regardless. So we do a camp, and then we do the service year, which is really… it’s always really good. And then during your service year, you can choose to do a project, if you so decide. It’s not mandatory. Some people do, some people don’t. And yeah, they teach you as well how to start a business, in case that’s what you decide to do when you finish from the service year. And typically, people typically do it while… before they get a real job, and some people get retained, like Vandi did, which… because he did amazing work. It’s not always the case. But that story, I think, is so important, because at the very end of doing two degrees. you went and saw a need, so you already… that service mindset was already in your heart, and… and that’s why I thought it would be so good for our audiences to hear that part of it. So, wherever you are, as listeners, wherever you are, just start. You see a need, you know. see what you can do about it. I usually say this to young people, is why you see a need, even if you don’t have the means. Obviously, with the salary from the government, I don’t think it was a lot at the time. You wait.

Vandi Hyelladi: What was it?

Nwabundo: Exactly. You found means, though, and people saw the value in what you were doing. I want to say that’s the first ever in Taraba state, no? The first.

Vandi Hyelladi: Yes.

Nwabundo: library. So this is a historical thing here, and I can’t imagine how many people that that library would have impacted. and how much more encouragement you’d have provided to people, you know, young people trying to finish a degree. All that access, honestly, at that time, all that access to resources is invaluable. invaluable, absolutely invaluable, if you’re asking. So, on behalf of Taraba people, even though I know you got your accolades, thank you, thank you for doing that.

Nwabundo: How can young professionals prepare themselves for Humanitarian leadership? And if there was one message you want to leave with the sector, with all the workers in the sector, especially in this climate that we are in now, what would that message be? So, two questions in one.

Vandi Hyelladi: Okay, so… Well, I’ll tell, young… people. Not to chase titles. Rather, Chase Competence. Very key. His character. and contribution. You have to be competent in what you do. You have to have the right character for what you do. And you have to always see everything from the eyes of what can I contribute? Because excellence opens doors. But purpose determines which ones you walk through. So you would have to make those decisions for yourself. And that is what… I would advise young people. And if I would, like, maybe give… Like a reflection, or… what I think in this sector, we should be doing now, is… For us to do that, we have to also understand that Africa’s young people Is it… is enough resources. So we have to strive to find locally-led solutions. We have to be innovative. But most importantly, we have to develop partnerships. Partnerships with the communities that we serve. Partnership with our fellow colleagues. Partnership with the institutions that support the work we do. partnerships with the institution that are saddled with the responsibility of what we do within every state that we work. When I say state, I mean the countries that we work. partnerships with the upcoming… let me… allow me to put it that way. Upcoming professionals that would be the next generation of leaders in this sector. We have to just build partnerships across both. So this would be some things that I think we can do as professionals in this field of work. And for us to achieve that. We have to invest greatly in localization. We shouldn’t always feel that as international institutions or international staff for international organizations, that this is going to continue. Because if you look at the trend now. There is increasing chaos and crisis globally. So we can’t always depend on international fundings or grants to help the people that are in need. Let’s find a way of helping, somehow. Therefore, I want to advocate for greater localization. We have to also invest in our youths. Africa has a huge youth population. In Nigeria. I saw an article that was saying our population is above 300 million now, and 60% are youth. 60% of 300 million That’s a lot of tens of millions of youths. And as David Ricardo says, mob. Mass army of mob. So, if we don’t do anything about it, That is our future problem. So… We have to invest. In our youths. And we have to build stronger systems. systems that work. Systems with purpose—systems that can help generations yet unborn. We have to also know. as Africans, I know we are nonchalant about this, but… Thank God with the increasing awareness and countries taking practical steps to tackle it. I know that we are serious about it now. It’s the issue of climate. We have to be serious about climate. As a baseline, we have to pay attention to dignified livelihoods for all. Because 90% of the challenges we face, in Africa specifically. Has one, in one way or the other, has a point to be tied with the livelihoods of those individuals, communities, states, countries, or regions.

Nwabundo: Absolutely.

Vandi Hyelladi: we have to work towards dignified livelihoods. So that would basically be my thoughts about our work. And that would be my recommendation for young people.

Nwabundo: Thank you so much, for your time today. Thank you for sharing very strong, useful nuggets, not just For navigating this sector as a young person, but also for navigating life, because things like having excellence, being excellent in everything we do. Having a certain level of resilience. Being able to identify passion, you know, and go with it. Humility is perhaps the biggest thing to flag. And having a heart of service, Even in spite of challenges. So thank you so very much. Thank you, and I’m deeply appreciative, and thanks to the HLA and, and HX Abuja, because that’s the way we connected, and I’m so grateful for that connection.

Vandi Hyelladi: Yeah, absolutely. So just telling our young dudes, right? Our young lads. The greatest measure of success is not how high you climb, but how many people stand taller because you chose to serve. Purpose is rarely found in comfort. It is found in courage. And if your work leaves hope, where there was once despair, then you have lived a life that truly matters.

Nwabundo: Thank you, sir. I think on that note, we will round up this episode of Fresh Humanitarian Perspectives. Thank you, everyone, for listening

This transcript has been generated using automated tools. It has been checked but minor errors or omissions may remain.

[Intro music]

[Voiceover, Fay]: Welcome to Fresh Humanitarian Perspectives, the podcast brought to you by the Humanitarian Leadership Academy.

[Music changes]

Fay:When we think about humanitarian response, we often think about meeting immediate needs. But what if our work could also help restore ecosystems, strengthen local food systems, and create the conditions for communities to flourish long after a crisis has passed? Well, that’s exactly what we’re discussing today, in today’s podcast episode. My name is Fay Loosley, and I’m the Sales and Accounts Lead here at the HLA. I’m joined by my co-host and colleague, Ka Man Parkinson, our Communications Lead, and we’re delighted to welcome our partners James Atherton and Ansiima Casinga Rolande, also known as Rolande, from Re-Alliance.

Re-Alliance is one of our wonderful Kaya partners. You joined us earlier this year, so a big welcome into the Kaya community, and you’ve launched an amazing new course on our platform. So, for all those listening to this conversation, if you’re intrigued and inspired to learn more, please head over to kayaconnect.org to check it out after this podcast, and we’ll drop the link in the show notes.

We really hope this conversation will resonate with people working at the intersection of humanitarian response, community resilience, food systems, environmental stewardship, and locally led development. But perhaps even more powerfully, it’s a conversation for those who feel that humanitarian work often addresses the symptoms without always having the opportunity to focus on long-term development and sustainable livelihoods.

So, to help us explore these topics, I’d love to start with the people behind that work.

[Music fades]

Fay: So, James and Rolande, thank you so much for joining us today. I’d love to hear a little bit more about your backgrounds, how you came to work at that intersection of humanitarian action and regeneration, and what first drew you to permaculture?

Rolande: Hi, I’m Rolande. I live in Uganda. And now I’m a permaculture trainer. My story is a bit long, but I’m going to try to cut it short.

The way I found myself in permaculture was because I wanted to do something for my community and for my family. My family left Congo and started living in a refugee camp, which was a completely different setting for us — like shifting a whole life. My family, and many other families, faced the same kind of challenges — water, education, food, all the basic needs for people to survive in a refugee camp. And I, as the first child, though I was still young — I was about 15 or 16 at the time — started working to support my family and help my parents raise their younger ones.

So I did a lot of different jobs, until I found one where my role was to collect data from other refugees, new refugees — asking them how they’d been coping with life in the camp over three months, six months, two years. During that time, I kind of discovered a lot, and it opened my eyes to the main challenges that people were facing. I was trying to find a way I could be useful, so I tried to volunteer with some organisations doing that kind of work — but it didn’t work out, I didn’t have any experience.

So I later joined a group of friends with the same mindset — including Morag, an Australian woman who does permaculture. At first I thought I would just go back to my community and teach about food growing [laughs] — that’s what I was hoping to get from it. But it turned out it wasn’t only about food growing. It was like opening a new world that I didn’t know existed but was right there. I learned about education, I learned about economics, I learned about food, I learned about sustainability. I learned so many things, and I realised there are so many conversations that people don’t actually have, but which are right in front of us. And yeah — that’s how I got into permaculture, up to now.

Fay: What an amazing story, Rolande. It’s so great to hear your journey, and how determined you were to build a successful life and thrive and look after your family at the same time, through such hardship. It’s really amazing to hear that, and I’m sure James is extremely happy to have you on his team, being in the heart of that. James, how about you?

James: Oh, thank you, Fay — and thank you, Fay and Ka Man, for having us on the podcast, we’re so happy to be here. And yeah, like you say, Fay, I’m inspired, and I learn so much every day from working with Rolande — thank you, Rolande, for sharing your amazing story, you’re such a wonderful permaculture teacher.

Permaculture, I think for me, started when — I’m from Australia, and my love of being out in wild nature really inspired me to look into how we can learn from living systems, which is kind of what permaculture is — how do we learn from the way life works, the way living systems work, to meet our own needs. That really resonates with what Rolande was saying about how we can meet the challenges we’re facing as humans, but learn from the way nature does it — the way wild nature makes these challenges less burdensome, perhaps. So we often look at this from a perspective of food needs — how do we meet our human food needs in ways that also enrich the ecosystem and support the health of communities and biodiversity.

Rolande mentioned Morag, a permaculture teacher — and actually we found this out much later. I’m not sure Morag even knows this, so maybe I should tell her before this podcast is released [laughs]— but your teacher, Rolande, Morag, lives quite close to where I’m from in Australia, and some of her permaculture projects were my first example of permaculture. Seeing those was what opened my eyes to this amazing movement. So we actually come from similar backgrounds, which is quite interesting and quite funny. And then years later, we met and worked together.

But permaculture, I think, is also quite hopeful, which is what draws me to it. It’s, in a way, a design movement, because it places humans as creatures with this amazing capacity to change the world around us. And it’s true — other species do the same, they change their habitats to suit their needs. But often we see humans doing this in ways that are quite destructive. We’ve changed the planet in such a way that the capacity to sustain life is going down, and we’re creating harm to living systems, which is harming ourselves and humanity too. We’re sadly nowhere near reaching the climate targets we’ve collectively set, and estimates show we’re now seeing effects we were meant to see later in the century. So we’re living in this climate emergency, which can feel very intense.

I mean, Ka Man and Fay, you’ll know that at the time of recording this, we’ve just lived through severe heat waves across Europe, which have sadly and horrifically taken the lives of over 10,000 people in just the past few months alone. So we know we’re living in this intense climate emergency, and we need to make change. But how we do that is where a lot of people have a difference of opinion, and for me, that’s where movements like permaculture can give us a lot of hope — because it places humans as having the capacity to create change in the world around us. We’ve seen us do that in a negative way, but we can create so much positive change too, through ecosystem repair, stewarding biodiversity, and learning from how people have done this since time immemorial — creating better ecosystem health that supports not only us but countless other species.

And when you see, like Rolande was saying, how people who struggled to access water can now access it — because they’re creating landscapes that hold and retain more water in the soil — and how they can then meet their food needs, and people who were struggling to access food now have this abundance — that’s what inspires me about permaculture.

Ka Man: It’s such a pleasure to have this chance to join Fay for this conversation, together with you, James and Rolande. Just listening in already is so inspiring because the fact that you centre this on hope is something that seems in short supply at times, in these current times.

So, you know, you’re talking about this as a movement, based on individuals connecting ideas, and I love the fact that Rolande and James, you were connected via Morag, your permaculture teacher — and that connects your worlds together between Australia and Congo. It’s just incredible, isn’t it. So I’m already enjoying the start of this conversation, thank you so much.

11:41: Chapter 2: Breaking it down: permaculture and regenerative humanitarian response

Ka Man: So James, you already touched on, you introduced us to these concepts briefly on regeneration and permaculture. And admittedly, when Fay told us, oh we have this Kaya partner Re-Alliance and regenerative humanitarian response, I was very intrigued and also thought, oh that’s different — I’ve not really heard about this framed in the context of humanitarian response, within the world that I’m in, within INGO/NGO structures etc. So for our listeners who, like me, are new to this, could I invite both of you to share, dig a bit deeper into these concepts and break them down for us? Could I come to you first, please, Rolande?

Rolande: Yeah, sure. Well, regeneration and permaculture — sometimes I feels hard with these terms and actually dissociate them, especially when I visit people and they tell me, “we practice agroforestry,” “we practice regenerative agriculture,” “we practice this and that” — it’s all under the same umbrella, which is permaculture. Permaculture is, like James said, a system, and a set of principles that help us live in harmony with nature and with ourselves, and to use our resources well. That could be the shortest definition of it. Regeneration, on the other side, is part of permaculture too, but it’s where we learn to go deeper into rebuilding systems that have been broken, and building them stronger than before.

I think permaculture and regeneration are here to teach us that we’ve done a lot of damage as human being, we need to start thinking about how Earth will be in the next 100, 200, or 1,000 years — and it doesn’t look good. Everybody knows that. But how about we start thinking now about solutions that make sure we don’t only support what’s remaining, but build structures that support life in the future, that protect all kinds of life? There are animals that existed when I was born — only 23 years ago — that have already gone extinct. I feel like in 500 years children are going to learn about those animals like we hear about dinosaurs, and that’s not going to look good in the future. Everything in nature has their own role — so when they disappear it’s only going to bring more destruction, even if we don’t directly need them for food or working materials, or clothes or anything. But they contribute to our life, if we think systematically they come somewhere, and they support the system somewhere, that supports us and nature and everything else around us.

So permaculture’s main work how do we make sure we as humans live in harmony with ourselves first — healing the inner self — and then healing the world we live in, making sure the relationships we have with other people, other species, and the resources on this earth are used in ways that support us but don’t harm any part of it, so future generations can also live. James, maybe you can add on that.

James: Well, I just love, Rolande, how you spoke about healing the inner landscape as well — I think that’s so rich. For me, movements like regeneration and permaculture – it’s almost a shift in a way of thinking — a shift in paradigm, a shift in how we see and interact with the world, as well as like you say, learning from nature, which we see as principles: learning how nature cycles nutrients, how it supports life to thrive. It’s almost the three P’s — it’s a paradigm shift, it’s learning the principles, and putting them into practice, right.

What the humanitarian sector can really learn from this is that the paradigm is often about meeting the urgent, immediate need — dealing with emergencies here and now, which saves lives, right, this is why the humanitarian sector does what it does. To save lives. And I guess the invitation from regenerative movements and permaculture is to try to shift this slightly, to build longer-term resilience. So instead of just meeting immediate need, it’s also about building the health and resilience in the long term, like you were saying Rolande. And I do think we can do both. We’ve seen case studies of meeting immediate need — Re-Alliance is a network of humanitarian actors across the globe, and all of our members are putting these paradigms, principles into practice. And we’re seeing how we can meet immediate need. For example, some are working after environmental disasters that have sadly destroyed whole towns and cities with extreme loss of life — so meeting immediate need while also building long-term resilience of place and of community. And we learn from how nature does that to implement that in our strategies. So this is what I think is relevant to the humanitarian sector,

And there are interesting cost-benefit analyses too — if saving lives and healing ecosystems and building resilience isn’t enough on its own, it’s also more cost-effective. So there are conservative estimates that for every dollar invested now in climate resilience, we save at least $10 in the future — and I think it’s actually it’s much, much more than this. Investing now in the resilience of people and communities facing oncoming climate shocks will not only save lives but is a very good investment for the sector now.

Ka Man and Fay, you mentioned the course on the Kaya Connect platform — there are great case studies in the course about how we can bring this to action and what this can look like in a number of humanitarian scenarios. Especially we focus a lot on protracted displacement, but a lot of it can also be applied to immediate need, like natural disasters or post-conflict situations.

19:56: Chapter 3: Building the economic case for regenerative approaches and ‘co-benefits’

Ka Man: That’s so fascinating, thank you both. I’m really interested, James, in the investment point — there’s almost an economic case for regenerative approaches, which is something I’m grappling with a lot in the humanitarian sector generally, given all the funding cuts and shortfalls, and the hyper-prioritisation that we talk of where it is focused on life-saving interventions. So I found that quite interesting that you said actually there are studies around that — I wondered if you would like to just share a bit more? Because I think that is something that would be something not really thought about, that people might think about your approach is a very long-term, slow — in inverted commas — kind of approach.

James: That’s really true — you’re right in that there is an immediate cost challenge for a lot of humanitarian actors right now, because there are massive, immense cuts to budgets, as we all know. And I think that’s interesting from a localisation perspective too, because we’re going to have to focus more on supporting people in place to build their capacities to create change, where humanitarian actors can’t now support because of budget cuts.

But any money spent now does have long-term benefits. And what we notice with regenerative interventions — permaculture practices, whether in the agriculture sector or whether that’s eco-buildings, or climate-resilient homes using natural materials sourced from place — and like Rolande says, often this is much cheaper, because permaculture focuses on using locally available materials, using what’s there, mapping resources to make it cheaper so that people can do these climate resilient actions.

But what we also notice with permaculture and regeneration is that there are so many what we call co-benefits — not just for humans and not sort of just economic benefits in terms of the cost effectiveness of so many of these solutions. But also permaculture interventions have been shown to boost biodiversity by tenfold more — by kind of wild amounts, of wildlife, that was an unintentional pun [laughs]. So many of these benefits are unexpected and not written into the original case for support — such as increases in biodiversity, increases in nature-based livelihoods for communities living in these areas, increasing crop yields from organic and regenerative agricultural interventions. So not only are regenerative interventions often cheaper than conventional approaches, and they carry ongoing monetary and economic benefits going to the future, like economic benefits for local people too.

There are many studies showing these growing, multiple co-benefits over time in regenerative and permaculture interventions. But the fact that it builds resilience to climate shocks in the longer term — I just think it’s a real no-brainer, to be honest [laughs]. We need to be shifting a lot of practices to meet these needs. I think the gap, and why it’s not happening right now, well there are a number of reasons, some of them quite political in a sense that these interventions don’t necessarily fit within a neoliberal capitalist frame, so people feel like they don’t want to invest in these. But it also relies on that, like we were saying earlier, that paradigm shift — supporting local capacity rather than having humanitarian actors come in — which I think the sector is moving toward anyway, toward localisation. I’m happy to see that.

Ka Man: That’s amazing — even in this conversation so far I’m already inspired, and it’s great that James and Rolande are both storytellers, because I feel like that’s the vital ingredient and magic for this paradigm shift, this more holistic understanding, rather than something that’s on the fringes. It’s something that has these – I love that you said “co-benefits” — that speaks to everyone’s language, right. Co-benefits – I was really taken by that, so thank you so much.

25:39: Chapter 4: Growing crises, regenerative response and localisation

So, picking up on some of those points that you’ve made on locally-led humanitarian response and that shift toward working directly with communities — I wonder if you could you could speak more to the context we’re in? You’ve already alluded to the climate crisis, like you’ve said, even in recent weeks, that’s not abstract, it’s affecting lives right now in really terrible ways. And then obviously if we look at the broader global context of ongoing conflict and unmet humanitarian need, it’s obviously a very, very challenging situation. So could you kind of bring in your approaches and kind of overlay your approach onto the localisation agenda and explain why it’s more important than ever? Could we come to you first, please, Rolande?

Rolande: Yeah, sure. As I always tell people when I’m teaching permaculture in a classroom, it’s not that hard a lesson to teach, because people are already living the consequences — so it’s easier for them to understand and pay attention to solutions because it’s already happened to them. Most of the time we hear things from afar, like “10,000 people died,” and it’s just a number — in 30 minutes we’ll hear another piece of news and it won’t feel relevant anymore. But when it’s affected you, you know it’s there. I think that’s why we didn’t act on this at first, until we saw how damaging it is to ourselves and our future generations, until it reached our homes. That’s when we started to wake up — and still, many people don’t believe it.

Localisation in this context is very important, because someone will act depending on what they’ve seen, and someone will heal land they know will serve them back, more than land they’re not sure they’ll ever return to. We’ve seen it a lot. Localisation helps people keep their resources and protect themselves and their land. People are very connected to the land — they don’t leave it when it’s still productive, they don’t leave it when the culture is still going on, they don’t leave it when there is happiness, when families are still coming together. They leave when there’s been a disconnection between them and the land. So it’s not only about being alive, but the interconnectedness of everything happening in the community — the feeling of being alive, really, you know, you can be alive, but feeling alive [laughs] is different from simply existing.

