We started SIRF Consulting to support aid organisations and workers in high-risk, high-flux contexts. Over the past year, we have been fortunate to work on seven engagements in four neglected crises: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Myanmar and Yemen. Together with coalitions, national and international NGOs, we have built unconventional collaborations, connected actors who rarely interact, and explored new governance, financing, and strategic models in closer conversation with communities. While we cannot share the details of that work, these experiences have left us with a few reflections.
1. The sector is under extraordinary pressure.
As impunity fuels massacre after massacre, humanitarians are being asked to strengthen a bridge while its foundations are being pulled out. Donors want more collaboration, localisation, adaptation and impact even as the (in)decisions of the same governments expand conflicts and erode the safeguards that make humanitarian action possible. As a consequence, what humanitarians can do, or hope to do, has become severely constrained, while the aid architecture has shifted almost exclusively towards triaging the dead from the dying. Perhaps the greatest danger of this pervasive pessimism is that we are beginning to lose the imagination to conceive of anything beyond managed decline.
In one response after another, we have seen how the humanitarian reset has reshaped relationships between organisations, narrowed the space for collective action and changed the conditions under which collaboration happens. Collective action is becoming most urgent precisely when the time, trust and resources needed to make it work are in shortest supply. We have also been confronted with a question to which we do not have an answer: humanitarians have long aspired to work themselves out of a job. But what happens when the jobs disappear before the work is done?
2. The localisation discourse is rigged against national and local actors.
Localisation is increasingly framed only as a question of efficiency and value for money. International institutions are still treated as the default guarantors of quality, transparency and accountability, while national organisations are required to prove they can deliver the same for less. This framing obscures the more consequential questions: who controls resources, who sets standards, who bears risk and whose accountability counts.
At a roundtable with donors in Asia, someone proposes tracing funding from source to field. We identify an average of three pass-throughs. In one case, funds have been sub-granted 13 times before reaching their intended beneficiaries. At every stage, individual agencies had made their own assumptions about how much partners can allocate to staff safety and care.
A similar logic shaped how US funding to Country-Based Pooled Funds was allocated, with national and local NGOs often excluded because the risk of underutilisation was deemed too great. Yet absorbing and managing risk is precisely part of the role of the relevant UN agency. If risk becomes a reason to keep national actors from accessing funding, rather than a responsibility to be managed and shared, localisation stops at the point where power would have to shift.
Aid delivered through national organisations may cost less, but localisation is not just an exercise in accountancy. National organisations also need resources to run programmes, retain staff and keep them safe, while maintaining quality and accountability. Transferring delivery responsibilities without the resources, authority and institutional backing to fulfil them is cost-cutting dressed up as a transfer of leadership.
For now, word from Geneva has travelled to a Greek restaurant in Goma. A former colleague asks if we have heard of the Yemeni humanitarian leader who called Fletcher a “liar” to his face for throwing national and civil society actors under the bus.
3. The work is not convening, but changing how people work together.
Across the sector, the language of collaboration, partnership and localisation often sits uneasily alongside the actual distribution of power. As resources shrink, organisations are under pressure to protect their own funding, capacity and institutional future, even when this comes at the expense of collective action. The challenge is not simply to bring people around the same table, but to confront competing interests, question whether existing structures serve their purpose, and negotiate how decisions, resources and risks are shared.
That is where we have tried to put our experience to use. Sometimes this means making sense of a complex environment or turning a diffuse problem into practical decisions. Sometimes it means helping organisations navigate change, challenge established assumptions or develop governance and strategic models that better reflect the realities of the context. The value of external support lies not in importing a ready-made solution, but in bringing relevant experience and analytical distance while recognising that the people closest to a context understand its constraints better than any external adviser can.
A small consulting practice cannot change the structural reality of the humanitarian sector, nor do we want to turn those problems into a sales pitch. Much of this work is slow, negotiated and dependent on trust. But this past year has reinforced our belief in the value of independent practitioners who can work across institutional boundaries, create space for candid discussion and help turn analysis into decisions grounded in operational reality.
One year in, we are still learning where this approach is most useful and how to sustain it. We have seen enough, however, to remain convinced that the need is real.