This year’s UNGA theme ‘The future we want, the United Nations we need: reaffirming our collective commitment to multilateralism – confronting COVID-19 through effective multilateral action’ is a timely reminder to the entire humanitarian community that we all must work better together in the Covid-19 response and in other disasters.
2020 has started off as yet another challenging year for the humanitarian community. As civil society in Turkey we have been mobilising localised aid to affected communities and high-risk groups during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, as local and national NGOs, we provided relief to those affected by the Elazig earthquake in South-eastern Turkey in January, followed by the surge of refugees and migrants to the Western coast of the country in March where we jointly covered the many needs of the displaced populations. We are first responders and have continued to work with partners, both public and private, to deliver urgent goods and services during these challenging times. For us to become more visible and scale up our efforts, we need to be better recognised and supported by the UN system and the greater humanitarian community.
As a handful of Turkish NGOs engaged in humanitarian work, we established an informal group made up of each organisation’s top executives. With the spill over effect of the Syria crisis and increasing number of refugees in Turkey, we started running larger humanitarian operations aimed at supporting those that were fleeing the violence to find refuge on this side of the border. Running into the same obstacles as local organisations and implementing partners of international humanitarian actors, we decided to meet informally to discuss some of these challenges and to find solutions. Being well-acquainted with the global commitments on localisation, we felt strong enough to discuss among ourselves the practical implications of our partnerships, the status of humanitarian financing in Turkey, our capacity to manage our organisations and our operations, and the way we were managing the many risks involved.
With the help of these periodic informal meetings, we developed common positions on risk sharing, overhead policy, severance obligations, and how to cover our government liabilities through project funding. By developing a common position and sharing this with partners and key humanitarian players, we benefitted from speaking with one, strong collective voice as Turkey based organisations.
An advocacy alert sent by NEAR in June made our group realise that we had much more to say and do on localisation, and that we needed to do this more systematically. We felt that the many Syrian-led organisations registered in Turkey were also in a position to greatly contribute to making advances on localisation. We made a call to networks of Syrian-led NGOs in Turkey to join our collective effort. With those that were willing to join on short notice, we wrote to all the international NGOs, UN agencies, and donors based in the country calling for the Grand Bargain signatories to report Turkey-specific progress on the Grand Bargain commitments. The communication helped initiate a dialogue with each of these humanitarian groups in Turkey. We received responses from some critical partners and have used this opportunity to continue this important conversation.
We are currently 11 Turkish and 3 Syrian-led NGOs. We are hopeful that we will expand the group and pull in many other Turkey-based NGOs. We know that there is a lot of interest in localisation and in conducting collective advocacy amongst local and national NGOs, both Turkish and refugee-led. We are now in contact with the Refugee Council of Turkey, which is a network of many refugee-led NGOs and we hope to carry out joint advocacy work in order to strengthen our positions as local NGOs and to push forward the agenda of localisation in Turkey.
NEAR has been very encouraging and has supported us in coming this far. From now on, as Turkey-based NGOs, we are hoping to come together under the NEAR brand so that we can raise a stronger voice and take bolder steps in our collective advocacy work. We know that not only will this make the process for engagement easier in relation to those we are trying to influence, it will also enable us to effectively address issues that we cannot do as individual organisations.
Having a common position and acting collectively can lead to greater impact in influencing policy. With only a year left of the Grand Bargain, it is important that we make progress not only in the talk on localisation but also in the practice. With NEAR’s support on country-based advocacy, we are confident that we will be able to influence the UN system in a way that can strengthen existing local capacities in each country for a more effective response and a more resilient recovery.
We are working towards this in Turkey and are creating our own spaces for dialogue with the multilateral agencies as well as other humanitarian actors. Embracing multilateralism means increasing transparency and openness among humanitarian actors. It also means increasing the effectiveness of aid through greater engagement of local organisations, both in delivery and coordination of aid. Finally, multilateralism is not about polishing a single local organisation, it is about investing in empowering local organisations as a collective. Instead of making rivals out of civil society organisations, the UN needs to create an environment where civil society has strong leaders and thrives by working collectively for the benefit of disaster-affected populations. Only then will there be trust, mutual respect, and better value for humanitarian money.
As Support to Life, we’ve been working since 2005 to safeguard the rights of disaster-affected populations and support living conditions on par with human dignity. When it comes to responding to natural disasters or conflict, we prioritise assisting the most vulnerable – those who suffer the impacts the most. Support to Life currently focuses on emergency aid, refugee support, child protection and strengthening civil society. For more information, please visit supporttolife.org.