Localisation helps people grow and create a local system — with finances and the resources they have — and to connect with the outer world when needed, rather than depend on it. It creates a sense of dependency on outside help. When you don’t rely on outside help, if it’s not there, you survive on your own. We’ve seen this in Congo during the wars — sometimes there would be like, let’s say, roads would be blocked and there can’t be communication or goods between villages, and the most vulnerable villages were the ones depending on the other villages. That can happen at a continental level too, with exchanges.

So localisation teaches us to be as self-reliant as you can be, to a point where we don’t need much help from outside. We know that humans survived this way for a very long time before depending on outside help. It’s an economy within villages — having our own resources, access to them, and full control over them. There are countries, like Kenya, that have restricted the sharing of seeds, and I don’t understand when and how that kind of law was voted in — it doesn’t make sense to the way humans should live. Localisation uplifts everyone into their own world and their own system and gives everyone a role to play. When you’re sourcing everything at home, everyone has a role, rather than one person controlling everything while everyone else is poor and working for that one power. Everyone helps, and the community relies on each other rather than on outside help. Thank you.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Rolande. I felt really moved when you said that feeling alive is different from simply existing, and how you spoke about community and that interconnectedness — I thought that was really powerful. Could I come to you, James, could you share your thoughts on this?

James: Thanks — I think Rolande said it all. What came to me as you were speaking, Rolande, is that in permaculture we ground all our work in three core guiding ethics, and they really resonated as you were speaking, Rolande, those were really singing to me: earth care — caring for the earth and living systems; people care — caring for communities and people; and fair share — so that’s kind of equitable distribution. Earth care, people care, and fair share.

Something that really inspired me Rolande, is how communities can come together to support one another in times of crisis — often that can rely on international solidarity, people wanting to support our global friends in need. But the real importance is supporting people in a way that has local autonomy, rather than sending in ideas from the Global North to the Global South — it’s about supporting how people themselves want to act and how people want to respond, in ways that are culturally appropriate and contextual to their land and to their spaces. Because often humanitarian actors from the Global North won’t have any idea about the local landscapes necessarily — so this is why we need localisation, we need people to show us how to respond in ways that is contextual, and does resonate with local people and the land, and is led by local people, rather than having all the power in the Global North. So that’s what really sung to me when you were speaking, Rolande.

I think just now, the humanitarian sector can’t meet the needs of people — not only because of budget cuts, but because over the next few decades we’re going to have tens of millions more displaced people because of climate shocks, let alone the intersecting polycrises of things like conflict, resource deprivation, and economic migration. So many, many more people are going to be displaced and are going to be feeling the effects over the coming decades. And at the moment, the sector can’t meet all these needs, let alone in the future. So we need to be buffering this localisation approach with local talent, local wisdom — really building the capacity of people to be able to respond in times of crisis in ways that are locally relevant, culturally contextual, contextual to the way that the land and the landscape is, so it can meet people’s needs but also ecosystem needs, ongoing. So I think this is why localisation isn’t just important, but really integral to the way we respond going forward.

36:33: Chapter 5: Scaling approaches for long term community resilience and the Re-Alliance Kaya course

Fay: Really interesting — and I think your point with the fact that the growing scale of polycrises around the world, and the fact that the sector can’t continue to meet those needs, and it’s about passing empowerment and leadership on to local people. The question I guess then shifts to: how do we do that at scale, in an accessible way to support communities to have the skills and knowledge to respond in the immediate term but the also build that resilience in the long term?

I think that threads nicely into the course Re-Alliance has recently published on Kaya. I’d love to learn more about it — what initially led you to think a course could be a great way to reach people, and what learning outcomes that anyone listening to takes the course can expect to achieve? James, I don’t know if you want to take that first, since you were part of joining Kaya at the start — and then Rolande, I know you’ve been a big, big part in designing the course too, so I’d love to hear your perspective too afterwards.

James: Thank you so much, Fay. It’s been such a joy to work with you all at the Humanitarian Leadership Academy and Kaya, and the course was a really important moment for the Re-Alliance network — all the wisdom the network has gathered from operating in crisis contexts and implementing permaculture and regeneration has been gifted into this course. We really hope it’s useful for practitioners, not just people from humanitarian INGOs. We especially wanted it to be available for free, which is why Kaya Connect is such an amazing platform — it’s openly accessible to so many people.

We wanted it available for free also for community responders— people operating on the ground, such a silly term as we’re all ‘on the ground’, I hope, unless we’re in space! Some of us are, I guess! [laughs] But people who are operating in crisis contexts trying to meet their community’s needs while also building ecosystem health. We wanted the course to be just an introduction, to get people excited about learning from living systems — permaculture, regeneration, agroforestry, agroecology — and thousands and thousands of years of wisdom from people who’ve been doing this work, like Indigenous and land-based communities.

This is really just a taster course for now — we’re hoping of course, and Fay and Ka Man, you’ll know this, there will be more courses soon, a little spoiler there [laughs]. But we wanted it to really speak to people’s hearts and give them real skills to be able to learn more, because wherever listeners are in the world, there will be amazing permaculture teachers near to you who can help contextualise some of this information into your localities. Once you’ve done the course — it’s about two hours online — you get a fantastic certificate you can show your friends and post on LinkedIn – and remember to give us five stars on the course, you know [laughs], if you want, please! We hope you can use that certificate to show you’ve started your learning journey, and continue it with local permaculture teachers, or by bringing a permaculture teacher into your organisation if you’re with an INGO, to help embed this into the policies and practices in INGOs. We hope this course can be a seed for planting these ideas in you and your colleagues.

Rolande: Actually, the first time I met James, it was for a video recording — he just asked me to shoot a video, was it about sustainability or something, I don’t even remember [laughs]. I did a video and sent it to James and we didn’t talk again after that. Then one day I was scrolling through my emails and got another one saying there was a course going to be recorded and published, and I thought, okay, this is the first time [laughs].

And I was happy, and when I personally read the script it was very exciting, partly because it connected with my own journey into permaculture — we always say “nothing for us without us,” because a lot of the time organisations use refugees not as people who need support but as bait for funds, or something. It happens, it’s so sad, it’s so sad — some people just throw the word “refugee” a few times into a few sentences, and it’s not really about the people they’re working for. It happens a lot. And it connects to my job where I was collecting data — and it didn’t feel right to be the person who goes to the community and I felt like, it in some ways, not dehumanising, but it felt like I wasn’t having real impact on the people I was doing this with. That’s why I shifted from doing it for money to actually working together with communities, to help build something for them. Learning about sustainability and regeneration gave me that same feeling that inspired me do this— like, this is another level: how do we make it stronger, how do we learn to actually build systems that not only heal what’s been destroyed but also build stronger ones that will not only sustain people but also preserve resources for future generations that will teach people about everything around them and how do we do this for ourselves, and what comes from somewhere.

So yeah, I was really excited to do the course. What I hope for people who come across this course is that they feel that connection too — I tried my best [laughs] to convey the emotion alongside the words, and I hope it is inspiring for them, and is something that inspires them to do better, and gives them a good beginning to actually dig deeper into this other world. When I talk about permaculture, I feel it’s a different kind of system that we were never taught about in school — we lived a part of it, but nobody told us there was another option than the main design system of how life should be. I really hope this course gives people a good introduction to digging deeper and discovering all the gold down there [laughs]. Yeah!

James: Also, just to say — we’re so lucky to have Rolande on the course. She’s an internationally renowned permaculture teacher, and teaching alongside her was such an honour for me. So, Rolande, thank you for doing the course — I know everybody’s inspired by you. Thank you.

Fay: We feel very honoured that you’ve chosen Kaya to publish that course, and as James mentioned, everybody who wants to access it can do so for free — that’s part of our mission, to help communities and people around the world access the tools and resources they need. I think lots of people listening will find this exciting and will enrol in the course to learn more about permaculture.

47:30: Chapter 6: A magic wand: Rolande and James’ wishes for regenerative humanitarian response

Fay: I could listen to you both all day — it’s so inspiring, so exciting, I love hearing about this world and the sustainability aspect of it. I think there are so many exciting things you guys want to achieve, so many long-term goals. If we can try and condense that — if you had a magic wand, what would your wish be for the humanitarian sector through that regenerative lens?

Rolande: Well, this is not a hard question, but there’s just a lot — which one would I choose? Probably, I would restrict the negativity toward regeneration. As an example — we’re doing this work, we’re the good guys here, but we know there are systems, big systems, very wealthy systems that have been built, and continue to grow, against everything we’re doing. So if I had a magic wand, what I would do is not destroy them, but I’d turn them toward doing things sustainably. I know many big companies talk about sustainability, but the actions, the products on the market, and the profit they want to make don’t reflect what they claim they do. So I’d turn every system built against our work toward doing the sustainable work [laughs]. Yeah.

I think that would help far more than — it’s okay to work locally, it’s okay for people to create their own local systems, but sometimes it feels like shifting the burden onto local people for problems that are global, caused by societies these local people barely contributed to. There have been studies showing that the people working hardest to rebuild these systems are not the people who destroyed them, and that in some ways, that doesn’t feel right. It’s the only option available to them right now — most of times, it’s poor people, who have a lot of other things to worry about, working hard to rebuild because it’s all they have. Everyone else can buy just another plot in a cleaner environment, somebody else can buy a fan or whatever resources they need to transform the air in their houses, anyone can travel wherever they want. But local communities that don’t have these, that access, they don’t have money to buy things to make life easier for them, are the ones healing wounds created by people who can actually run away from their mistakes anytime, anywhere. Yeah, sometimes it feels unfair. Yeah — sometimes it feels unfair. Yeah.

James: I so agree, Rolande — thank you for pointing that out, because most of the harm is created by the Global North, and yet it’s mostly people in the Global South feeling the worst effects of the climate crisis. It’s so unfair.

We talk about the difference between sustainability and regeneration — I like to think of sustainability as interventions that minimise or stop harm, and regeneration we think of as going a bit deeper, creating more capacity to sustain life and abundance. They’re different, in a way, but sometimes to achieve regeneration we also have to look at sustainability initiatives to stop harm — and this is exactly one of those moments of harm, like you say, Rolande, where so much of industry, decision-making, and money in the Global North is going toward creating destruction that mostly affects people in the Global South, and the harshest effects there.

So if I had a magic wand, we’d have to stop that first of all — rethink the way our societies and economies work so they’re not focused on creating harm to people and planet, but refocused, as we were saying, toward creating more space for health, life, and abundance, learning from nature and living systems. And I’d also say to policymakers and decision-makers within humanitarian INGOs and agencies: go take this course on Kaya, and then go on a Permaculture Design Certificate course — a two-week course taught by a local permaculture practitioner, wherever you are in the world. Find a PDC, a permaculture design certification. Because people come to permaculture thinking it’s about gardening, right, and it’s so much more than that — it’s a whole new way of thinking, a revolution in how you approach agriculture, but also how we build our houses, how we travel, how we live our lives. So if I waved a magic wand, it would be a paradigm shift in how we think in relation to the living world, and then filter that into the policies and practices into the agencies or organisations that we work within.

55:00: Chapter 7: Closing reflections

Fay: Yeah, I mean they are very, very big, important topics that are extremely relevant in today’s world.

So, I suppose just to close off really, we’ve spoken about some really interesting, inspiring, empowering things, and I’d love to sort of just get some closing remarks from you all. I think for me, I’ve learned that permaculture is so much more than what a lot of people assume — it’s about regenerating land and rebuilding resilient local systems and communities. But I think one thing that really touched me in this conversation is the piece about creating hope for future generations — for me that’s the sustainability piece that really touched me. It’s that hope piece. And also the fact that when we provide local communities with that empowerment to lead and build these resilient systems and sustainable communities, it gives them that stake in the game, that skin in the game, I think that’s what inspires and gives them that passion to fight the good fight and have that stake in the future we create. So that’s some of my takeaways — thank you both so much for sharing your thoughts today and telling us more about the course and Kaya. So I’d love to invite you all to share your closing remarks, and thank you again for joining us on a lovely Friday morning.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Fay, and thank you, James and Rolande, for the privilege of this conversation — I’ve felt incredibly grounded, inspired, and there’s also very sharp reminders as well in what you’ve shared. Do you know, I came into this talking to you about, before we started recording, about soil, “oh I’m really interested in soil, let’s have lots of soil conversations at a later date!” [laughs] and I still want to have those conversations — but you’ve really spoke to how, you know, we bandy this word “holistic” around a lot, but it really is, you’ve really put this into the frame of everything we do. You’re talking about regenerative approaches, and I think it’s about us as humans as well, right— reminding ourselves what it means to be human, in support of assisting other humans. Returning to what Rolande said about doing no harm — obviously that’s the central tenet of humanitarian work, but as a sector we have to take a long, hard look at where our structures and systems have caused harm, and continue to do so, and what we can do, proactively do, to mitigate that as we rebuild the sector and repair these relationships and links with communities.

It’s been so inspiring to hear you speak so candidly, and I’m definitely going to take the Kaya course, I definitely want to check that out and I really think everyone should do that too. So, thank you, really. So now I’d like to come to our wonderful guests. Rolande, would you like to share any closing reflections?

Rolande: Oh, thank you so much. I’m always happy to have conversations like this, because I always say, I’m not the most amazing person out here, but I have the chance to speak, I have the chance to share in the names of other people I’m representing now, and I’m so happy that I’m sharing our story, and getting it out there. I’m so happy my words can help make a difference in the world beyond, like what I can do with my hands. I’m always happy for you and other people offering platforms like this and putting us there — because sometimes living in a camp it really feels like being taken away from the real world. And I’m so happy about everything we’ve spoken about.

The main point of today was how we live in harmony with nature and the people, which is the core of permaculture. And I hope many people take the course, and remember it’s just a starting point — go deeper, open up to this new discovery, it’s very big, we can’t talk about it all in one day. I’d really love to talk more, different subjects, and I also I love to learn a lot — I’m sure I’ve learned a lot today too. Thank you.

Ka Man: Thank you so much. James, can we bring you in for some closing reflections?

James: Thank you so much, Ka Man, Fay, and Rolande — it’s been such a joy to share this space with you, and I’ve come away with so much learning and also so much hope, like Fay has said. We’re living in a polycrisis of intersecting crises. Humans have this amazing capacity to change the world we’re part of, I should reframe as, so we can make change, and we need rapid change now.

So, I say to everyone listening: allow yourself to be changed too, by movements like permaculture and regeneration. Do the learning, share it with your colleagues and friends, because we need this hope, we need change, and we need to create space for the life that sustains us on this planet to flourish alongside us — not just humans, but all the other species we share life with, all the other species to thrive as well. Thank you so much for giving us space to share this, and I really hope listeners enjoy the Re-Alliance course.

Ka Man: Thank you so much — what an absolute pleasure. Fay and I have absolutely just, it’s been such a joy to spend this time with you, so thank you so much. So Rolande, James, Fay — thank you for being here for today’s episode of Fresh Humanitarian Perspectives from the Humanitarian Leadership Academy.

[Music]

This transcript has been generated using automated tools and has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. The transcript has been reviewed but minor errors or omissions may remain.

Ka Man: Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar, brought to you by the HLA in partnership with NetHope. My name is Ka Man Parkinson, and I’m delighted to welcome you to today’s session: Collective Action on Localised Humanitarian AI, Unlocking Solutions Together. It’s great to see people already joining the room and introducing themselves in the chat. We’re absolutely delighted to have over 450 people registered from over 90 different countries, so we’re really excited at the global interest in today’s conversation.

Today’s session is set to last for 90 minutes, beginning with this welcome and introductions, followed by some housekeeping. Then we’ll hear from you through a short audience poll. Then we’ll move into a series of short presentations from our wonderful speakers. Then in the second half of the session, we’ll move into audience Q&A, so that’s where you’ll be able to put your questions to the panel. If you have any questions, please submit those through the Zoom Q&A function — that’s in your toolbar, you’ll see a question mark icon. Please submit any questions at any time, and we’ll pick those up in the second half of the session.

It’s great to see people introducing themselves. Hello, Vijay from India, Muhammad from Pakistan, Aileen from Berlin, Martha from Uganda, welcome.

I’m absolutely thrilled to be joined by a stellar group of speakers today — a huge thank you and welcome to Deo, Meheret, Tino, and Esther. I’d now like to invite each speaker to say hello and briefly introduce themselves, and tell us why they’re interested in today’s conversation on localised AI. Let’s come to you first, please, Deo.

Deo: Thank you so much, everyone. My name is Deogratius Kigggudde, and I manage programmes at the Upanzi Network. We are a pan-African research network hosted at Carnegie Mellon University here in Kigali, where we build, test, and independently assess digital public goods and infrastructure, and the AI that goes through them.

Why I’m interested in this conversation is because I spent over a decade in the humanitarian world, especially in the mapping sector, looking at how people moved from depending on commercial maps — that were very scarce in some of the communities we were working in — to working with open source, community-run, default maps like OpenStreetMap. Because local people were funded, and built their own, and managed their own resources on that. I think for localised AI, this is the same problem, and I want us to see how we can solve that even faster this time. Really excited for that. Thank you.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Deo. It’s fantastic to have you here today. Meheret, would you like to introduce yourself?

Meheret: Definitely. Thank you, Ka Man. Hi, everyone. I’m Meheret Takele, and I’m based in the Netherlands. I’m from NetHope, I’m a digital transformation analyst, leading our NetHope Connected community. I work closely with local and national nonprofits across Africa, Asia, and beyond, and I’m here today because their experience with AI is exactly what I believe this conversation needs. These organisations are already doing remarkable work on localised AI, but often in isolation. That’s precisely why I believe collective action matters — it’s how we make sure no one has to build the same solutions twice. I’m really looking forward to the conversation.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Meheret. Over to you, please, Tino.

Tino: Thanks so much for having us. We’re truly delighted to be here — I think for us it’s an honour to be talking here, because Kobo is a non-profit really dedicated to having better data collected all around the world. For us, localisation is always a bit of a funny word, because the vast majority of organisations who use our tools — open source data collection that’s really the standard for humanitarian actors, Kobo Toolbox — those organisations are local. To them, this is the tool they use. They speak to local organisations in their own languages, so localisation is the default for us and for our users, and this is where we start from. AI, for us, has to conform to that — it’s not an afterthought, it doesn’t work unless it’s local to begin with. Happy to engage with everyone here today. I’m really excited to talk about this. Thank you.

Ka Man: Thanks so much, Tino. Kobo really is doing some incredible work in this space, so thank you for being here and sharing your experiences. Over to you, Esther!

Esther: Thanks, Ka Man. I’m Esther Grieder. I work for NetHope as the Director of Membership Engagement. NetHope has a membership of around 60 INGOs. We also have a second community, which Meheret mentioned, which I work closely with her on — a community of smaller, more local organisations, and that’s a growing community. What’s really exciting for us at NetHope at the moment is that through that community, we’ve started giving grants for AI work and AI projects, and so we’re learning so much from that community at the moment. It’s really great to be here to share with others what we’re learning, and also hear what other people are learning through their own experiences as well. Thank you.

Ka Man: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Esther, and thank you to all of you for taking the time to be here with us today.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Ka Man Parkinson from the Humanitarian Leadership Academy, and I’m based near Manchester in the UK. The HLA is part of Save the Children UK, and our mission is to accelerate the movement for locally-led humanitarian action. We really do see AI and technological developments very much as part of this conversation, and that’s the lens through which we’re looking at this today. Thank you once again, and thank you to everyone introducing themselves in the chat — it really is so lovely to welcome you here.

This session is being recorded. It will be uploaded to the HLA YouTube channel, and an email will be sent to you with the slide deck early next week. Zoom captions are enabled, so you can turn those on by going to your Zoom toolbar and pressing CC, and translated captions are available as well. We want this to be a lively and interactive discussion space, so you’re very welcome and encouraged to use the chat to share any reflections or comments as we go along. If you have any questions for the panellists in the second half of this session, please submit those using the Q&A function.

As a kind reminder, please keep any questions or comments respectful and on topic — relevant to localised AI in humanitarian work. Finally, in recognition of your learning and engagement in this forum today, you’ll be able to claim an HPass digital badge — keep an eye out for a separate email for details of how to claim that next week.

We’d now like to hear a little bit from you, our audience members — we’ve just got a couple of questions to ask you, and Esther’s going to walk you through that.

