CALLS Network

This is the third in a series of pieces on refugee-led organisations (RLOs) and localisation, and what it truly demands of the humanitarian system. The first explored whether localisation is even the right word. The second argued that the system needs an equity lens, because equality is actually a trap for RLOs. This one is about the limits of meaningful participation - and why we built CALLS Network around agency instead. When we sat down to define our founding values, one q

This is the second in a series of pieces on localisation and what it truly demands of the humanitarian system. The first explored whether "localisation" is even the right word. This one asks: even if we get the word right, are we prepared to do what the concept actually requires? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the humanitarian system had a reckoning about aid to women and girls: providing equal, generic assistance often left women and girls entirely marginalised, their di

There is a word that has dominated humanitarian and development discourse for well over a decade. It appears in donor strategies, conference agendas, and funding frameworks. It is held up as the answer to the long-standing critique that aid is too distant, too foreign, too disconnected from the communities it is meant to serve. That word is localisation. And in the past year, as the international development sector has been shaken to its foundations - USAID dismantled, global