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.