Esther: Thanks, Ka Man. We would love to hear from everybody, what brings you here today? We’ve got a few options which you can hopefully see on your screen: exploring localised AI for your own organisation, curious about the technology, you have specific questions to ask, you want to connect to others or share ideas in the chat, general interest — just here to listen — and then “other”, which is obviously the most exciting option, because we really want to hear what other reasons people might have joined for. So please do type in the chat if you’ve chosen “other”.

Ka Man: Fantastic, we’ll just give that a second. I can see that over 70 people have responded, and it’s going up rapidly — that’s great to see people engaging. Okay, I’m just going to end the poll now.

Esther: Okay, so hopefully you’re seeing the results up there on your screen. It looks like the largest contingent are here because they’re exploring localised AI for their own organisations, which is really interesting — that does mean there’s potentially a lot of organisations here with things they can also share in this forum in future. Then we have a lot of people coming because they’re curious about the technology, some to connect with others, and others for general interest. So please do type in the chat if you have another reason for joining as well, and we’ll be interested to hear. Thank you, everyone.

Ka Man: Thanks, that’s really interesting that people are keen to dive into the technology a little bit. We’ve just got a second question that we’ll launch now.

Esther: Second question: what is the main challenge that you currently face with using AI in your context? We’ve put a few options there to get you started. It might be costs — for example, licences and maintenance. Lack of suitable tools available to you. AI expertise — for example, skills, particularly technical skills and AI literacy. Data concerns around security and privacy. Infrastructure, such as power and connectivity. Language access. Leadership factors — thinking about how you can get buy-in from the right people in your organisation. Or time and capacity to focus on AI. Again, we have the “other” option as well, in case you have something else to add.

Ka Man: That’s fantastic, we’ll just give that a second. I can see over 70 people have responded, and that’s going up as well, so thank you. Now going to close the poll.

Esther: Great — seeing the results coming in, it looks like the highest contingent voted for AI expertise — AI literacy, digital skills, technical skills. That’s the biggest barrier that people are seeing. Close second and third are data concerns, and then costs, for example licences and maintenance. We also have a few people who voted for lack of suitable tools, or issues with infrastructure, and some for leadership. Language actually got a very low number of votes in this particular poll, which is interesting.

Ka Man: Thank you very much, that’s really interesting to see. What surprised me is data concerns ranking so highly. Thank you very much for sharing that. So we’ll continue. I’m just going to spend the next few minutes contextualising today’s discussion in the HLA’s work, before I hand over to Esther, who will do the same from NetHope’s side.

So why are we talking about AI in the humanitarian context through a localised lens, when AI is a global phenomenon, some people may wonder? For those of you who’ve been engaging in our work over the past year, the HLA, together with our partner Data Friendly Space, has been tracking how humanitarians are navigating AI adoption decisions. That’s been conducted through two surveys, with over 4,200 responses from over 140 different countries. On top of that, we’ve been continuing the dialogue through convenings — like these webinars with NetHope, and other settings — where we’ve been getting continuous feedback through the community. Through that, we’re hearing the concerns from the sector, as well as things that people are excited about.

We see that humanitarian AI is being driven very much by individual uptake of commercial tools, and that’s due to accessibility — lots of people are using free versions of tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek, and so on. What’s interesting and notable is that AI adoption, because it’s individually driven by humanitarians, is not following what you might see as a typical global north-to-south diffusion pattern. Because it’s driven by individual usage, it’s actually clustered and concentrated and aligns with operational need — for example, at country level, we’re seeing that the most intensive use was in Kenya, Sudan, and Bangladesh.

In these convenings and discussions, we keep note of what’s coming up, and these are some of the key themes that emerge time and again. If anything resonates with you, put something in the chat, or if you’ve got a different perspective, feel free to share your thoughts — we’re really interested to hear. You’ll see that a lot of these themes cluster around this notion of localised, contextualised humanitarian AI solutions that are driven by local need and grounded in local context.

We conducted a series of interviews with humanitarian practitioners and members of our community. I think Nour is on the call with us today — hello Nour — she works in community engagement, and she’s very much an advocate for building together with communities, rather than starting by default with large solutions.

Ivan, from Uganda, has a particular interest in climate resilience, and has very bold ambitions and visions for AI use cases in humanitarian work, including in the area of climate resilience, and also MHPSS — mental health and psychosocial support. He’s very optimistic; however, he’s very much telling us about the context he works in, Rhino Refugee Camp — connectivity challenges, different languages being used — so we really want advocates for donors working in partnership with humanitarians to understand those local needs.

Finally, Shudarshan, who I think is joining the call today as well — he works for a technology firm in Kathmandu, Nepal, and he’s working on a platform for anticipatory action. It’s a very interesting case study, because this platform is being scaled across Nepal — very ambitious — and also in contexts like Bangladesh and Malawi. But even though it’s scaling, he really advocates for contextualisation and localisation — that solutions have to integrate with local platforms, systems, and people.

Those three quotes have just been chosen to put a human face on those data points and themes that have emerged through our research and convening over the past year. Based on that evidence, qualitative and quantitative, this points the HLA and our work and engagement with the community into this space of localised AI, and we’re absolutely delighted to have this session today, together with NetHope, so that we can pull together our collective thoughts, ideas, and networks in this space.

I’d now like to pass over to Esther, who will say more from the NetHope perspective. Over to you, Esther.

Esther: Thank you. If you just go to the next slide — I wanted to briefly touch on the always thorny issue of terminology, because as we know, terminology around localisation is already extremely complicated. But it only gets more complicated when you’re also talking about technology and AI. I just wanted to make a distinction here about what we’re going to be talking about in the webinar. We’re talking about localised AI in terms of AI which is designed to meet the needs of communities — whether that be in terms of accessibility needs, or communities having been involved in designing AI tools. So we’re talking in that very broad sense, of AI that has involved communities in its design, and is also owned and governed by communities.

What we’re not specifically talking about is local AI or local LLMs — models that are hosted on one machine or device. We probably will mention that at some point, it might come up in our discussions, but that’s not the main focus of the discussion. I just wanted to make that distinction before we start, in case there’s any confusion.

Now this slide — hopefully it’s showing properly on your screen — it’s harking back to a webinar that we had in January. Some of you may have been at that webinar as well. Ka Man and I hosted that along with some other speakers, and we talked a little bit about some of our predictions for 2026. Because we’re halfway through 2026, I thought it would be nice to put that slide up again.

The ones highlighted in blue are the ones we’re going to touch on today, so we’ll be thinking about what progress has been made on those topics: more localised AI use cases and tools developed in the Global South, smaller and more agile organisations demonstrating what can be achieved when they’re unencumbered by red tape. Potentially linked to that as well, discussion about environmental impacts — it’s linked to the idea of having more local tools, or really prioritising tools that have a positive impact for society over other tools. That also links a little bit to discussions around moves away from dependence on US tools, and discussions about open source. And of course it touches on the “beyond the hype” theme as well, because the organisations in this webinar are all thinking very specifically about what they can design to meet the needs of the communities they’re working with, and solve actual real-world problems.

I just wanted to bring us back to that discussion we’d had in January to touch on that. On this slide, I wanted to briefly mention some of the signals we’ve seen over the past few months that relate to some of those themes. Within NetHope, we’re constantly sharing articles and exciting developments that we see coming up. The first one here — I believe Meheret flagged this to our team — is a new multi-language speech-to-text model for Ethiopian languages. There are many Ethiopian languages; this model is available for five languages currently, and it really opens up new possibilities in terms of tools that can be developed for the Ethiopian context and solve Ethiopian-specific problems. That’s one small development we’ve seen over the past few months that has really big implications.

In terms of the environment, there have been so many reports coming out to do with AI and the environment, which all tell us that we really need to prioritise the use of AI where it’s actually going to have the most impact. I’ve put some quite scary statistics there, from one of the recent reports about AI’s overall environmental impact — quite frightening. And then lastly, I put something there about how open source AI is gaining traction — an open source AI gap map, which we spotted, pulling together a whole range of different open source AI tools, and also an article about human rights defenders and how they’re using AI tools — they’re often the ones who most struggle with using big tech, and are often looking for alternatives. So I thought I would pull out those, in terms of the big picture, to illustrate some of the trends we’re seeing over the past six months.

Ka Man: Thank you, Esther, that’s really interesting to see. It was also interesting to revisit those predictions you shared back in January. Oh sorry, you’ve got this other slide as well, I do apologise — over to you again.

Esther: This is also going back to January — this was a quote from Tom Fletcher, which we looked at in January, and I think this really gets to the heart of what people are talking about today: how can we really make sure that we’re prioritising using the AI tools available to us to solve some of the most important social problems, for the benefit of humanity. I just wanted to share that quote again because I think it’s inspiring and sets the scene for the rest of the discussion.

Ka Man: Thank you, Esther. Yes, exactly — very grounding words. Now that we’ve set the scene from the HLA and NetHope’s institutional perspective, we’re now going to dive deeper with the expert perspectives — Meheret, Deo, and Tino. We’ll have a series of short presentations, starting with Meheret. Over to you, Meheret.

Meheret: Thank you so much, Ka Man, and thank you, Esther. As we’ve already done the introductions, I’m going to jump straight to my presentation. It’s great that you’ve already set out what we mean when we say localised AI, and what I’m going to do is take that one step further and ask the question of what localisation means for international nonprofit organisations. Next slide, please.

Okay, thank you. What I’ve done is I analysed the localisation narratives in the strategy documents of around 40 international nonprofit organisations, because these documents are where we say who we are, and what we’re committing to for the next five to ten years. The first thing to say is that localisation is not one single idea — based on the analysis I’ve done, it has six distinct framings that came out from that analysis, and I’m going to share that with you today.

The first one is localisation as empowerment, which means shifting power to the people most affected.

Second is localisation as system strengthening, which refers to investing in local institutions.

The third one is localisation as collaboration across sectors, which also relates to building digital hubs connecting across sectors.

Fourth is localisation as innovation, which means building platforms to scale solutions built on local ingenuity.

The fifth is localisation as accountability — it relates to centring communities so that the work is legitimate. And the last narrative from that analysis is localisation as normative commitment, which refers to localisation as a sector-wide standard to adopt.

Looking across these six narratives, we can see these are not just soft statements — this is a serious, well-developed commitment, and the thing that really interested me most in this work is that, as you can see from the examples of each framing, digital is not sitting outside of these framings — it’s already inside every one of them.

In these strategies, they rarely name AI specifically, and I believe that’s entirely reasonable for a five-to-ten-year document. But we can see that AI is the newest layer of that same digital commitment, which means the guidance is already there. The question is not whether we believe in localisation, it is how deep localised AI actually goes. Next slide, please.

I’m going to lay out some layers of localised AI, and each one asks a deeper question than the one before. I’ll start with the first, which is language — a question that asks: does the AI work in the language people actually speak? Not just the interface, but the training, the support, the documentation, the help desk.

The second is access — related to the question: does it run where people actually are, on the channel they already use, with the connectivity they actually have?

The third layer is data — related to asking whose reality is encoded in the system we’re developing, who decides what counts as a case, a risk, or a harm.

The fourth is governance — asking who sets the rules, whose ethics, whose safeguards are written, and by whom. And the last layer is ownership — who decides and who still holds the initiatives we’re building, the AI tools, after we’ve developed them.

What I want to mention is that most conversations about localised AI focus at layer one, and layers one and two definitely matter enormously, but they relate to adaptation.

When we see layers three, four, and five, that’s related to where ownership genuinely shifts — that’s the difference between translating an interface and localising an AI tool.

What I want to mention is that it’s also a question any funder or international organisation can ask: which layer are we actually funding, or implementing? Are we implementing the language layer, the access layer, the data layer? So we can identify through these layers. Next slide, please.

To see what local organisations are actually doing, I went and looked through some local nonprofit organisations. I focused on a recent NetHope AI grant, which Esther already mentioned, that supported six connectors — local organisations that are part of our NetHope Connected community.

As we can see from this table, three are using AI to deliver their mission, and three are building AI readiness and governance into their organisation. Generally, what this table shows is the organisations and what type of AI project they’re conducting.

Just to go through them: the first, in Tanzania, Digital Agenda for Tanzania, is promoting the ethical use of AI in journalism and civic media. In Egypt, Educality is strengthening small civil society organisations to adopt AI responsibly through an ethical AI readiness level.

In Uganda, Rural Smile Foundation is piloting an AI trade monitoring tool for reporting and intimidation of human rights violations. In Somalia, Safe Somali Women and Children are embedding responsible AI into their protection work for women and children.

The fifth, in Italy, Shield APS is building a practitioner-powered harm intelligence system for online safety. And the last, in Nigeria, Women’s and Girls Empowerment Network is running an AI-powered SafeVoice platform, which supports women and girls to report gender-based violence and access justice.

After this, we’re going to see what happens when we hold these six projects against the five layers we already described. Next slide, please, Ka Man.

So here, remember the five layers from our previous slides — these are some examples of where the AI projects I described align with the different layers. Just to mention one example for each, but you can see the other projects relate to these layers too.

To start with the language layer: in Tanzania, journalists and civic media groups are building verification and localisation workflows in Swahili — and you can see others in Egypt, in Arabic, and so on. Related to access, the second layer: the women’s organisation in Nigeria that runs a reporting platform for survivors of gender-based violence — what’s really interesting about access here is that the tool they built, the AI-supported service, can be reached in four ways: through an app, through a web platform, through WhatsApp, and also plain SMS.

Looking at the third layer, data: we can take the example of the Shield project, which uses a shared harm dictionary so that harm data gathered by each organisation can be compared across organisations. In relation to governance: the women’s organisation in Somalia is writing their own AI governance policy and ethical framework — that’s an example of the governance layer being built by this organisation.

And the last layer is ownership: the SafeVoice AI platform makes sure the survivor is told what happened to her report, so she stays connected to her own information rather than losing it to the system — that’s the kind of ownership we want to see in localised AI work.

Just to wrap it up, this shows how these projects fit into these layers. But I have to mention that there are certain barriers, which include language, connectivity, funding, and working in isolation. Ka Man, if you go to the next slide —

I’m going to conclude my presentation by saying, so what would it take to go deeper? These are some recommendations I want to lay out. I want to recommend three moves. The first is we need shared, offline-ready infrastructure. The second is we have to fund AI initiatives beyond their pilot stage, through to sustainability. The third is creating a space to share and amplify, so that collective action can support the barriers we’ve already mentioned.

These are some of the recommendations I want to state, and I want to conclude by saying that no single organisation can build the whole layer alone, and none of them should have to be built twice, in isolation, by different organisations. As I already started with, talking about localisation — localisation is the sector-stated commitment, which we’ve already shown through the strategy documents. The layer is where we find out how deep we’re building localised AI tools. I think that’s all. Thank you so much — over to you, Ka Man.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Meheret — I really love the work you’re doing in this space, and I appreciate the clarity through your narrative framings, as well as the layers. I think that’s a really good and useful framework for us in this space, so thank you so much for sharing that.

If you have any questions specifically for Meheret, please pop those in the Q&A, and we’ll pick those up later. Now I’d like to hand over to Tino. Over to you, Tino.

Tino: Thank you so much — that was an amazing framing to follow on. I’ll add to this discussion, the presentation, by talking about the implementation side. Kobo and Kobo Toolbox are, from the ground up, really — our whole organisation is dedicated to having organisations rely on better data to measure and inform their programming.

I’ll start by saying a few things for those who may not be too familiar. Kobo is a non-profit organisation, we’re global in scope, and our primary tool, Kobo Toolbox, is a data collection tool primarily for humanitarian workers, but also widely used across human rights, development, environmental sectors, and so on.

If you can pop to the next slide there — we really are, from the ground up, and as a tool in our organisation, always come from the sector, from the perspective of users. We were researchers, we were UN workers trying to find the right tools to collect better data for our own work. Kobo is about 20 years old, but the word “Kobo” and “Kobo Toolbox” actually originated in northern Uganda, where our enumerators, doing co-design sessions, came up with a name for this really early version of what became Kobo Toolbox for electronic data collection.

Fast forward a number of years, and if you can go to this next slide — the tool we released, just over 10 years ago in 2014, was the first version of our global platform for survey data collection. Launched in 2014, and from then onward, many organisations drove this bottom-up approach — that data collection shouldn’t be done only by large UN organisations and large INGOs, but actually should be done primarily by local organisations.

If you look at this graph, showing the number of survey submissions we’ve been receiving and hosting on many servers for humanitarian workers and many other sectors, we’ve actually reached 1.5 billion — this graph is slightly outdated, we’ve reached just recently 1.5 billion surveys collected by over 35,000 organisations in over 200 countries.

What’s really special, and something our whole team is really dedicated to, is that our organisation is dedicated to keeping this as accessible and as free as possible — 95% of our users, and we have hundreds of thousands of users, use the platform day in, day out for free, and rely on their whole programme, M&E, and evaluation framework built on the fact that they can rely on this as a generally free and extremely accessible platform.

That’s important to keep in mind, because if you think about lots of small organisations we work with, they don’t have large budgets for AI — as we saw earlier in the poll results, costs are a major driver. It’s not just the cost you pay today, it’s the cost you might pay tomorrow, because prices will inevitably go up. If you get the whole organisation relying on these tools and the cost doubles over time, that’s an extremely unpleasant wake-up call — that’s happened even last year with other technologies.

So for us, this is one of the major driving forces behind why we build not just Kobo as a data collection tool, but also how we integrate AI, and how we keep it accessible and useful for local teams.

Let’s go to the next slide. What you see here is some of the AI features we’ve already released. In Kobo, you can build your surveys not just to collect any kind of survey data, but also to collect what we call qualitative information — open-ended, long-form survey responses, where a lot of the depth comes in.

We’ve built these features to allow users to collect open-ended audio or text, which can then be transcribed into text — you can use AI for that step, and machine translation to translate into other languages, as you can see. And we recently, just a month or so ago, released features to allow you to use AI to actually code and categorise the long-form responses, as you can see here.

We did none of that before going through a really rigorous analysis, from the literature and with our local partners in co-design sessions, to understand the ethical risks — we’ve published all of them, there’s a link at the bottom here.

We’ve gone through a lot of checklists and careful analysis so that everything we build goes to minimise these risks. These aren’t just risks we found in the lab — they’re risks that real local research and initiatives have raised. If we couldn’t find a good way to de-risk it, to protect against it, we wouldn’t release that feature.

Everything you see now, and everything I’ll explain in the next slides, goes toward how we release something responsible and ethical for the whole sector — not just for a couple of organisations.

What we’ve done, and you’ll see this when we jump to the analysis — on every screen, there’s the ability for the human to say “I’m not quite okay with this, I’m going to verify this, I’m going to make edits to it.” Everything under the hood gets logged to say this may have been created by AI, but the human in the loop always gets to verify and check it, and if they don’t, there’s always a record showing it was not reviewed and not edited by a human — that’s really important. The AI drafts, and the humanitarian worker, the humanitarian specialist, decides what to do with that data and whether to make changes.

We’ve also released a study to show how reliable they are, because there’s no point having AI do all this if it’s not reliable. We’re happy to say that, in our testing, we found that the models are more reliable than most human coders, at least for English — that’s the big asterisk for this discussion, because of course we want to test that for many other languages, and we all know the quality is not the same for many other languages once you move away from English.

Let’s talk about some of the technical steps — if we can go to the next slide. Some of the things we’ve done under the hood, beyond the UI choices I already talked about: when we use our AI models to do the categorisation, to do the coding of qualitative data, we never send and never will send the data off to another commercial provider — so it does not go to, let’s say, OpenAI or Anthropic’s servers.

Some of these models are extremely good, but even though you can have very strong terms of service in place, there’s never full trust — we’ve seen organisations being burned by that, and increasingly regulators also just don’t trust that API handoff to say “we trust the terms of service.” For humanitarian workers, that’s also a risk we don’t want to pass on.

For us, it’s really important — if you trust Kobo, and you trust Kobo Toolbox to collect the data, then it stays in our own environment, and that extends to using AI models. We use GPT-OSS-120B at the moment as the best open-weights model. Open weights, referring to an equivalent of open source for AI, means we can host it, we can run it on our own servers, we have full control over how it gets handled. It also means it’s more reliable, because the model works the exact same way whenever you use it.

When we find a better open-weights model, which we’re currently evaluating again, we’ll host that and switch to it instead, but it will remain on Kobo servers.

The second option, really relevant for localisation as well, as you can see on the right here, is what we do for extending speech recognition, or ASR — automatic speech recognition — to more and more languages.

