On localisation and local knowledge in humanitarian action: working on the ground in the Central African Republic

Brigitte Piquard introduces her Work in Progress seminar, which is on Thursday 18 October at 4.00pm. (Please note the earlier time this week.)

For the last year, I have been working with Caritas Centrafrique, a national Central African NGO, on different capacity building projects.  The Central African Republic is currently facing one of the worst humanitarian situations as 54% of the population is in need of emergency relief and more than 25% is displaced.  From this experience national staff have developed a wealth of operational humanitarian knowledge that is invisible and undervalued by the international humanitarian community and sometimes underestimated by the national staff themselves.

We decided then to reflect on this and to re-organise our work, building on this knowledge rather than replacing it.  We also decided to start a reflection on the specificity and the ambitions of national NGOs in the humanitarian system and the importance of tacit local humanitarian knowledge in the debate on localisation.  Ongoing discussions are taking place in the field and a workshop was organised in Oxford in June 2018 with representatives of international organisations that have adopted the localisation agenda.

During the work in progress discussion, we will present the state of art of this ongoing reflection and we will question why local knowledge is missing from the localisation debate.  

The seminar will be in Abercrombie, third floor, Student Hub/White Space. Please click here for details of the whole series.