Humanitarian Policy and Practice

As ACT Alliance EU we are promoting approaches to survivor and community led response. Some call this citizen-led action among other names. The spirit is a genuine transformative methodology giving ownership to individuals and groups who find themselves as first responders to crisis. Whether interested in immediate response alone or longer term development action, approaches to locally-led response facilitate needs analysis led and managed by the communities and international action links in within a support role.

Over more than a decade, the Local2Global Protection community of practice made up of individuals from within and outside the ACT Alliance membership have developed a facilitation model, training materials, methodology, testing and evidence for such approaches globally.

The approach is found to deliver successfully on inclusive participation, programming which cuts across humanitarian, development and peacebuilding through community approaches, and the self-help and ownership model drives empowerment and in particular proven leadership of women.

The approach ensures that existing actions – including those of faith actors, informal response and those of women’s groups – are given the leverage and support necessary to deliver response sustainably.

See an outline of the concept and evidence from hundreds of initiatives in the Philippines, Northern Kenya and Sudan here:

And recent reporting in the New Humanitarian outlining the process toward such an approach and its successes and challenges in Palestine:

At EU level, we are raising awareness of the approach and bringing evidence of the benefits of micro grant tools for community-led response as a new modality for cash programming and the strengths of rooting accountability, safeguarding, compliance and protection requirements in locally-relevant systems.

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