We already support about 150 languages for existing models, but we want to extend it to more languages that are priorities for humanitarian crises. For that, we currently use Meta’s Omnilingual 7B model — again, an open-weights model, which means we can fine-tune it, we can add more languages.

If you can go to the next slide, we’ll talk about what we’re doing in practice and which languages we’re focusing on.

Great. It was great to hear about the Ethiopian ASR models at the very beginning, in Esther’s slide — we’ve had our eyes on this for a while as well. In fact, we’ve done some of our co-design workshops in Addis, in Ethiopia, as well as in Colombia, and we’ve known that Ethiopian languages in particular are not great for any of the commercial models.

But because of the work we saw earlier, that Google and others are doing, we’re able now to extend these languages and improve them. It’s not just the ones you see on the screen here — we can benefit from the ethos of open source and open sharing through Creative Commons licensing, for example, and improve the models we have, and increasingly replace commercial models entirely, hosting all of that in our own environment.

We don’t do this in isolation — we’re working, as you can see here, with Clear Global, with UNHCR, with George Mason University, and other partners, especially local partners, to collect this data, to validate it, to process it. It’s an arduous process, it’s costly, so wherever others are already doing this work and have released the data, we can then use it to train and improve the models for those languages. There’s never a moment where you say “oh, it’s not that good” — you should always come back and test it again after a few weeks and months because of this work.

I know, in the interest of time, I’m going to pass it on to the next speaker, but if there are any questions I’ll be in the Q&A and happy to respond there or later on. Thank you so much.

Ka Man: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Tino, for that fantastic presentation. It’s great to hear about the technological developments and the things you’re working on in this space, particularly in relation to languages. Great to see the synergies with Meheret’s presentation as well, so thank you. If you have any questions for Tino, please pop those in the Q&A and we’ll pick those up shortly. Over to you now, Deo.

Deo: Thank you so much, Ka Man. We’ve definitely heard from Meheret about the layers, and Tino about how Kobo works, and I think that was really good, listening to some of the work they’re doing — I can feel a lot of synergies from our side as well.

I wanted to start with the phrasing you opened with, Ka Man, where adoption isn’t always following the global north-south pattern. We’re already seeing a lot of intensity within Kenya, Bangladesh, and others who are already demanding this use — so we’re not really missing enthusiasm for localised AI, the enthusiasm is there.

Having seen something similar during my time with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, where most times we’re working in places where connectivity is just on the edge, starting up — it’s always very good to know that the tools that really survive, that really get used, are the ones that work offline, like Kobo does, but also where local teams can run them without having to call HQ at five o’clock on a Friday when no one’s in the office, or where time zones are really tricky. That’s what we try to test as well.

The Upanzi Network is hosted at Carnegie Mellon — we have five nodes that I’ve put on the map, but we work across the continent, trying to look at what our network within these different universities works on. Next slide, please.

Within the Upanzi Network, what we’d call localised AI really focuses on three main things. Some of them Meheret and Tino already mentioned, so I’ll just touch on them briefly. The first is language. The second is context — we focus a lot on trying to assess and evaluate some of the models out there before people actually adopt them. We want to understand how these models are performing, and how we can evaluate them independently, because everyone will try to say their model is the best — we’ve seen all the commercial platforms saying that. So we try to say, okay, let’s put that to the test — how can we evaluate them? We do have spaces and ideas on how to actually do that. But also trying to understand the context they’re in — because sometimes just translating a model into another language isn’t the holy grail. You need to understand the norms, the context — whether it’s child protection, cash eligibility, how are people already understanding those conversations? If it’s not understanding the conversations it’s having, it can really struggle once you switch languages. It was really good to hear the work Meheret and Tino are doing on Ethiopian languages — we also have a project, the FIDEL project, where we’ve released some optical character recognition for Amharic, and it’s available on Hugging Face if you want to check it out. The idea is to work with lots of organisations on the ground, and I think it would be a good way to improve some of the models you’ve put out there — again, speaking to the conversation about sharing data people have without having to go back on the ground, which, as we say, is really expensive.

The second part is really about infrastructure — not necessarily the hardware itself, but accessibility, which Tino and Meheret have hinted at. Right now we’re getting a lot of people talking about different models out there, but when you look at localised AI models, no one’s really marketing them. We’re getting a lot of bombardment from the commercial ones — they’re taking up the space. I think the conversation should be, how can we get people to actually access these localised systems, or at least think about how we can localise them, because sometimes people are told from the get-go, “no, it’s too hard, don’t even bother, just stick to the commercial APIs” — it’s made easy, just a click of a button, and people are pushed away from the localised part. For me, that’s more of a marketing campaign we need to think about, and that’s something we within the network try to emphasise — why we need to talk more about how localised AI can actually be localised. We need to just have a conversation about that — it’s not that hard, and we need to make it much more accessible for people, and make it feel like they can actually do it, especially with local organisations that already feel overwhelmed with a lot of technology coming their way.

The third part is really about ownership — again, something the previous speakers have mentioned, who owns the data as it’s put out there. But the bigger part we focus on is who’s auditing the models. Everyone will say “my model is the best” — I’ve just been looking at a new model called Kimi that’s come out, and everyone’s saying it’s the best right now. We need to spend a lot of time thinking about how we keep having a humanitarian sector, or a combined effort, of auditing some of these models, because we can’t do it alone — our organisation can’t do it alone, and even countries can’t do it alone. We need to think about how we localise that auditing process — that’s what we want to look at. Next slide.

I did mention our project around FIDEL — you can go on Hugging Face and check that out. It’s something we feel like anyone working within their language can test out and check, and maybe add to your database. Another part I wanted to bring up, when it comes to localised AI, is trust. We’re in a space where we’re working with people who are very vulnerable, for whom trust isn’t the first thing that pops to mind, and with the inclusion of AI right now, with all the different AI deepfakes, anti-spoofing issues — there’s a big distrust when it comes to AI already. When it also comes to localised AI, we need to be training people, protecting them, and helping them understand how they can verify what’s real and what’s not — that’s going to be a big focus for us, because once people feel like “this is a setup on a server I don’t trust, a system I don’t trust,” or they get a bad one-shot experience, it may be difficult to get them back on board. So how can we help them detect but also know and verify what they’re working with — I think that’s really key for us. Next slide.

One of the things I want people to remember, when it comes to AI or the word “localised AI,” is we’ve seen this play out before — at least for me, way back when it came to maps as well. It used to be that commercialised maps were seen as the standard format, and over the years, in places where most humanitarian organisations were working, these maps weren’t that usable — there was less data. But as newly open platforms like OpenStreetMap came up, we saw people pull resources together, communities came together, were trained on how to standardise, use, verify, and audit these places. That’s how local mappers came up — like the way Kobo’s doing it with local data collectors. Once you really give the power to communities to take it on, evaluate it, and audit it together, it grows much faster. I think we need to treat AI the same way — localised models, but also localised builders, testers, and auditors. I think that’s where the key part is — having that skillset at the local ground, keeping it moving, keeping it growing, to a point where it’s more defaulted and more trusted as well. Next slide.

Some of these points have already been laid out — how do we move away from just having pilots? For me, one of the first conversations, and I’ve mentioned this across my presentation, is having shared evaluations. We can’t be the ones only evaluating ourselves — you build a model and evaluate yourself. We need to get to a point where we’re having shared evaluations. Independent testing is also very key, because that really builds trust — when you’re bringing a tool to people who are actually in a situation where you basically have one shot with them, you need to get to a point where they can trust the tool and keep using it. I think this has already been mentioned — funding beyond just a demo, or a couple of years — it takes time to adopt a tool, work with the tool, learn the tool. Signals like Kobo — the years that have gone by, almost two decades of growing it — we need to go in with the mindset that localised AI won’t happen tomorrow morning or tomorrow evening. It’s not going to be a year, not going to be two years. It’s going to take time, growing with the community, with the people using these tools.

One of the conversations I’m really passionate about is procurement as well. For us to say something is localised — whether it’s AI or any other tool — we need to think about how we get the resources on the ground. If you have a procurement system that focuses on contracting global platforms, making it easier for global platforms to be adopted, you need to think about how national teams in your organisation can be trained to get those tools where they are, and share results across the board. One of the things we love doing is sharing results as much as we can — let’s really open source the knowledge, the information, and not only the models, but the data we’ve put out there and worked with. So that’s what I would say. Next slide.

I’ll end by saying we need to think about how we build, test, and own locally, and — the auditing part I didn’t mention — independent testing is really key for us, because once you independently test the tool and make sure it works, you really build trust with people. One proposal I have — and I’m just coming up with these words off the top of my head — is really human-authored humanitarian evaluations of some of the models we have, especially when it comes to languages, and really making them into public goods, similar to the way FLORES and Masakhane datasets are generally put out as digital public goods. I think we need to think about how we do that from the humanitarian context, especially around activities like cash eligibility, child protection, shelter registries, and so on. But also trying to find cheap, relative ways of training people how to use the models we’re working with, because that’s really going to be key — commercial platforms are really bombarding everyone, making it seem like “don’t even try to use your localiser,” and once people hear that multiple times, once you step into the room with localised AI, they’ll just run out of the room. So if we spend a bit of time on that and do it together as a collective, I think it would be a big push for this. Thank you so much, everyone.

Ka Man: Amazing. Thank you so much, Deo — again, I really love the very practical nature of your presentation, and I like that you said “we’ve run this play before,” bringing in your contextual learnings from mapping. Thank you so much for that, and thank you Meheret and Tino as well for your fantastic presentations.

We’re now moving to panel discussion. I’ll ask each of you — you’ve all alluded to this in your presentations, what you advocate for — but I’d love to put you on the spot and say: over the next 12 months, since AI is developing so quickly and everything seems to be moving so fast, as you’ve just said, Deo — what would you really like to see, to accelerate collective action in this space, over say the next year? Could I come to you first, please, Meheret? What’s your take on that?

Meheret: Sure, definitely, Ka Man. I’ll relate to the recommendations I already mentioned at the end of my presentation. I really believe — not only me, but NetHope really believes — in collective action, and for the next 12 months, what I really believe is that, especially the isolation part of the recommendation I already mentioned — everything we build should not be isolated and only used in one organisation. What I really recommend is to go to spaces where there are such networks — we can list different networks, like the Connected Community, the START Network, CIVCUS, and other networks. What I really believe is that we should build collectively and share what we’re learning, and what’s working and what’s not working, with a community. That’s something I believe we should build on in the next 12 months.

Ka Man: I wholeheartedly agree. Esther, could I bring you in as well? Do you have anything to add from the NetHope perspective?

Esther: Yeah, I guess to say — in the NetHope community, for a long time we’ve had a lot of demand for people to be really sharing practical examples. I suppose it’s that “beyond the hype” vibe — there’s always that feeling that there’s a lot going on in the AI space, but people really want to see the tangible examples of what different organisations are doing. So I think continuing to document and share those across organisations is one really important thing.

The other thing is that there’s so much work going on in the sector now around standards and frameworks and the ethics surrounding AI, and that’s something we have to take way more seriously than the rest of the world, other sectors, potentially, because we’re working with the most vulnerable people. So making sure we’re really collectively working on that effort, and pooling the resources we have, in order to make sure we get in place what we need — because we’re always going to be playing catch-up to some extent on that. So doubling down on that effort, I think.

Ka Man: I could not agree more. Thank you, Esther. Tino, what’s your take on this? What would you advocate for, what do you call for to accelerate action in this space?

Tino: It’s really about the collection of training data for the many languages that are not well represented, and in some cases not represented at all, in AI models, commercial or open-weights. We talked about some of them in the slides, and you’ve heard from other speakers that there are a lot of initiatives around this, but the speed with which that’s moving forward has barely improved over the last years.

We’re grateful for organisations that fund this and their initiatives, but everyone involved in this is basically competing over a very small pie. There are hundreds and hundreds of hours collectively spent writing grant proposals, and eventually someone gets, say, $100,000 to do work that takes 12 to 18 months to conduct, and eventually you have to justify to the donor that it was actually useful, and maybe you could do a follow-up grant and collect data for another language or two.

At this scale, this will take us hundreds of years if we continue doing this. In the world of AI, we’re collecting this kind of data in a 19th century mindset — this is insane, given that we can build applications, we can verify and improve software, and ethically we can do all this faster these days.

All of that is based on the models being what they are, based on the training data that was available — and that’s mostly a lot of English, a lot of European languages, and very little, incomplete, insufficient data — especially for transcription — for many of the world’s 7,000-plus languages. My big ask, and we speak to donors about this regularly, is to create a pooled fund. This is not something that can be done in the current way of doing things — the gap will never close, and we’re actually burning 20-30% of funding just competing over these grants. That’s not scalable.

At the end of the day, this needs to be all open source, everything open-licensed, so everyone can use that training data to improve their own models, and humanity will benefit from it — but not if we continue to fund it in the old way of doing things, which is highly out of date.

Ka Man: Thank you, Tino. You shared some very sobering stats and facts on the current state of play, and a very clear call to action there. Thank you very much. Deo, what’s your take on it? What would you like to see over the next 12 months?

Deo: I’m going to be very similar to the previous speakers. Ka Man, we talked about this a few days ago — we had a visit from some of the folks from the Gates Foundation at Microsoft, and even they were saying AI is actually expensive, and we got a report where Bill himself said his team is complaining that they’re running out of tokens and need more GPUs and CPUs, and he was shocked. We’re definitely in a space where we’re playing with a technology that’s very expensive, and I do think it has to come to a point where we think about how we share the resources we do have — especially in the humanitarian sector, where resources could be more needed now than ever.

We need to think about how we have shared resources, and how we actually use them more effectively. Like Tino mentioned, we can’t be competing in a space that needs people working together. One of the things I want to see is more collaboration, especially in training datasets, like Tino mentioned, and on my side, in evaluation as well — because everyone’s just, we’re having so many models coming out, everyone saying “mine is the best,” but we’re not evaluating them critically before deploying them with people.

What we’re getting is bombarding a lot of our beneficiary population with so much technology, so many models, and it’s getting confusing — everyone’s going for the best of anything that comes out. It’s getting to a point where it’s more confusing now than ever, rather than actually improving the technology itself.

Someone told me a sentiment once — we’re glossing over some of our problems, putting lipstick on a few things, and then putting out another model, as opposed to actively trying to improve and put out something that’s actually better. For the next few months, I would hope we see less pilots, more longer deployments, much more strategic improvement of models, and working together, especially when it comes to language, context, culture, norms, and embedding that within the models we’re working with. So I’ll go with that.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Deo. Hearing all of you speak, I actually find it really inspiring, because sometimes when you’re in this space, it can feel quite overwhelming because of the pace, the conversations, the discourse, and everything happening in the commercial space. Sometimes you wonder how much traction we can gain with localised approaches, how we make that viable. But because all of you have set out very clear and articulated ideas, your experiences going back pre-AI — I feel quite more optimistic after hearing your presentations, and I’m sure our people on the call will too. Thank you very much for sharing that.

I’ll now move to some audience questions — thank you so much to everybody who submitted questions through the Q&A. I’m going to put a few individual questions, and then some group questions.

I’ll start with a question for Esther, from Orren, who asks if we have any advice for drafting policy or guidance documentation for organisations, because this is lacking right now, and it’s difficult to find examples. What do you think, Esther?

Esther: Thanks, Ka Man. I was delighted to see this question, and asked to answer it, because NetHope does develop a lot of different resources to support organisations to put in place policies and governance frameworks for AI. I’ll share a link in the chat to some of the ones we have available now, publicly on our website. We’re also currently developing a policy template to support smaller organisations — so keep a lookout on our resource page for new things coming up, we have lots of new reports and resources coming up all the time. I’ll share that page with you anyway so you can see what’s there, and hopefully that provides some support. Thank you.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Esther. Now I’ll come to a question from Munia, which I’ll put to Meheret. It’s following your presentation, those fantastic layers of localisation. Munia asks: how can local actors in South Asia, or any context, gain real ownership and decision-making power, and not only provide data or access? Do you have any thoughts on that, Meheret?

Meheret: Yeah, definitely — that’s a great question. First, I’d like to mention that this question specifically mentioned South Asia, but it’s also the same thing we hear in different regions in the NetHope Connected community — the layers I mentioned apply to every localised AI solution, not specifically to that continent. For these localised AI tools to be owned and governed by the people using them, all the layers apply, starting from language to the ownership stage.

When we talk about the smaller layers I mentioned — access, language — if the tool is available in their own language, if they have access to their own infrastructure, not the one we assumed, if they’re the ones providing the governance tools, and also writing the governance that’s contextual to their community — I believe that’s how we’re going to reach the ownership stage of the layer, so the tool is owned and governed by the community using it. When all the layers are implemented, when we apply localised AI, that’s where I’d call it really localised, and we can call it localised AI.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Meheret. Next, I’d like to come to a question for Deo, from Mo. It’s around your presentation — Mo asks, apologies if I’m not pronouncing this correctly, what are the challenges in your work on FIDEL Amharic OCR? Bit of a techie one. But have you got anything to chip in on that one?

Deo: Yeah, one of the challenges, actually, is getting enough data. To generate this, we worked with over 2,000 people generating handwritten questions and everything, and that still wasn’t even enough — we felt it was still small, so the first challenge is just getting enough data. We need enough people to sit down and write these things out and get that recognised. The second part is we need to do a lot more training — we needed a lot more CPU, a lot more people to work on training the dataset, and that’s still going on, actually, as I speak, to keep improving accuracy — because it’s not just one snapshot where you collect once and everything’s done, we have to go back and forth on that.

Right now we’re working on improving the accuracy and the models, and trying to get the data working with the right models — that’s also been a challenge. Some models say they’re good, and once you start working with them you find out they’re actually not, so it’s almost hit and miss with different models, and we had to try many out. But the process itself really helped us find out which ones actually deliver on what they say. So some of the challenges: one, creating the data is very expensive, so you have to spend a lot of time collecting it; two, the models themselves say one thing, but once you start working with them you find you have to keep shopping around and changing them out all the time. So that’s some of the challenges we’ve faced with creating this FIDEL dataset.

Ka Man: Wonderful, thank you so much, Deo. I’ve got a question I’d like to put to Tino. How can we ensure that locally designed humanitarian AI also addresses specialist functions, such as finance, donor compliance, and audit requirements, where a contextually incorrect recommendation could directly affect programme delivery and accountability? Do you have any thoughts to share on that one, Tino?

Tino: That is so specific, I love it. I forgot to say this earlier — Esther, thank you so much for bringing the definitions up. I think it’s so rare that these discussions are preempted and framed with proper definitions, because otherwise you spend two hours talking about localisation and at the end realise no one agreed on what it actually means.

Using that definition to answer the question: the challenge you describe could be one of localisation, absolutely — if the training data is inherently using up-to-date financial reporting data for your organisation, your country, that’s great. Although this is where even the best models, even for European and U.S. questions, are starting to struggle, because they were trained on everything, and that could be out of date by the time they stop training. It was incomplete and conflicting. So nothing replaces proper sharing with these models of absolutely up-to-date, correct, authoritative data. Anyone relying on these models to say “how do I report my taxes” or whatever is going on an extremely slippery slope, even in the best circumstances.

Localisation, I would argue, should not play the role of filling these gaps. It can certainly help so that the model is not completely unaware and doesn’t completely hallucinate on these topics, but it’s so specific, and you’re always going to be liable to ask “was our training up to date?” By definition, it’s never going to be up to date.

At the end of the day, I’d say the onus is unfortunately on the user — here are the correct guidelines for financial reporting, upload those as part of the context in the prompt, then ask the model the question you’re trying to answer: how should I report this, is it this page or that page, option A or option B? But that’s not, in my understanding — maybe the other speakers disagree — the job of localisation, to bring that up to speed for every country and continue to be current, which is such an impossible task at the same time.

Ka Man: Thank you, Tino. Next, I’m going to ask a question I’ll put to the group, for anyone to jump in. This is a question from Syed around security, who says this notion of security and challenges has been at the core, vis-à-vis humanitarian data. Syed’s question is around trust in using AI, especially when local organisations, or even INGOs, don’t have resources. Would anyone like to share any thoughts on that?

Deo: Yeah, sure, I can take a crack at it. One of the things we do here in the lab is — most of the work we do, cybersecurity really comes key, so we need to first look at how data is actually moving, and how that affects the users as well. But I must say, for an organisation looking to take on localised AI, or just AI in general, security needs to be first and foremost — especially in a sector like the humanitarian sector, where you’re working with vulnerable people, refugees, displaced persons. That should really be at the core of whatever you’re implementing.

