This collaboration between ACT Alliance EU, Caritas Europa, Islamic Relief Sweden and EU-CORD emphasises the crucial role that local faith-based organisations play in supporting vulnerable communities, especially within fragile contexts.
Together, we highlight the use of the nexus approach, which integrates humanitarian, development and peacebuilding efforts to address the complex and interconnected challenges faced by the 1.8 billion people living in fragile contexts.
Background
Almost a quarter of the world’s population – 1.8 billion people – live in fragile contexts, a figure that could reach 2.3 billion by 2030. The European Union cannot ignore the urgent need for a clear and comprehensive policy and funding strategy to engage in these regions effectively. While the Global Gateway investment approach may work in some regions, even its proponents recognise that it is not a solution for the complex challenges of fragility. Economic and infrastructure investments alone cannot address the deep-rooted issues of conflict, governance, and systemic inequality that define fragile contexts.
We believe the Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus offers a practical engagement framework. By integrating humanitarian responses with long-term development and peacebuilding efforts, the HDP approach provides a pathway to tackle the systemic causes of fragility, build resilience, and ensure no one is left behind.
Terminology buster: The Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus approach aims to enhance the coherence and effectiveness of crisis responses by bridging the gaps between humanitarian aid, development efforts, and peacebuilding initiatives.
For many faith-based organisations, the HDP Nexus is not a new approach but a new language for how many of us work, given our holistic, deep-rooted, and long-term presence in communities.
In these case studies, the ‘us’ refers primarily to local faith-based organisations and other civil society partners.
These organisations are integral to their communities, embodying their identities and values. Their approach does not fit neatly into the traditional humanitarian, development, or peacebuilding categories. Instead, they adopt a comprehensive and integrated approach by listening to and responding to their community’s needs and capacities.
They can leverage their established networks and cultural understanding to implement contextually appropriate and sustainable programmes. They can relay this social capital to governance structures when the context allows. This long-term sustainable presence of FBOs at the grassroots level — as also recognised by the UNDP Guidelines on Engaging with Faith-based Organisations and Religious Leaders — presents a promising solution for how donors can continue to engage in fragile contexts through partnerships with local faith-based organisations.
EU support to religious literacy and the role of FBOs
As recently highlighted by the European Parliament, faith-based organisations (FBOs) have the potential to facilitate humanitarian access, and a more systematic engagement with them may help to increase the efficiency of the EU’s actions. This would enable EU assistance to directly reach vulnerable groups in emergency settings and communities in remote areas. In fragile and politically estranged contexts, FBOs can often successfully maintain their presence in a country even while international NGOs and donors withdraw funding or operational presence on the ground. In the European context, we also draw on the EU Action Plan on Human Rights & Democracy (2020-2027) and its encouragement to engage with religious and faith-based actors in areas such as development and peacebuilding.
This short collection of case studies aims to highlight the lived experiences of faith-based organisations working in fragile contexts through nexus approaches. More importantly, it seeks to demonstrate that, with the right support, empowering and sustaining communities in fragile contexts, while challenging, is far from impossible.
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