A key message emerging loud and clear from the recent World Humanitarian Summit regional consultations for eastern and southern Africa is the need to scale up and improve ways of listening to people affected by crises.
This is partly a matter of dignity, but it is also a matter of rooting interventions in the beliefs and motives that will sustain them.
Civil society organizations and community representatives remind us that listening is not the same as routinely asking people to list their basic survival needs. Listening means being open to hearing the various ways that challenges and solutions are perceived subjectively by people in crises. It means not limiting our interest to those areas where aid agencies have a predetermined agenda of services to offer.
About the author
Alexander Matheou
Alexander Matheou is the regional director for Asia Pacific at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. He has worked in the humanitarian sector for 20 years across a variety of fields, including disaster response, food security, social exclusion, displacement and migration, HIV/TB prevention, and institutional development.