The rule we tend to have is to try to avoid data always moving — you can always test more, edit, train models in place. Organisations, even countries, now have national data protection policies — you try to follow those, really trying to keep the standard as it is as much as possible, because you don’t want to break the rules you already have just because you want to get AI on board. In the end, what you’re trying to do is improve service delivery for the people you’re working with, make their lives better. If you feel you can’t fully implement AI without compromising security — especially data security for the people you’re working with — we always tell people, don’t take the risk.

We work with a lot of analysts — when we’re doing our tests, our audits, and everything, we try to work with a lot of synthetic data and do lots of testing and demos before we say “okay, let’s go live, let’s deploy.” You’d rather spend months and years and let everyone go forward and get the shiny things, because there’s a fear now of missing out — everyone’s saying “I have the new tool,” and you fear you’re missing out. I don’t think that should be the case. You should be saying, we’d rather have the oldest model ever, but it actually works for us, or a mid-sized model — you don’t have to be at the top of the game to really improve the work you’re doing. That’s the notion we go with — start off small, sort of what you can secure, because right now resources may not be enough, but you start where you can actually control and secure what you have, and keep growing, rather than going full blast trying to compete with everyone.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Deo. Did anyone else want to weigh in on that one? Okay, I’ll move to the next question. This is a question around tools, from Ishaku — they’re asking what the HLA recommends, but as a neutral convener in this space, we don’t recommend specific tools, but we’re obviously really keen to learn about the ecosystem and what’s fit for purpose for different humanitarian contexts. I’ll put this to anyone else on the panel: how would you go about thinking through the tools you’re using in alignment with localisation in humanitarian programming?

Meheret: Maybe I can say something, and please feel free to add if there’s anything. When I see this question — I don’t think there is one single recommended tool that we’re going to say “use this,” because I believe the whole argument is that the right tool depends on our context and our use cases. Maybe you’ve seen in the chat, I shared some of our latest briefing, written on local AI, which works offline, on our machines, that doesn’t go online, our data doesn’t go out. If we have that kind of context and want that kind of thing, this local AI approach might be something to explore.

As I mentioned, related to use cases — for example, if we’re exploring data collection tools, Kobo has already been mentioned, Tino already mentioned it — so based on our use case for data collection, we might say Kobo. For other things, we might say other tools. Based on our context, and based on the use cases, there are a variety of tools we’re going to adopt for the humanitarian work we’re implementing. So that’s how I’d address it.

Ka Man: Fantastic, thank you so much, Meheret. I see a lot of appreciation for your response, as well as everybody else’s contributions throughout this webinar, which I can’t believe is almost time to draw to a close.

Thank you so much to everybody who submitted questions — I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to answer more, I would love to have a three-hour webinar, but I don’t think everybody else would be up for that! [laughs] What we’ll do is collate all the chat, all the questions, go through that, and if there’s a way we can incorporate that and respond to it in different formats, we’ll look into how we may do that. After the January webinar, Esther and I worked on a guide, which we produced as a follow-up, so we’ll see if we can produce some form of resource as an outcome from this session. Thank you so much to everyone for your fantastic engagement, and of course our incredible speakers for sharing your insights, which I honestly found very reassuring and inspiring as well.

I’m just going to spend the closing minutes wrapping up together with Esther. Thank you to our wonderful audience for taking the time to be here, and really engaging in this conversation.

When the browser window closes, a short Zoom survey will pop up — if you can answer those, I’d really be grateful for your feedback. This recording will be uploaded to the HLA YouTube channel, and you’ll receive an email with that, and all the links. I know everyone’s really keen to get the slides so you can go through the info in more detail — we’ll share that in a PDF format. You’ll also receive an HPass digital badge for your engagement in this session today, and you can share that on LinkedIn — tell the community and your networks your thoughts, what you learned. We’d really love to see that.

As I say, we’ll compile some resources if we can, to build on the existing resources we have out there, including some examples. You’ll notice these two wonderful guests have been on our podcast in September last year, so do listen to those — they’re really insightful conversations.

In terms of upcoming events — there is one massive event in the calendar, which I hope everyone will be able to join in person or online, and I’ll hand over to Esther to say a few words on that.

Esther: Hello, yes, I love an opportunity to talk about our NetHope Global Summit. That’s coming up again in October — there’s four days of the summit happening in Amsterdam, but what I really want to talk about here is the Virtual Summit Day. That’s happening on 3rd November, and it’s free for all non-profits to attend. It’s a really good opportunity to join all kinds of different sessions — there’s about 25 different sessions happening that day, a whole track related specifically to use of digital tools in fundraising, cybersecurity, and of course AI is all over it as well. Do please sign up to that — even if you can’t join all the sessions at the Virtual Summit, if you sign up you also get the recordings, so you can look at those afterwards. Thank you very much, and thanks so much for having us all here today as well.

Ka Man: Oh, thank you. I really love the HLA-NetHope collaborations, because we really do bring together complementary networks, and people can have these candid conversations and hear insights we don’t normally hear in our day-to-day, so it’s fantastic — and I think, just to echo what everyone has been saying, that’s really critical for collective action in this space. I really hope we can build on these conversations at the virtual summit, which I hope you’ll all be able to join.

The HLA will be at both the in-person and virtual summit. My colleague James Maltby will be giving an in-person session, together with AWS, on using AI to connect humanitarian talent to where it’s needed most. And at the virtual summit, I’ll be giving a workshop together with Madigan Johnson from Data Friendly Space on moving humanitarian AI out of the shadows — so we hope you’ll be able to join us for a practical workshop on encouraging a culture of open learning and communication.

That leaves me to say thank you once again to our wonderful panellists and speakers — Deo, Tino, Esther, and Meheret — and to our wonderful audience for taking the time to learn together with us today. Thank you very much, and have a good rest of your day.

This transcript has been generated using automated tools. It has been checked but minor errors or omissions may remain.

00:00: Chapter 1: Introduction

[Intro music]

[Voiceover, Ka Man]: Welcome to Fresh Humanitarian perspectives, the podcast brought to you by the Humanitarian Leadership Academy.

[Music changes]

[Voiceover, Nour]: Humanitarians, we know, we did a lot of digital transformation, and we failed at most of it, in my opinion. Sorry. And that’s because we didn’t ask the right questions to the right people.

[Voiceover, Musaab]: Ethical AI is not really a technology discussion — it’s a power discussion. Who designed the system, whose data is used, whose perspectives are represented, who benefits, and who carries the risks

[Voiceover, Ali]: it’s very important to invest in cultures, in the transformation, to see the end-user perspective, to not focus only on the models but on how they will be rolled out and designed and all those different stages. So try to imagine things, think differently, and see how we can leverage them to support those colleagues on the ground who are supporting the communities we are serving

[Music changes]

Ka Man: I’m Ka Man Parkinson, Communications Lead at the HLA. And for the past year, together with Data Friendly Space, we’ve been leading the first global study mapping how humanitarians are using AI in their work.  

Welcome to the second instalment of a two-part conversation on humanitarian AI. In part 1, I sat down with Madigan Johnson from Data Friendly Space to take stock of what we think our year of research and convening tells us is urgently needed as the sector navigates ethical and responsible approaches to AI, amidst deep sectoral change and challenges. As Madigan reflected later on LinkedIn, we’re grappling with the question: How do you build responsible AI when the money’s gone and the ground keeps moving under your feet?

Today’s episode deepens and contextualises this conversation: it’s a candid discussion on the promise, potential and pitfalls of AI during this era of the Humanitarian Reset, from the perspective of three humanitarians. I’m delighted to speak to Musaab Abdalhadi, Nour Arab, and Ali Al Mokdad who’ve been an integral part of this research and convening journey. They bring perspectives from Sudan, Lebanon, and across the globe, living through and supporting communities during immense challenges and crises, through conflict and displacement.

If we want to stress test humanitarian AI applications and concepts, this is the lens through which we must consider genuine needs and use cases. Musaab, Ali and Nour each return to the same point: AI must support local leaders and the communities we serve.

[Music ends]

Ka Man: Hi Nour, Musaab, and Ali, welcome to the podcast!

Mussab: Hello, hello!

Ali: Hello

Nour: Thank you very much.

Ka Man: Oh, it’s so nice to have this time to speak to the three of you, especially as we’ve had such close collaboration over the last few months, and longer than that, actually, on humanitarian AI, in terms of convening, our webinars, podcasts, and your support for broader initiatives. So, it’s so great to regroup and have a chat about how things are looking from your perspective in this area in 2026, and looking ahead to the second half of the year.

So, to kick us off, for listeners who are new to our work, would you like to briefly introduce yourself and your interest and background in AI in humanitarian work? So, let’s start with you, please, Nour.

Nour: Hello, everyone. My name is Nour. I work across communication, community engagement, and emergency response globally. I’ve been exploring and using AI for the last two and a half years, and I found myself naturally developing a skill of coaching AI to organisations and people, and I do this right now.

Ka Man: That’s fantastic, thank you so much, Nour. So, let’s bring you in now, Musaab. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Musaab: Thanks for having me. My name is Musaab Alhadi, and I currently work in Sudan, supporting humanitarian programming with a particular focus on locally led response, partnership, and group cash transfer approaches.

Like many humanitarians, my relationship with AI has evolved quite quickly over the last couple of years. Initially, I was curious about its potential to help with drafting, analysis, learning, and knowledge management. Today, I use AI regularly in my work, whether for brainstorming, reviewing documents, developing training materials, or helping structure complex ideas.

At the same time, working in an active humanitarian response has made me very aware of both the opportunities and the limitations of these tools. AI can support decision-making, but it cannot replace contextual understanding, community relationships, or human judgement. That’s where most of my interest lies — how we can use AI responsibly, while keeping humanitarian principles and local realities at the centre.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Musaab. You’ve been doing some incredible work haven’t you, with local responders, with your group cash transfer work, and also AI capacity strengthening training alongside that — also with Ali Mokdad as well — so it’s an absolute pleasure to have you here today. So let’s come to you, Ali. Would you like to introduce yourself for those who are new to your work?

Ali: Yes of course. First of all, thank you for having me. My name is Ali Al Mokdad. I currently advise international and national organisations, NGOs, and social enterprises on organisational transformation and optimisation of their governance and processes. Among the things I support organisations with is AI integration and digital transformation, including the integration of digital solutions like AI agents or large language models with their processes and workflows. I also have a couple of published research, including Inclusive and Intelligent Governance, and I have a bestseller book called Quantum Humanitarian.

Ka Man: Amazing, thank you so much, Ali. Just hearing you all recap who you are and what you’re about really made me think how, obviously, there’s a lot of convergence – from what I know of you – in your work and approaches, but you do occupy different perspectives as well, different vantage points as well, so it’ll be really interesting and useful to hear your take on developments in this discussion.

07:56: Chapter 2: Operational realities: Reconciling disconnects between systems and people

Ka Man: So, to get started, I’d like to talk to you broadly under the theme of operational realities. So through the research that the HLA has conducted with Data Friendly Space — through the convening, through the survey, and interviews like I’ve done with you, Nour, with practitioners — a key theme that came through, particularly from local leaders, is that AI systems must be developed to respond and adapt to operational realities, that they can’t be removed from each other. So, avoidance of a technology solution being imposed on a context without that contextual understanding. I thought it’d be really good to dig into that a little bit more from your perspectives and experiences, your rich experiences across the sector.

So, first of all, I’ll come to you, Ali. Could you share something about AI in your day-to-day context along this theme? For example, I’d be really interested to hear about when you’ve seen a disconnect between how systems are being shaped and how humanitarian work actually happens in practice.

Ali: Let me give you a fresh example — something I’ve been working on with one organisation, where we were trying to look at the challenges they are facing from an organisational psychology perspective, some of the issues, and possible ways to optimise their processes. What we did was use AI to go through so many layers of workflows, processes, policies, and documents, building on the data that they have.

And of course when we did that we found tonnes. We found almost 700 documents, tons of templates and tools, and multiple offline solutions that they had — and because they have area, country, region, and headquarter level with multiple representation offices, we used AI agents and tools to scan all those documents and processes, and identify workflows.

And after identifying those workflows and looking at who’s doing what, we managed to identify multiple what I call organisational disorders — which means a gap between communication at field level and headquarter level, duplication and multiple responsibilities, multiple people stepping over each other’s responsibilities without even realising. We started finding other issues causing gaps in communication and collaboration.

After mapping all those workflows and identifying those issues, we started coming up with AI solutions — for example, automated communication between setting something on the system at HQ and taking it to field level, or identifying duplication in multiple roles and seeing how an AI agent can work on those. And multiple other things.

But the challenge we faced was the transformation element. AI helped us organise this massive amount of data across different levels, but once we started applying those digital solutions, we found, one, a capacity issue — which I would brand as an AI literacy issue. Two, there’s the need at field level for offline solutions and lack of access to the cloud. And adding to that, we needed to present it from a cultural perspective, because there was a bit of moral panic, a bit of lack of clarity, and not all the people were on board with having those solutions and all.

So we needed to step back and focus on organisational transformation, offline solutions, and site-level realities — trying to see how we could work before we sync with the cloud, and work on the cultural element before we even start deploying those tools.

So what I’m trying to say here is on the positive side, it helped us scan massive amounts of data from around ten years, identify multiple organisational disorders, bring solutions, and work as an ally and a tool to the leadership at headquarter, regional, and country level. But the challenging part was the rollout, the offline solutions, and introducing those cultural elements. This is just a fresh example of what I have seen at organisational and institutional level.

Ka Man: That’s fascinating. I have so many questions but I don’t want to take up all the time. I found it really interesting that you pointed first to the people aspect and culture — organisational psychology, organisational disorders — I think a lot of listeners will be nodding their heads and relate to that context. So, thank you very much.

Let’s turn to you now, Musaab. Could you share any experiences where you’ve seen this sort of mismatch or disconnect between systems and people?

Musaab: Yes, I have so much to say here [laughs]. One thing I often notice is that many conversations about AI assume that information is readily available, is structured, and consistently updated — but humanitarian work rarely operates like that. Definitely in Sudan, decisions often have to be made with incomplete information, rapidly changing context, communication disruption, and significant access constraints.

I remember working on humanitarian programming where displacement patterns changed within days. Communities moved, markets shifted, and security conditions evolved rapidly. In those situations, the most valuable information often comes from local responders, community leaders, volunteers, and partners who are physically present and consistently engaged with communities. That is where I sometimes see a disconnect. AI systems are often built around data.

But humanitarian response is also built around relationships, trust, and contextual interpretation. There have been many moments where I have thought: I wish the people designing these systems could spend one week in a humanitarian field operation to see the realities — not because the technology is wrong, but because they would quickly see that reality is much messier than any dataset. A recommendation generated by AI may look logical on paper, but local actors may immediately recognise why it won’t work in practice. For me, that highlights an important lesson: AI should support local decision-making, not replace it.

Ka Man: Thank you so much for sharing that. I mean, it’s such a vivid example, because obviously you’re working directly with local responders now — so you see the issues day in, day out, you know the challenges, and you know the workarounds, and you know the cultural factors at play, and the nuances that like you say, an AI would not understand. That plea that people spend time actually – when developing these systems — to understand what is this the situation like, that can really help to shape the actual system design. So thank you very much.

So let’s come to you now, Nour. Could you share any examples or perspectives of this sort of disconnect between systems and people?

Nour: I would actually like to add to what Ali and Musaab were saying. When the solution comes from humanitarians, it’s always a much better solution. That’s why AI literacy is quite important. When an outsider comes with AI expertise, let’s say, to an organisation, they would come with AI as a solution, while the problem is totally different, and the solution to the problem is not AI.

I was approached recently by one local NGO. They said, Nour, we’re sure you can help us a lot with AI, and I smiled and said: no, I can help you, and then if AI is the answer, I can be useful on this matter. So, tell me about your problems first. And as a humanitarian insider, I was able to ask the right questions and then identify what they need — by asking very simple things, like: what frustrates you in your work? What’s repetitive? What makes you bored at work? What’s something you would like to do – and this I wouldn’t touch when it comes to AI. And then, let me see your latest report. What systems do you have? What’s your data protection policy? And this is where the conversation flows very naturally from one humanitarian to another, and we start identifying the issues as we go.

And as Ali was saying, it’s overwhelming what AI can do — it can come up with so many solutions for people because it identifies patterns and gaps so quickly, maybe not humanly possible with the short contracts that we have.

But it’s always very important to understand where the organisation stands when it comes to AI, and how much acceptance they would have in integrating these changes into their system. Personally, I start with the simple things, and then expand to the bigger scheme. In time, people start to accept, integrate, and also come back with troubleshooting, some problems they faced — and then we fix, or simply let the whole agent go if necessary. Because again, the main issue is to solve a problem, not to install another system. As humanitarians, we know, we did a lot of digital transformation, and we failed at most of it, in my opinion. Sorry. And that’s because we didn’t ask the right questions to the right people. I’m not planning to do that anymore [laughs].

Ka Man: Thank you, Nour. It’s quite interesting — when you said those closing words, Musaab and Ali both smiled and nodded their head, so that obviously really resonates.

Nour: There’s one thing I’d like to add.

Ka Man: Yeah

Nour: In one of the coaching sessions I had, one of the people I was talking to — a senior humanitarian — was saying: I’m having this problem with my boss, and I don’t know how to explain what I do to her. And I said: okay, let’s do that with AI. He had four extremely complicated Excel sheets — very, very good work he was doing, but his manager didn’t understand what he was doing. So we spoke together, asking the right questions — what’s your objective, what would you like her to understand — and we came up with a platform that was so easy to understand.

With AI literacy, it doesn’t just improve the system of the organisation, but also the communication between departments that is sometimes — or most of the time — impossible [laughs].

Ka Man: Yes, again, that probably resonates with a lot of people listening. What I’m hearing from the three of you is – if we’re look at this in terms of a flowchart – is that people and conversations and communication are foundational — that’s the very first step — whereas it can be so easy to just bring in a system and install that [laughs], overwriting all of that stage, bypassing that, and that’s where the problems begin.
Ali talked about organisational psychology and transformation before talking about the actual technical solutions.

You Musaab, you were talking about the cultural nuances and the understanding that a lot of data will be unstructured because of the nature of the work and the context in which you’re working.

And Nour, you were talking about the same themes. So that really comes through to me. So I just wanted to throw it back to you — whether any of you had any brief reflections to share on what’s just emerged.

Ali: I have to admit, and make a confession — I’m guilty. I have made so many mistakes before, when I led the rollout of ERP systems, when I led automation and Power Apps and Power BI initiatives, when I established AI communities and super users, and led governance of multiple business processes. I have learned so many things from those failures. One of the key things I learned is culture — and the people in the organisation. And going back to first principles: any conversation must start from first principles, especially when we are talking about design, rollout, development, maintenance and all that.

The second thing I want to say is about roles, specific roles, workflows, and processes. We have to keep in mind, when we are talking about AI’s impact on positions, we have to distinguish between purpose and task. There is a huge difference. The project manager’s purpose is to oversee the project cycle management. But managing a budget, preparing a forecast, preparing a plan — that’s a task.

So AI, from my perspective and what I have been doing, is not coming for the overall purpose — it’s coming for the task. How that project manager is forecasting, how they are doing the monitoring, the planning, the designing.

So when I talk with people about the impact of AI on organisational workflows, I always try to distinguish between purpose — the overall goal and scope — and the task. Because the integration at this moment, AI in humanitarian development is mainly in that area: the tasks, how leaders and people at different roles are doing those different tasks. It hasn’t impacted the overall purpose until this moment. That’s from my perspective and experience working with different organisations.

Ka Man: Thank you. Purpose and task. I think it’s hard for organisations to think about that sometimes, especially in the current context and all the changes generally, beyond AI — so having that framework is a useful one. Thank you so much.

25:10: Chapter 3: Humanitarian AI learning: Now and in the future

Ka Man: I want to share thanks again to the three of you, and our appreciation for your involvement to help shape the development of our Ethical AI Use and Decision-Making in Humanitarian Work microlearning, developed together with Data Friendly Space as well. I’m so excited to see that launched on Kaya. So many thanks again to the three of you for your rich contributions and feedback.

So I wanted to ask you to briefly share one reflection or takeaway from what you saw, your involvement or that process — and then, more broadly, what do you think needs to be prioritised in terms of AI literacy in humanitarian work, or just more generally, in the second half of 2026? So, let’s bring you in first, Musaab.

Musaab: Thanks Ka Man. As a humanitarian, one of my key takeaways from the Ethical AI Use and Decision-Making in Humanitarian Work microlearning was that ethical AI is not really a technology discussion — it’s a power discussion. Who designed the system, whose data is used, whose perspectives are represented, who benefits, and who carries the risks. Those are questions humanitarian organisations are already asking in localisation discussions and agendas, and I think they apply equally to AI.

Looking ahead as I see priorities to the second half of 2026, I believe one priority should be making AI literacy accessible to frontline humanitarian workers and local humanitarian responders. Right now, there is a risk that AI conversations become concentrated among technical specialists and headquarter teams, while local actors remain consumers rather than contributors.

If localisation is important for humanitarian action, then local actors should also have a voice in shaping how AI is used within humanitarian response. I also think we need to invest more in critical AI literacy — not teaching people to blindly trust AI, but teaching them how to question it, challenge it, identify bias, and understand its limitations as Nour and Ali mentioned. Because responsible use is not about knowing what AI can do — it’s about knowing what it cannot do.

Ka Man: Well said, Musaab. I was just reflecting recently how, in our immediate circle, we do naturally frame AI literacy and AI development in the localisation agenda – situate clearly within there. But outside of this particular group or people with this school of thought, shall we say, the innovation agenda and the efficiency agenda may be more dominant.

So I’m pleased that you’ve surfaced that here and you’ve always spoken, when we’ve had conversations about this, like at our HNPW session back in March, you really put it down to power. Made that a central theme and question in the use of AI tools. So thank you very much for sharing. So, Nour, let’s bring you in. What’s your take on the ethical AI microlearning and AI literacy in general?

Nour: It was twenty minutes of knowledge. I don’t call it a microlearning course — I learned a lot myself from it. And I think it answers an observation we have, which is that AI is going to make us lazy, or it’s a shorter route to things.

But when doing the training and going through the questions, you realise that when you use AI, you add more steps to what you do, and hence you spend more time doing what you do — but maybe differently. The workflow is different. It could be broader, based on more research, more patterns — but it’s not necessarily a shorter way to do your tasks. In my experience, sometimes I spend much less time working because of AI, and in other times I’m working ten, twenty times more [laughs]. It really depends on what task it is, and the learning curve.

Going back to my first point — not making the same problem we have, the same mistake we made in digital transformation — I really do think AI literacy is most important because the problem should be identified by the people, by the humanitarians, by the people on the ground who know the context well and are able to generate better solutions. Training on AI literacy can be a bit too general. Maybe it depends on a specific task or a specific department. Personally, I find it very useful to speak to colleagues very informally about the challenges they face every day, and how AI can help them. There are a lot of webinars and online trainings out there, and the ones that are winning, I think, are the ones that tackle specific problems and expand to the different tasks people do — for example, in communications, or finance etc. That’s what I think.

Ka Man: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Nour. I really enjoyed our conversation that we had last month — your interview is available on our website and I’ll link it in the show notes — where you made a very definitive, declarative statement that AI literacy for those who are on the ground is key. So you really do see that as a priority, particularly in line with the localisation agenda, would you say?

Nour: Yes, definitely. And I’m on the advisory board of the Community Engagement Forum, and we’re currently running a survey on whether AI belongs in community engagement or not. We’ve been receiving very interesting responses — we made it very open, we said whatever you think of AI, if you refuse it, if you hate it, if you love it, just drop your opinions there. It seems that respondents are saying they’re already using AI and they need help with AI literacy training. Another finding I saw is that they want to include communities so much in what they’re doing, and let them know how they’re using AI in their work — but at the same time, they don’t know how. They’re sharing interest but also concerns, and asking for support on specific things. I’d be more than happy to share the results at the end — that would help with your work.

Ka Man: Yes that’s fascinating. And I think that experience is replicated across the sector at large — where there is this recognition that AI is helping, AI can take some of this pressure off from me, but we’ve reached a bit of an impasse, a bit of stuckness. How do we get to the next level and unlock that? My aspiration is that this Kaya course – I’ll call it course rather than microlearning module [laughs] is part of a new wave that I hope will emerge to help the sector get across the line — so we’ve moved from “is AI okay, can I use it?” to the reality that we are using it, so how can we as a sector move forward responsibly and operationalise it in our work? Thank you very much for sharing your reflections, Nour.

So, Ali, would you like to come in now and share your thoughts on the module, and any reflections about AI literacy?

Ali: I think it’s a good course, and I highly recommend those who are listening or watching this later to go to Kaya and look into the other courses — there are so many around leadership, project management, finance management, supply chain. I’m not sure if there are now over 500, but I don’t think there is a topic you can’t find a course or e-learning on. If it’s not hosted by Kaya, then it’s another platform in collaboration with Kaya.

There is one thing I want to say here. When I design e-learnings or trainings, I always try to look at it from the end-user perspective. One of the main opportunities that came with AI and AI applications is the way we think about e-learnings. An example — something I just completed recently with one organisation. When we started designing from the end-user perspective, we looked at different ways of learning. A user enters the platform, and once they sign in, they find three options: do you prefer learning through text and listening? Do you prefer learning through videos? Do you prefer learning through scenarios or practising? The user chooses one. If they clicked on text and listening, AI agents in the background tailor the e-learning content in the language the end user wants, appearing as text and voice — they can control the speed and other things, and do the test while they’re learning. If the user picked video, AI agents come in the background, add short text, and pick from the video library. If the user picked scenarios — and that was actually my favourite — a screen appears with multiple AI agents playing different roles in an organisation, and then it’s role-play scenarios with the learner. All built on specific content, but delivered in the way the platform tailors to the end user’s preferred method, language, and approach.

The main reason I’m mentioning this is that with AI, we have an opportunity to reimagine learning — because some people like to read, others like to listen, others like to watch videos. In this case, the user has all those different options to learn about exactly the same topic, exactly the same material, but in their preferred way. And I’m not talking about the future — I’m talking about something we literally just finished.

The second thing: I think it’s very important to recognise that AI literacy means different things to different people, and different things at different levels. When I talk about AI literacy at operational level, they are already using the tools — they want an operational co-pilot, something that can match their speed. When I talk about it at headquarter or regional level, it’s more focused on governance and data analysis.

And when I do AI literacy initiatives for people outside the sector entirely, it means something different for a nurse, a doctor, a teacher. So it’s very important to look at learning from the end-user perspective, and to start leveraging the opportunities that come with these AI tools and AI models.

Ka Man: Absolutely. I think the emphasis on the user journey and personalised learning — well that’s first of all, obviously a really exciting use case for AI and the use of AI agents for such a personalised and contextualised learning experience. So that’s the future.
And a bit of a sort of plug for Kaya — thank you for mentioning the courses, I didn’t pay Ali to say that [laughs], not a paid commercial. I know you’re an online super learner, you have been throughout your whole career. But we do have, in the migration and upgrade, we’ve got plug-in ability to add AI agents in the future and other exciting opportunities. So yeah, maybe that is the direction we’ll go in, hopefully.

But I think user journeys in general. I think If we go back to the development perspective — actually thinking – rather than making assumption, this is what is needed, this is solutions, like a top-down, it’s actually from the user, from the organisation from the humanitarian’s perspective. so I think that’s a really good mental model to have across the board. So Nour, did you want to come in and add something there?

Nour: So two things actually. Very quick notes. First, I have a friend who is blind, and she was talking about the limitations when it comes to AI use — and using those agents could really help with inclusive learning whenever possible. I think that will help a lot. The other thing: I’m a huge podcast lover, and I listen to podcasts whenever I’m doing mundane work. I actually use NotebookLM whenever I want to learn something — I put different resources to generate the research and then start speaking as a podcast participant. It comes back to me with a very normal conversation, as if I’m speaking to a human being, and I start to learn things differently. I’m really liking it. So this could be one way of learning in the age of AI.

Ka Man: That’s very innovative. I like that! You’re making doing mundane tasks a learning –

Nour: Very! To be honest!

Ka Man: [laughs] And Ali — didn’t you have a podcast using NotebookLM?

Ali: It was a bit of an integration of multiple APIs and different tools, and that was more than a year ago. It went through everything I have published online, and some of the published research I have from 2013 to 2025, and generated 30 episodes of conversations around those different topics. That also opened my eyes around the learning concept. I want to mention something about those AI agents — I had a case where I did an e-learning as a participant. I started doing the modules, and I asked AI to observe what I was doing, the layout of the e-learning, how I was responding, so that it could also anticipate different reactions from different users. Some people ask me why I picked scenarios, videos, text, and audio — because that’s how I like to learn. Sometimes a video, sometimes an audio, sometimes text. I really like what Nour mentioned about inclusive learning — that’s a step toward inclusive learning, from my perspective and experience.

Ka Man: Fantastic. Oh, it’s very exciting — the future of humanitarian learning in all forms. Thank you. What a fantastic conversation. We’ll have to organise a follow-up at some point, because there are so many things I want to dig into deeper with you all. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wrap things up. But I just want to thank the three of you again, sincerely, for everything — all of your contributions, having this dialogue on an ongoing basis, and all that feedback along the way. So I truly appreciate it. So, on behalf of the HLA and Data Friendly Space, thank you.

44:11: Chapter 4: Closing reflections

Ka Man: So, would you like to share any final thoughts or message to our listeners? Let’s start with you, please, Musaab.

Musaab: Yes I should start that we’re closing this conversation [laughs.] My message will be simple. AI should make humanitarian action more human, not less. The technology will continue to evolve, but our responsibility remains the same — listening to communities, respecting local knowledge and local actors, and making decisions that put people first. The most effective humanitarian responses of the future will not be those with the most advanced technology. They will be those that combine technology with local leadership, human judgment, and genuine accountability to the people we serve.

Ka Man: Thank you so much, Musaab. Well said. How about you, Ali, any final words to share?

Ali: It’s something I usually say: technology is not the problem, transformation is. To be action-oriented about that — it’s very important to invest in cultures, in the transformation, to see the end-user perspective, to not focus only on the models but on how they will be rolled out and designed and all those different stages. And take the opportunity to think differently — because that’s one of the main advantages coming with AI and AI agents and all those tools. Try to imagine things, think differently, and see how we can leverage them to support those colleagues on the ground who are supporting the communities we are serving.

Ka Man: Thank you, Ali. And you, Nour?

Nour: If you asked me this question a year ago, I would say start using AI somewhere. But now, with a lot of people already engaged with AI, I would say: keep the people who know the problem and know the work doing AI solutions, and do not import people from outside to do it for you. Whenever it’s possible, train your teams, individuals, and community members to do the work — and you’ll see a lot of your problems solved.

Ka Man: Thank you very much. Wise words to close on. Nour Arab, Musaab Alhadi, and Ali Al Mokdad — thank you very much for joining us for today’s episode of Fresh Humanitarian Perspectives from the Humanitarian Leadership Academy.

Nour: Thank you so much.

Ali: Thank you so much.

[Music]

This transcript has been generated using automated tools. It has been checked but minor errors or omissions may remain.

[Intro music]

[00:00] Chapter 1: Introduction

[Voiceover, Ka Man]: Welcome to Fresh Humanitarian Perspectives, the podcast brought to you by the Humanitarian Leadership Academy.

[Music changes]

[Voiceover, Gülsüm]: In our sector, there’s not much you know, funding, especially after the cuts. So we need to find very creative and like the smart solutions to our problems.

[Voiceover, Ka Man]: Actually, this is the time to retain that real human decision-making — the human-in-the-loop, as we say — and make sure that’s at the heart of it.

[Voiceover, Amanda]: I think we as comms professionals, we need to be honest with ourselves too, and say we need to get better at telling our story and making people care about the ‘so what’ and the ‘why’, so that it helps people realise what we’re doing is mission critical.

[Voiceover, Ka Man] How are humanitarian organisations rethinking communications in 2026?

I’m Ka Man Parkinson, Communications Lead here at the HLA and in today’s episode we’re exploring this very question through a candid, three-way conversation with peers. I’m joined by Amanda Hinkel-Mauceri from Humentum and Gülsüm Özkaya from IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation.

This is an informal yet thoughtful and thought-provoking conversation, where we discuss the shifting communications landscape in 2026, what’s working for us from our vantage points and what’s not — from the rapid rise of AI and tools reshaping comms, to the growing pressure to communicate more impactfully and cut through the noise, while still protecting core principles and values such as ethics, dignity, and trust.

We hope this conversation will resonate with both communicators in the humanitarian field and the nonprofit space tackling common challenges as well as those in other roles who are curious what your comms colleagues may be working on or thinking about – hopefully sparking ideas for your next collaboration.

[Music ends]

Ka Man: So, Gülsüm and Amanda, welcome to the podcast!

Amanda: Thanks for having us!

Ka Man: I’m so excited to have this conversation with you today, especially because it’s about comms, which is obviously something that we’re all passionate about. So, to get started, would you like to briefly introduce yourself to our listeners? Let’s start with you, Gülsüm.

Gülsüm: I’m Gülsüm Özkaya. I’m working for an NGO based in Istanbul, Türkiye — IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation. I’m working as an International Humanitarian Affairs Coordinator. And also, I’m pursuing my master’s degree on humanitarian communication. I am writing my thesis right now. It’s about how to use AI in humanitarian communication, and the perception of crisis-affected people while being represented in humanitarian communication products.

Ka Man: Thank you, Gülsüm. It’s so exciting for you to be here — especially as our organisations and our paths have crossed in different ways over the past year or so, so it’s nice to have this time to sit down and chat to you. So, Amanda, let’s come to you, would you like to introduce yourself?

Amanda: Yes, thank you. My name is Amanda, I’m the Director of Marketing and Communications for Humentum, and we’re a global nonprofit that helps other NGOs and nonprofits enhance their long-term resilience and navigate change through training, consulting, and membership as well. And I’ve been with Humentum for 8 years now overseeing marketing, comms, PR, video, graphic design — you name it — so a bit of everything, myself and my team manage. And I will say, in hearing a bit of both of your backgrounds, I didn’t necessarily expect to end up in comms, and I didn’t necessarily expect to end up in humanitarian global development either. And I actually came from an arts management background, and while I’ve been now in this sector for 10-plus years, it’s still a bit of a learning curve sometimes. So I’m so thrilled to just have a conversation with you both, and really just share what we’re hearing, what we’re seeing, and what’s working — and really also, what I think everyone’s interested in is what’s not working, and why, and what new ideas we can bring to the second half of 2026.

Ka Man: Thank you, Amanda. It’s so great to have this conversation with you today. So Humentum and the HLA have been partners — we’ve collaborated on courses on Kaya and other initiatives over the years, but our paths have only crossed the past year, I think, after we connected on LinkedIn. So it’s so nice to talk to a fellow comms professional. And we’ve had chats and Gülsüm and I have had chats, and there’s common ground. We’ve just discovered that we all like history, that was our favourite subject at school! [Laughs] We love learning about the past and how we can apply that to the present, as well as fond of literature as well. And Amanda, you were talking about, you weren’t expecting to be in comms, but here you are — you and I have had conversations about applying creativity into work and bringing in that perspective. So, although it might feel disparate in some senses, in other ways, it’s really holistic part of our lens and way of viewing the world, right?

Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been so fascinating because you know, arts and culture and comms are not far off at all, and the more you can bring in all those cross-disciplines, your messaging is stronger, your stories are stronger. It’s a really nice collaboration that makes a lot of sense when you think about it sometimes a bit more.

Ka Man: Absolutely, I love that. I’m really here for the whole interdisciplinary approach — that’s what I think comms actually has to evolve and become more like in the coming period, which we’ll talk about a bit more shortly.

So, the format of today’s podcast is going to be a little bit different. So because the three of us are comms professionals, it’s going to be a bit more of a dynamic conversation, so in turn, we’ll ask each other questions, so it’s not just me posing the questions.

[06:39] Chapter 2: What’s changing for communicators in the shifting landscape?

So much has changed for everyone in the system over the last — well, it’s been more than a year, but it’s been particularly acute since 2025 onwards. So can I turn to you first, Amanda, to ask: what’s changed for you within Humentum, and for you as the Director of Comms, what’s shifted?

Amanda: It’s been quite a rollercoaster, if you will, since 2025, when we had the USAID funding cuts. And Humentum, like many organisations, we reduced our structure and staffing footprint due to those cuts, so it really caused us to think about a lot of things differently. How can we be doing more with less? How can we be doing different things with less? What are the right things that we should be focusing on that best delivers on our mission and vision? And it was a really interesting timing and an interesting shove, because we were already thinking about an AI roadmap and implementation, but suddenly it really accelerated the thinking about how we can be using AI better at our organisation, and how we can be showing up with AI for our members and our clients. We did start with the foundational pieces of creating an AI way of working, an AI policy to get our staff aligned there. And then we started identifying the right tools, experimenting, testing, learning. It was a lot of working out loud, which is really fun when you get the space to do that, and just really see what works.

It was also over the past decade or so increasingly evident that we need to ensure that marketing and comms always have a seat at the table to ensure that you have that cross-collaboration. And I think something that might be top of mind for both of you too is: you can’t just bring comms in at the end. You really need to ensure that we are integral throughout the whole process — to be thinking about messaging, campaigns, channels, we’re showing up, where and when. So internal comms also shifted a lot within the past year, making sure we were showing up the way we needed to for our staff as well. But I’d be really interested to hear both of you — what is really changing, and what’s been working for you?

Gülsüm: Well, especially with the use of AI too much in our organisation as well, and I’m not only referring to IHH, the organisation I’m currently working at, but also my previous organisation YEÇED. These are both working with the teams that are a very young team and are just engaging with AI tools so quickly. What has changed, especially for the last year, it was so quick for creating content. We’re working in crisis areas and everything is changing so fast — but it was hard to follow these too fast changes before. Because I have like four years’ experience, and I’m referring back to 2022, the first year I started. But for the last year, it was too quick to create content. And also like engaging with other people, using their content as well — especially for the pictures from crisis areas. We are sending some messages, even to crisis-affected people to share with us and share on our social media accounts and other platforms.

So, especially for the external communication part, it was about creating quick content. But for internal communication, it’s also under the effect of AI, because right now it’s very easy to develop some tools with AI, and we are using it for internal communication as well. For example, our manager he’s developed with an AI person — he’s not a developer, but using an AI — for our internal communications problems, and now we are using that platform. So it was a quick answer to use for the internal communications, because other tools sometimes cannot address the problems let’s say of humanitarian workers or humanitarian organisations. So maybe, as humanitarian communicators, let’s say, we can focus on developing our own tools, our own solutions with AI.

Amanda: And I think that is so important, because we’re not operating in the same context as a public company, right? We’re dealing with so many sensitive areas, and I think we really need to ensure that what we’re putting into AI and building within AI aligns with our brand and our guidelines — because you need to have those set of guardrails, or I think it can do more damage.

Gülsüm: For sure, yeah, our standards are totally different than the other sectors. So we need our own standards which means we need our own standards on AI as well — so even for the use of tools, creating content, etc. It’s important for us to engage in AI in that point, I think.

Ka Man: I love hearing this, because as you know I have a particular interest in AI. I haven’t guided you in this way to talk about AI [laughs] — it’s just naturally emerged as a priority for you. And that reflects the interest and adoption across the sector, where we found in our recent research with Data Friendly Space that three-quarters of humanitarians are using AI regularly to support their work. But there’s low levels of organisational readiness across the board, including policies for example and training. So it’s actually really interesting for me to hear that actually as organisations, you’re trying to find a way forward but not in isolation — you’re trying to operationalise that more widely across teams, and I think that reflects the stage that a lot of organisations are at.

But I think, crucially, for communicators, we’re kind of leading the way in a sense — because even though people might not necessarily think of comms straight away when you think about humanitarian AI – you might be thinking of more operational or programmatic applications, MEAL for example, or needs assessment, actually because comms and design, and marketing have actually been the first areas in all sectors to be really adopting AI. Actually, I think we’re quite an important contingent to actually reflect back lessons learned, and to share that, and encourage that open conversation and those lessons learned for other teams.

Amanda: And one tangible example I can share — and Ka Man, I think I talked to you about this a bit: I was building an AI agent in Copilot that was trained on our brand guidelines and messaging, which we then rolled out to a small group of staff members to test and trial, see does this help with building content? Does it help generate strategic ideas, or be that thought partner? And it hasn’t really been working the way I anticipated, to be very frank. I think it takes time to figure that out, figure out what’s working and what’s not, and to share that out loud. Because I know, Gülsüm, you’re working on Claude, right? And that’s really where I’m interested in exploring next — maybe a skills-based agent in Claude is the better option. But really understanding what your organisation needs, what we need as comms teams, to help us move forward and what the rest of the organisation needs. What our comms teams needs and what the rest of the organisations needs.

But it did give us ideas of— oh, could this work for our programme teams in different ways? Could this work for our business development teams in different ways? So there are always rays of sunshine, if you will, when things fail and don’t quite work out, and I think sharing those lessons learned out loud to inspire other comms teams to test and trial within their own parameters to see.

Gülsüm: I totally agree with you. Well, that’s why I think we need to keep trying, I guess. And also, especially for the youth – I don’t know who is describing yourself as young or not [laughs] I’m not saying anything about this, but of course like maybe as younger generations, maybe we need to focus more on creating tools and developing maybe with Claude you mentioned and other tools as well. Because when we realise how much it makes everything easier and faster, I think it will just make a huge difference in the sector as well. In our sector, there’s not much funding, especially after the cuts. So we need to find very creative and smart solutions to our problems. That’s why we need to focus on the specific problem and create our own solution on this.
 
[17:06] Chapter 3: AI slop, algorithms and the attention challenge

Amanda: Yes, and I think the flip side of the rise of AI is also the rise of AI slop. There’s just a lot more content out there, a lot more for our audiences to sift through. So where are you finding it hardest to cut through the noise right now? Is it with younger audience, is it supporters, partners, donors, funders?

Gülsüm: Well, actually, it’s not directly from my own organisation’s experience, but in general — because I have lots of friends in the sector and we are talking frequently about this. The hardest thing is mostly explaining our solutions to the older generation of managers. It might be an easy solution, or a content idea, that they could expand it more. But the sector is not always that welcoming to AI and these kinds of new ideas. You see. Not the donor side, of course actually might also be the donor side a little bit, because among donors it’s not always a young group of people in the sector.

Sometimes it is a hard part to deal with. I’d like to give an example about this: for a child protection project we had involving child sponsorship, something like this, we had donors but we didn’t want to share real pictures of the children with the donors for the child protection, and we created AI-generated versions of pictures of the children and shared with the donors. Mostly, it sounds like a creative idea for the younger people, they loved the idea and were okay with it, but older generation donors are not very welcoming of this solution — because if they’re not engaging with AI in their own personal lives, these kinds of AI-based solutions are not seen like a good way to solve problems. So that might be the hard way to solve the problems.

Amanda: Yeah, that’s such a good example — meeting them where they are. Ka Man, what are you seeing?

Ka Man: You know, it’s so interesting hearing you both speak, because actually you both point to something that’s really hard for us in communications because the landscape is shifting, and expectations are shifting so rapidly. Maybe going back 10, 15 years ago, we had a sort of clearer idea of what appeals to which audiences and which channels we’ll use to reach them, and developing a marketing plan or a comms plan was a bit more of a straightforward task. But social media algorithms are really working against us [laughs].

I’ve found that in the last year or so, LinkedIn especially — which is one of our major channels and we still get a huge amount of our audience from there and engagement — the algorithm counts against us I think in a non-profit capacity. Our messaging isn’t “here’s top 5 ways to, you know, maximise your return on investment.” [laughs] It’s very different messaging, which these platforms might not necessarily prioritise. So it’s working with that. And then, as Gülsüm has just mentioned, it’s the changing expectations of your audiences — so that might be generational, or it might be the purpose. So as comms professionals, I feel it’s really hard for us to develop a cohesive plan that you don’t have to constantly refine and iterate, which we do, but with time constraints it can be hard to do that. In an ideal world, we’d have a big team, we’d be doing A/B split tests and we’d be doing all sorts of things to test that, but in the operational realities that we face, we don’t have that luxury necessarily. So I think being strategic, being intentional, but also having that flexibility to adapt is absolutely essential to navigate this— but it’s hard [laughs], it’s hard, because we’ve only got one pair of hands and 24 hours in a day. So yeah, I think that’s one of the things that one of the biggest challenges right now.

Amanda: And there’s so many nonprofits doing so much incredible work. So how are you cutting through the noise? How do you ensure your messaging is landing? I think it’s really about understanding your target audience, knowing what they need to hear from you, where their mindset is at. But I think we as comms professionals need to be honest with ourselves too, and say we need to get better at telling our story and making people care about the “so what” and the “why,” so that it helps people realise what we’re doing is mission critical and affects your daily life.

And I was looking at some research done by a university in the US, and Candid recently highlighted it as well, which said that only 5.4% of Americans say they use nonprofits. And even in that context, that’s shockingly low, right? But it also reflected that 4 out of 5 Americans visited a local park, a rec centre, a museum, a zoo — and many people didn’t realise that those are nonprofits. So how can we as comms professionals, one, cut through the noise that connects with our audience, and two, help them understand the why behind it and why these things matter, especially in our current environment?

Ka Man: Yeah, that’s so true. You know, you made me think about — in January, the team and I took part in an Amazon Web Services hackathon. It was a 3-day hackathon and we had to pitch at the end — we only had five minutes, and we had to just give an elevator pitch essentially for why our prototype should be funded and why this matters. And normally when I’m presenting to audiences, I’m presenting to the humanitarian sector. And actually that was a real challenge, because I’m like, of course humanitarianism matters, humanitarian action matters, locally-led humanitarian action really matters — but to actually get across into one minute or less, when I’m alongside charities who are working in healthcare and education — those are universal and resonate immediately because we all have the experience of a child learning to read, or supporting someone with health challenges. I think we in the sector need to maybe take a step outside of our beliefs and you know, what we think cuts through, and evaluate with a fresh perspective, and a bit of soul-searching to get to: why are we here? What do we stand for? And so what? Why should a funder care? Why should a partner care? And it’s not easy, because obviously we all care, but we need to make that argument stronger and more compelling.

[24:50] Chapter 4:  The human-in-the-loop – AI opportunities and challenges for communicators

Amanda: Absolutely. I know, Gülsüm, you’re thinking about what’s working and what’s not. Do you have any key lessons that have really made a difference for you, or any things that really haven’t worked — thinking about AI or talking to different audiences at different generational levels? What are you seeing that’s worked?

Gülsüm: Well, actually, I’d like to mention my here my project because it’s changing my perception on what’s worked and what’s not especially for humanitarian communication. And what I mean by project is actually my thesis. I’m conducting interviews with crisis-affected people and asking: do you prefer to be represented by AI, or do you prefer to do real pictures of you, your community, your area, your city?
I always assumed that most people would choose AI because they don’t want to see themselves or their families depicted in a crisis situation. But most of the interviewees actually expressed that they would like to see real pictures from crisis areas — even their own pictures — because they want people to understand that the crisis is real.

At that point, I really changed my idea, because I used to think that AI was the best solution on this. But after these interviews, I started to understand that the perceptions of crisis-affected people or beneficiaries might be totally different. So while we are creating solutions with AI and other tools, we of course need to get the input of beneficiary groups — not just donors or humanitarian communicators or others. For the last year, that has been my biggest learning lesson.

And also, authentication of content — because there is lots of communication that we are engaging as humanitarian communicators, we engage with lots of content from news sources, directly from content creators in crisis-affected areas, and local partners we have in the crisis areas. There’s always a flow of content, but authentication directly affects our relationships with donors, networks, and partners. That’s also a key issue for me this year. That’s why I’m working on a humanitarian AI policy for my previous organisation — because these humanitarian AI policies, if we can’t create these immediately, new problems adding on this. Especially in child protection and related protection areas, I think we all need to focus on this before the new challenges are born.

Amanda: So fascinating. I love the really interesting work you’re getting to focus on. And for me, it’s that reminder that we need to be centring communities and the people that we serve, involving them in data collection and decision-making — because we don’t want just a top-down solution. We want to understand how they want to be portrayed, and for me that comes back to building that trust and building relationships. And I think that’s something that makes a real difference especially this year. And I know, Ka Man, you’ve been thinking about that piece especially — building those relationships.

Ka Man: Yeah, absolutely. You make such great points both of you. Yeah, open communication and trust-based relationships are so critical across the board. And Gülsüm, your research is so thought-provoking — because from a personal perspective I think, of course real photos, authentic imagery is preferable. But then actually your research is showing that actually, agency and choice is the central decider. So there is no one-size-fits-all, and that listening is really key.

Gülsüm: There’s another point here I guess, because sometimes even when crisis-affected people choose something they think is more beneficial for them, but humanitarian communicators have to protect their dignity even if they choose something else. For example, in a crisis area, a woman let’s say, might say, “You can take a picture of me if you give me some cash or just some help, or any other something.” You see, it’s a crisis affected context, they might say something like that. But the decision of whether to actually share that picture belongs to the humanitarian communicator, right. So even though the person, the crisis-affected person, choose the normal picture or something to be shared to call people for donation, the humanitarian communicator still has to protect their dignity, even if they have permission from them.

And also for children as well — children have no idea for AI or normal pictures or real pictures sharing on social media or different platforms. Humanitarian communicators have to protect their rights and their dignity, you know.

Ka Man: Gosh, you really highlight the complexity there — so, it’s not just informed consent, but whether the whole situation is ethical. That speaks to the whole theme of: whether we’re under pressure, we have to put that time and really think through the processes, even with AI speeding things up and giving us back some time, we can’t, you know, we need to be diligent in our processes. That really speaks to the importance of that with that really tangible example there.

Gülsüm: Yeah.

[32:27] Chapter 5: What do communicators need to get better at in the year ahead?

Amanda: So what do you think is going to be really important — or even critical — as we look to the second half of 2026 and into 2027 for comms professionals? What are you all seeing? Do we need to get better at something? Is there something we need to let go? We like to say at Humentum: what do you need to start, and what do you need to stop?

Gülsüm: I think as long as we have standards on this and we continue to talk and discuss about it more, everything will get better situation I think — because there are lots of tools that make everything easier and faster, and there are lots of benefits for crisis-affected people, beneficiaries, donors, and humanitarian professionals. But of course, as long as we are realising the potential problems and risks of AI and humanitarian communication in general, I think everything will improve. That’s my personal point of view — I always think things will get better, I think, inshallah. It’s my personal point of view, I always think things will be better! [laughs] But for humanitarian AI specifically, I think we need to discuss more about our standards and humanitarian AI policies.

Ka Man: Yeah, I agree. From my perspective, there are a couple of things I think we need to get better at, I’d like to point to a couple of things. Advocating for communications. I know it’s quite ironic to say that on a podcast about communications [laughs], but as we’ve gone through this conversation, it’s really highlighted to me how, in the age of AI and efficiency and the pressure to do more with less, comms can be seen as something maybe not essential. But actually, this is the time to retain that real human decision-making — the human-in-the-loop, as we say — and make sure that’s at the heart of it. Because, as Gülsüm has just talked about with that really powerful example, all the intricacies and nuances of deciding what type of imagery to use in comms — an agent isn’t going to be able to make those kinds of decisions. Not yet. Maybe in the future, but not yet. So I think advocating for communications, advocating for our role and our strategic steer, and critically helping the organisation to articulate why we matter and why people should support us and our mission.

And then secondly — because of all the pressures we face and you know, everyone showing up and doing the best they can every day — I think we have to really try to maintain intentionality in everything we do. Whether that’s an individual task, whether it’s the relationships we need to nurture with colleagues, with our broader network, with funders, and so on. I think we really need to put care and time into that. But that’s not easy with how thinly we are stretched, but I think we need that time and space to give ourselves and our colleagues and others permission to do that.

And on that point — I read on LinkedIn recently, someone called Jennifer Lentfer posted a phrase I found really interesting. She said the nonprofit sector has what she called a “bias for action,” which can be a positive thing, right, because that’s what we’re here for – action. But it can be detrimental because it can lead to knee-jerk reactions or short-term approaches that can actually do more harm than good. She didn’t go as far as to say that necessarily but that’s the overall sentiment. But I thought that’s a really crucial and critical thing to consider as we navigate this time, and communications can be central to that. Open, honest, and candid communications — and that’s where we as communicators can really advocate for that, beyond just promotion or direct communications externally, but with everyone in our network. So yeah, I think we’re probably doing quite well with what we have, but you know, just being conscious of all that will be really valuable in the year ahead.

Amanda: That’s really fascinating, and I’m seeing something slightly different in the moving from talk to action — because what we’re seeing at Humentum is a lot of organisations and leaders still feeling stuck. The old system, the old way of funding and implementing, is gone. So it’s fascinating that that’s person’s reflecting on seeing too much action, and maybe we’re just not quite there yet — but I’m confident and really believe we’re all moving in the right direction. It takes all of us to be doing that.

Ka Man: That resonates 100%. Yes, you need to find somewhere between paralysis — because you don’t know the way forward and the actions and knee-jerk reactions. There has to be intentional action, and that’s so hard because there are so many dependencies we’re all navigating, not least funding. So, I think there’s more clarity now about where we want to be, but how we unlock those solutions now — including funding — is the missing puzzle piece in a lot of our conundrum, I’d say. So yes, collective action I see as the way forward, in all its forms, small ways and big ways. So, conversations like this, that’s part of it — that honesty and that transparency.

[39:31] Chapter 6: What’s next – youth perspectives, new partnerships and approaches

Amanda: And lastly, something else I’ve been thinking about and would love to hear your perspectives — what’s in our sphere of control, and how can we bring in other experts, including unconventional ones? Something I see unfolding in the social media ecosystem is increased partnerships with influencers. Some organisations and nonprofits and NGOs are starting to experiment with what those partnerships can look like. I firmly believe that’s another avenue that, if it’s right for your target audience, should continue to be explored — in the right context, with the right messaging, in the right channel. Working with those partnerships can unlock a whole new audience that may have been untapped, and allows unconventional ideas and experts in their own way to elevate our expertise and break through the noise. Have you all been seeing anything like that or is it way off what you’re hearing?

Ka Man: I think it’s so interesting — and Gülsüm, I know you’ll have something to say about this because you’ve been talking to a lot of young people, haven’t you, youth leadership, how they want to bring their energy, ideas, and perspectives and skills to the sector, but there aren’t necessarily the structural opportunities available. So I’ll bring you in in a sec to hear more from you on that. And from my perspective, there are people out there like MrBeast, right, who is doing collaborations with more formal organisations. It might jar for certain types, but we have to be receptive to new ideas and new approaches. So yeah, I think it’s definitely think we should be open to exploring. And also, when you look at some organisations across the nonprofit – cultural sector actually I think is quite good at this. When you see someone younger at the helm of social media, doing reels, you know, just bringing that fresh energy and that engagement — it’s really great to see, I love to see it! And I think the humanitarian sector needs that injection of ideas and energy.

Gülsüm: Oh, I think so. And actually based on the country, it’s changing — as far as I can see, there are quite a lot of young humanitarians in Türkiye as well. But for other countries, it’s also discussing what the main problems are for young humanitarians — maybe it’s finding the right place in the sector for themselves, or even cannot even get a seat in the sector at all, with doors closed to them. Maybe we can discuss that more with young humanitarians as well — as an upcoming episode ideas [laughs].

Ka Man: Yes, absolutely, I love it, I love it! And actually at the HLA, my colleagues are working on a youth leadership series, so stay tuned for that coming soon.

Oh, what a fantastic conversation — I really love this. It’s so energising to hear from you both, and I love the perspectives that you bring. We’ll organise another conversation for sure, but I just want to say thank you. Do you have any final words to share before we wrap up today?

Gülsüm: Next time, a face-to-face conversation, inshallah!

Ka Man: Yes, I would love that, I’d love that! Istanbul, right, we’ll come to Istanbul! [laughs]

Gülsüm: Yes, in Istanbul, please!

Ka Man: I’ve never been, so I’d love for you to show me around [laughs].

Gülsüm: [Laughs] You’re most welcome.

Amanda: Kudos to you, Ka Man, for bringing us together. It’s so fascinating to have conversations across geographies — we each sit in different seats, and to hear what you all are thinking about is just informing my work so much more. I’m so excited to go back and share with my team what you all are thinking about and how we can apply things differently. And I think that’s when the best ideas form — when we’re knowledge sharing, when we’re seeing those successes and those not-so-successes. It really helps us become better communicators and better leaders, to share out the right messaging for the right target audience, to really make a difference and continue to move us forward.

Ka Man: Absolutely. Gülsüm actually had the brilliant idea of, when we first met, to actually start up a humanitarian communications community of practice — starting off with an informal one. So that’s what this is, really, isn’t it? [laughs] It’s a very informal community of practice. If any funders are listening to this and want to help us scale this so that we can support humanitarian communicators, we’d be very receptive to hearing from you [laughs]. I do think it’s really invaluable. Yes, so Gülsüm, do you have any final words to share?

Gülsüm: Well, thank you so much for having us. It was a great conversation for me, because it’s important to discuss this together — we cannot imagine what’s coming in terms of problems and risks. And we can solve them by discussing among ourselves, and I really appreciated what Amanda is working on and you are also doing. So it was a great opportunity for me as you are experienced comms professionals. So I hope that we keep the discussion, and hope that there might be even a little benefit for anyone who is listening to this. I will be so happy about this. So let’s see how much more we can do for this sector and all the people we are trying to reach.

Ka Man: Brilliant, thank you so much. So, Gülsüm Özkaya and Amanda Hinkel-Mauceri, thank you very much for joining us for today’s episode of Fresh Humanitarian Perspectives from the Humanitarian Leadership Academy.

Amanda: Thank you so much.

Gülsüm: Thank you.

[Music]

Podcast transcript 

This transcript and translation have been produced using automated tools. It has been checked but minor errors or omissions may remain. 

Faisal Mislit: Welcome everyone, I’m Faisal Mislit. I’m delighted to be with you today in this episode where we discuss a very important topic: leadership in complex humanitarian contexts. At the Humanitarian Leadership Academy (HLA), which is part of Save the Children, we work to accelerate humanitarian work based on local leadership. This is a critical topic because we believe that local leaders are best positioned to understand their challenges and respond to them effectively and sustainably.

Today’s conversation will certainly not be purely theoretical. We will try to understand how leadership is actually practiced on the ground, especially in environments full of challenges and constraints.

Today I am honored and very pleased to host Professor Ali Al Mokdad, one of the experts in this field, to engage in this dialogue together. Welcome, Professor Ali — we’ll give you the floor as well. Please go ahead.

Ali Al Mokdad: Hello and thank you very much for having me. I’m really happy that we can have this discussion and talk about these topics, because I feel it is very, very important to do so. At the same time, there aren’t many discussions on this topic in Arabic, so this will be a great opportunity to share this knowledge and these experiences together. As we said before recording, let’s have fun and enjoy this conversation.

Faisal Mislit: Absolutely. Thank you, Professor Ali — it’s certainly a wonderful opportunity. As I mentioned, we in this field are opening a new space for Arabic-speaking audiences. We always see content in English or other languages translated into Arabic, but today we’ll do the opposite — we’ll speak in Arabic from the start, inshallah.

Your experience is vast and your field is excellent — we’ll try to benefit from our conversation today. Through your long experience, the youth and local leaders in our regions — thinking of the Middle East, North Africa, Arabic speakers everywhere, or those living in difficult environments — face certain challenges influenced by factors like unequal opportunities and others. Could you share some observations from your experience?

Ali Al Mokdad: Before I get into the challenges facing young people, I want to say a bit about my background so that listeners understand where I’m coming from. I was born in Syria, in a small village in the south. Like most villages in the Middle East, there was no internet and access to services was very limited. In the area where I grew up, there was only one main road. I didn’t have access to global experiences or knowledge, and I remember having to walk about an hour and a half to two hours just to get to school.

After that I moved and started working and volunteering. I spent more than a year volunteering with local organizations and volunteer teams. My main goal was simply to help the people around me — I wasn’t even thinking that people could make a career out of it. From there I started to develop professionally.

But then I started facing challenges. For example, the work was in English, and I was embarrassed to speak English because I was afraid to use technical terminology. Every time I spoke English, someone would correct me, so I developed a kind of fear. Later, when I started working with international organizations in Syria, I faced further challenges: are you international or national staff? Are you a manager or technical staff? All these distinctions were foreign to me. As I continued to grow step by step as a national staff member, new challenges kept emerging: “Where did you study? What’s your specialization? What university did you attend?” I started hearing names of foreign universities I had never heard of, as if they were the only valid standard. After that I took on assignments in other countries — I wasn’t only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, and Europe. I moved from Syria to Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, the UAE, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, and then to Europe, eventually taking on responsibility for more than forty countries. But by that point new challenges arose: what passport do you have? Can you travel? Can you get a visa? I mention all of this simply to say that I lived these problems myself — but let me get back to your question.

What I noticed, especially in the Middle East, is that we don’t have a problem with ambition. Everywhere I’ve been — cities, rural areas, small villages — everyone has ambition. But the problem is with opportunities. The second challenge I observed is that starting points in life are different. The starting point for young people is often tied to geographic location — whether they’re in a village, a city, or a capital — or to their economic situation, since some people carry the responsibility of supporting their families while others don’t. There are social classes, and in terms of education, some managed to go to university and others didn’t. So starting points are genuinely unequal.

The second issue I found is that weak policies within organizations and institutions create even bigger obstacles. Instead of young people focusing on developing themselves and reaching their ambitions, they get distracted by simple logistical problems — two hours of travel just to get somewhere, standing in queues, dealing with paperwork, visa issues — things a person shouldn’t even have to think about. All of this hinders growth. In summary, the chaos around opportunities, equality, and institutions has become part of everyday life for youth in the Middle East. They carry an extra burden of navigating this chaos instead of focusing on their future and building their lives.

Faisal Mislit: Exactly. We can certainly talk about a complex reality — upbringing, access, problems, and challenges. Those listening to us now may be facing the same issues — passports, location, identity, and the chaos you described. Systems and contexts sometimes impose unfair restrictions on growth and opportunity. The problem, as you said, is not in people’s capabilities — it’s in access to opportunities. Do you agree?

Ali Al Mokdad: Let me give you a quick example. When I was national staff in Syria, they formed a technical team at my organization and an international staff member joined us. Before even getting to know us or understanding what each person does, the first thing he did was ask everyone what they had studied. When he got to me, I explained my work, my trainings, and my experience. He said: “No, the person doing your job needs a master’s degree from such-and-such university.” First of all, that program didn’t even exist in the country. Second, I was already doing the job effectively. Third, how were those credentials even relevant? Unfortunately, he removed me from the technical team. Access to that specific university or master’s degree suddenly became a barrier to my professional development — not because I lacked the experience, skill, or knowledge, but because an arbitrary standard was suddenly imposed. And beyond education, you encounter the same thing with visas — you need a certain nationality or residency to do certain work. Suddenly you find all these obstacles based simply on the language you speak, the place you were born, and the environment you grew up in. Instead of institutions supporting and developing you, they place all these standards which, in my view, are all assumptions — because on the ground, the reality is completely different.

Faisal Mislit: I completely agree. We’re talking about the Middle East, North Africa, and surrounding countries affected by complex environments. If you look at history, you see these crises and the organizational responses that have happened over many years — yet the number of people from this region who reach senior positions remains disproportionately small. The problem is not in capabilities. One excellent example you raised is education — the academic programs relevant to this field may simply not exist here. My own background is in engineering; others come with medical or doctoral backgrounds and join organizations working in completely different areas. So you end up working on two parallel tracks: building experience in the field while also going back to find formal qualifications that you don’t actually need in practice. I also want to share something from our current work. Under HLA, I manage a project in 6 countries including Iraq, Myanmar, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Congo. Local partners there sometimes face even greater challenges than international staff. For example, in Myanmar, the preference is for people who speak the local language. I shouldn’t force people in that country to learn another language just to access opportunities — the work should go the other way. We believe leadership should come from within, from local people. That’s one example. You raised an excellent point about people, barriers, and education — something that genuinely confronts so many people.

Can we move to the next point, Professor Ali? The conversation is excellent and time is passing quickly. Earlier we were talking about people who have left organizations or left this field entirely — feelings of frustration, loss of hope. To be honest, not everything is rosy. Some people apply for long periods, some want to grow but face barriers in being accepted if they lack the right connections. How do you see these challenges affecting young people and local leaders in terms of their self-confidence, ambitions, and hope?

Ali Al Mokdad: From my personal experience, and especially having worked with many talented people across all those countries, I felt that frustration, psychological pressure, and exhaustion — to the point where it physically affects you and your relationships with family and friends — has become part of these challenges we are living.

Of course there are many dimensions to this. If you’re responsible for a family, the pressures multiply. If you’re working in your own country, you’re trying to operate in a place that may already be in a catastrophic state. If you’re in another country, your home situation is unstable while you’re working somewhere equally unstable. Throughout all my years — working across 30+ countries and managing programs, operations, and organizations — the challenges kept repeating, just in different forms. Even when I reached headquarters and regional offices, they were still there. I feel it has become part of our journey in this field. But the most important thing with these challenges is that you are able to sit with them — to live through that exhaustion or frustration, think about it, and work on it so it doesn’t keep recurring. I’ve noticed that some problems, if not properly addressed, come back in a different form, in a different place, again and again. It’s better to confront them and think about how to deal with them. What genuinely saddens me is that young people in the Middle East, because of all these challenges, find every door closing on them repeatedly — a second time, a third time, a tenth time.

Faisal Mislit: That’s true.

Ali Al Mokdad: Their hope that things will change diminishes greatly, and so does their capacity for reflection — and I consider that dangerous. It’s very important that these things — psychological exhaustion, frustration, pressure, and growing responsibilities — which often in the Middle East also have material and social repercussions, are things one must genuinely sit with and think through.

Faisal Mislit: Exactly. And we can build on that last point — despite these problems, we see different models of people who managed to cross these challenges. They could be challenges that Faisal or Ali faced, or that those listening now are facing. Some people broke through, persevered, and kept their hope alive. Someone once asked me: “How do I reach the level that some people have reached? I have the ability, I have the language, I’ve learned — but with 7 years of experience, I’m sitting at home.” What distinguishes those who persevered and reached that place? I’d love to hear your take.

Ali Al Mokdad: I could talk about this topic for hours. But there’s one thing I’ve noticed that’s common among all these people: ambition alone — everyone knows — is not enough.

Faisal Mislit: True.

Ali Al Mokdad: You need a strategy. You need to be able to think: this is my goal — what are the concrete steps I can take to get there? I’ve noticed a clear difference in people — especially administrators and managers I’ve met at very high levels, whether in companies, non-profits, or international organizations. When people talk about steps to take, they usually think from one to ten — what do I need to do? But what I’ve noticed distinguishes people who’ve reached a high level is actually what happens from zero to one. From one to ten, I can tell you the standard things: do online training, read this manual, work with certain people — everyone knows those. But the real key is from zero to one. What does that mean? It means sitting with yourself — working with three versions of yourself: your past self, examining the challenges you went through, the things you worked on, the things you were criticized for; your present self, assessing your current challenges, opportunities, and responsibilities; and your future self, defining your goal and your strategy. Think of it like a personal council where you sit with all three versions and think through the details. 

Practically speaking — if my future goal is a management position, or focusing on my family, or writing a book — what are the one, two, three, four things I need to do in the present? What tactics do I have available right now? That’s why ambition alone isn’t enough — you need a strategy. The big challenge you’ll also face is assumptions. In our societies especially, everyone has advice and assumptions to offer. You need to distinguish between what is an assumption and what is reality. For example, one very common assumption in humanitarian and development work is that you need a strong passport or strong residency to work in different countries. I consider that an assumption — because I’ve worked in 30+ countries and managed 40 countries with only one passport. Another assumption is that you need a specific degree or master’s from a particular institution. That’s also largely an assumption — I eventually went ahead and completed two master’s degrees and set a record for the number of professional trainings completed, and I came to realize that most of those credentials were assumptions, while the experience gained on the ground was worth far more. You need to be able to distinguish between assumption and reality. And one more thing I notice a lot with young people just starting out: they use hope as a substitute for strategy — “things will get better, things will change.” Hope is important, but hope alone is not a strategy. You can’t simply wait for things to improve without taking concrete steps and working on them.

Faisal Mislit: Exactly — excellent. At the heart of this: as a person, you are responsible for the striving, not the result. What matters is that you actively pursue your goal. And your last point is spot on — waiting for hope means you’re in a waiting queue, not moving forward. The points you raised about assumptions — or what I’d call imaginary challenges — are very important. I’m already dealing with real challenges like passport restrictions and travel barriers. Then someone else layers additional hypothetical obstacles on top: “You’re from the Middle East, you can’t work in the UK, or Denmark, or Indonesia.” Why? “Because of your passport.” And automatically you might feel discouraged. We’ve all been through this. That frustration could cost you real opportunities. The important thing is: you are responsible for the striving, regardless of today’s challenges. Ali Al Mokdad, from a small village in Syria, now works at a major level. Faisal, from a small village in Iraq, now works in the UK. We faced the same challenges. What we’re sharing now is not discouraging — on the contrary, we’re trying to build a spirit of perseverance and continued effort.

We’ve shared some very real things today, and that’s the purpose. Before we move on — do you have a real story you’d like to share, without names, of someone who went through these challenges but overcame them?

Ali Al Mokdad: Two stories come to mind. First, my own. Early in my career I was very, very frustrated. My country was at war, the economic situation was terrible, I was far from my family, working in a field where I didn’t feel I was learning — and most organizations, unfortunately, don’t invest in their staff. I felt no opportunities were coming my way, so I decided to resign. I sent the email to everyone — I was very frustrated and wanted people to know: nothing is being learned here, there’s discrimination, and I was also young. Everything at once.

Faisal Mislit: I see.

Ali Al Mokdad: As I was leaving the office, the organization’s director called me and said: “Sit down, let’s talk.” My first reaction was almost a shock — the director spoke English, and I was very anxious about speaking English. I knew it, but I was afraid people would correct me or think I couldn’t express myself properly. I sat there with hands between my knees, very nervous. She asked one question: “Why are you resigning?” I said: “I’m not learning anything.” She said one sentence that changed my entire life: “Who is stopping you from learning?” At that moment I didn’t fully understand what she meant. She told me there are things available online — books, articles, learning resources, videos. I had always assumed my organization would be the one to train me. When I went home that evening — imagine that moment of frustration, leaving work, everything weighing on me — that thought hit me: maybe I should look at what’s actually available online. This was more than thirteen or fourteen years ago. I suddenly discovered websites like Disaster Ready, Kaya, and Global Health. When I started exploring them, it felt like finding a treasure.

I started learning — at that time I was a senior officer — about project management, project lifecycle, operations management, disaster management, international law, humanitarian law, gender-based violence, psychosocial support. That moment took me more than a month of intensive study, but my thinking completely changed. I understood that I needed to take ownership of my goal and my development. The message I want to convey is: don’t wait for your organization to develop you — take responsibility for your own growth and start working on it. The second story is about someone I deeply admire, whose journey feels very similar to ours. He was born in Sudan and started the same way — as a volunteer, then small positions, in a completely different specialization, before entering humanitarian work. He was told he needed a master’s, specific training, and all the rest. He faced all the same problems. His focus at that time was on securing his family’s stability while also growing professionally, driven by a genuine curiosity and love of learning.

He found that things weren’t accessible to him in the usual ways, so he started buying books — going to bookshops and choosing titles on economics, policy, foreign affairs, local governance. Each time he’d read, take notes, and compile them into a kind of personal journal. He started seeing how he could apply these ideas in his work. He moved from local organizations to the Red Crescent in Sudan, took on more responsibilities, and became increasingly creative because he was connecting what he’d learned from books with his hands-on experience and his deep knowledge of the country and its people. People noticed his creativity and started giving him more challenging tasks. Today he works on missions across 6 different countries and has reached a very senior administrative level at the headquarters of the Red Crescent and Red Cross. The key message from both stories is this: success doesn’t necessarily mean reaching an international role or moving between countries. I’ve met highly successful administrators who made an enormous impact working in their own village, city, or country. We shouldn’t tie success only to international or regional work — everything starts from where you are.

Faisal Mislit: True. An inspiring story, and that last point is excellent — because I was one of those people who struggled with this exact assumption. I used to search for any opportunity to leave Iraq and become international staff. One of my managers — a colleague from Pakistan, we were in the same accommodation and he was my manager at the time — told me: “Faisal, you don’t know what it’s like out there. When you go abroad, other things change. We come from similar communities — we have social obligations, family commitments, everything. You might not be able to sustain it even if you get the opportunity.” But I was convinced I had to go. Then the 2023 earthquake in Hatay, Turkey — I went on a deployment as a project manager. The plan was three months, but due to visa requirements I had to leave Turkey and re-enter each month. I told myself: three months isn’t enough, I’ll stay five months or a year. After the very first month, I was counting the days. I was practically begging to finish the month so I could go back to Iraq.

Ali Al Mokdad: Hmm.

Faisal Mislit: One of my managers said: go back for Eid, celebrate with family, and come back. I said no, my extension is done, I’m finished. But the point is — this didn’t affect me negatively at all. On the contrary. The reason I share this example is that success doesn’t require being abroad. Right now, sitting in a village in Iraq, I’m managing a project and the Academy across 6 global countries. Location has no bearing on impact. That is the opportunity itself.

Let me take one more practical point before we close, so that what we’re sharing is useful to listeners. These organizations, the UN, and others working in this sector — how can they support youth and local leaders in facing these challenges? Not everyone can navigate these barriers on their own. They need support from institutions. So in your view, how can organizations help?

Ali Al Mokdad: I’ll talk about institutions before I talk about individuals. One of the things I worked on whenever I moved to a new country or reached regional and headquarters levels was trying to change policies and create an enabling environment — for people like the young man from Sudan, like all the talented young women and men in the Middle East and Africa — so they can grow their talent, achieve their goals, and do this work without all the artificial barriers. First, organizations must work on policies and governance, review how work is structured, and remove the assumptions that prevent people from developing. Second, they must create a work environment that builds bridges — between someone from a village and someone from a city, between local and international staff, between those working in-country and those at the regional level, between humanitarian and development work. We all need to build these bridges more actively. Third — and very importantly — we need to invest in local leadership figures who work with limited resources but who have the trust of their teams and communities and are driving real change. Invest in these people, invest in their values, and help develop them further. And practically speaking: stop importing staff from other countries to work in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Sudan, or Egypt when there are already talented, ambitious, knowledgeable people in those countries. Work with them. Stop thinking of local staff or communities as beneficiaries — think of them as partners, as the drivers of the work. They are not recipients of a service; they are co-creators of it. There is much more to say, but given our time, those are the most important points.

Faisal Mislit: Excellent. Your points and your personal story — from thinking about resigning to the shift toward self-directed learning — are very powerful. For those listening, we’ll add some useful links at the end of the podcast. Skill development and leadership require personal initiative — yes, resources need to be available, whether free online or at low cost, but the person also needs to move. Let me share one example from our current project — Local Space — in the 6 countries I mentioned. We have a coaching program where an expert like Ali goes to a country and works with organizations over an extended period, helping develop certain skills including policy and governance. This isn’t a one-off training — it’s sustained engagement. When we collected feedback, someone from the Congo said something that genuinely surprised me: “The coaching I received is better than any external consultant who came in.” He explained: “A consultant might finish after a month or two, and I’m racing to absorb everything before they leave. But you’re investing in me as a person, building my capacity over time. My organization now has access to things we couldn’t have accessed before — expertise that would have cost thousands of dollars to bring in externally.” The key message here: organizations must invest in local leadership. The ambition is there, the capability is there — the opportunity is what’s scarce. That’s where institutions can make a real difference.

We’ve been talking for what felt like just a few minutes but has been over an hour. One final thought — you made an excellent point at the start: hope alone is not enough. If you have a closing message for the young person listening now who may be frustrated, or who has left the field, what would you say?

Ali Al Mokdad: What I want to say is linked to everything we’ve discussed — but I want to focus on our role as individuals. Regardless of where you are or what your situation is, here is something practical you can do right now: take responsibility. Take responsibility for your path, your life, and your choices — and start working on it in concrete steps. First, be excellent at the work you’re doing. I’m not a fan of shortcuts — excellence in your current work is the first and most important thing. Second, invest in your individual skills: communication, diplomacy, analytical thinking, and the ability to reflect on your own situation as we discussed.

I also want to add: sometimes you need to take risks. I often say the biggest risk you can take is not taking risks at all. You might succeed, you might not — but you’ll always learn. And one of the things that has helped me most throughout my career, especially in leadership positions: invest in your team. Build a strong team with shared values and principles that complement each other. The stronger your team, the more you grow alongside them.

We’ve talked a lot about continuous learning — and learning isn’t only through formal courses. Sometimes you learn more from a conversation with someone experienced, or from listening to a podcast like this, or reading an article. Keep your curiosity alive. One thing I noticed personally as I reached senior international levels is that the higher you go, the more you may start to feel a degree of isolation — because you see things differently, and you become one of very few people from the Middle East at that level. You need to be comfortable with that isolation, while still maintaining strong connections with your family, community, and friends — because you’ll need those voices around you. Passion alone, ambition alone, and financial security alone are not enough — you need strategy and steps. And one thing I always say: the higher you climb, the more responsibility you carry to bring that ladder back down so others can climb it too.

Faisal Mislit: True.

Ali Al Mokdad: You have a responsibility to invest in people, give them opportunities, build enabling environments, and invest in your team. Try to create for others the knowledge, experience, and opportunities that came your way. And the last thing I’ll say: we’ve talked a lot about work, learning, skills, policies, and governance — but it’s very important to live your life.

Faisal Mislit: True.

Ali Al Mokdad: Sports, games, coffee. Sit with your family, your children, your parents, your community — live your life. Because life is not only work, not only a title, not only material things. You’ll be amazed at how much something simple — sitting in the sun, being with family, playing sports — gives you the energy to do everything we’ve talked about. Inshallah, these steps, along with what you shared from your own experience, will inspire people and give them the energy to take a step forward.

Faisal Mislit: Absolutely, Professor Ali — excellent and inspiring. You made a point for everyone: challenges exist everywhere. We are not promised a smooth, easy path. Let me share one quick story before closing. In 2017, when I was first hired, I kept going to my manager asking: “How do I do this activity? How do I do that one?” He said something I still think about regularly: “Faisal, if I already knew how to do all of this, I wouldn’t have hired you. I hired you precisely to figure it out. Go and work on it — go and handle it.” The point is: don’t keep waiting for someone to give you the opportunity or for the organization to hand you the solution. The challenge is part of your life. A local leader who hasn’t faced difficult experiences cannot truly lead. Every challenge you overcome becomes experience — it transforms from an obstacle into a skill, and you become stronger for it.

I wanted to share that before we close. Professor Ali — any final words?

Ali Al Mokdad: I believe the most important thing — honestly — is that no matter what happens: pressures, challenges, problems, frustration — keep moving forward. If anyone searches for me online, on LinkedIn or Google, they’ll find books I’ve published, research I’ve conducted, organizations and teams I’ve managed. But there’s also a very large part of the story that isn’t visible — the countless times I was rejected for a job, the enormous number of visa rejections, the money I spent just to access basic learning, the days working under micromanaging or high-pressure environments, the nights spent in camps far from family and country. I mention all of this because everything that people — especially in the Middle East — might be going through does not mean that this is the fate we are heading toward. It means that right now we have a challenge we’re facing, and no matter what, we must stay committed to our principles, our values, and our ambitions, and keep working. Inshallah, those listening will keep that ambition alive, keep working on it, and keep taking steps forward — whatever their goal may be. Don’t lose that hope or ambition.

Faisal Mislit: Absolutely, Professor Ali. These challenges — whether Ali’s, Faisal’s, or anyone else’s — we all faced the same. When I first started in the NGO sector, I was paying from my own pocket just to get there by taxi, with no salary from the local organization. The rejections in my inbox accumulated over months and years — possibly hundreds of job applications. This is part of the challenges we all face. When you get rejected, it doesn’t mean only you were rejected — Ali was rejected, Faisal was rejected, many others were too. But to keep going: your striving is what is required. The conversation has been rich and I know the listeners will enjoy it — but time is up and your time is precious. Thank you so much, Professor Ali, for this wonderful dialogue. Today we were reminded of real challenges, but also that true leadership is defined by how you deal with those challenges — not by the absence of them. Thank you for believing that local leadership is not just part of the solution, but is the solution. Thank you so much, and thank you to all who are listening. Inshallah we’ll meet again in future episodes.

Thank you, Professor Ali.

Ali Al Mokdad: Bravo.

Faisal Mislit: Thank you, goodbye.