Navigating Many Currents: The Future of Locally Led Impact 

By NEAR’s Movement Building Team 

Vrinda Dar, Wejdan Jarrah, Shahida Arif, Enrique Garcia, and Eric Onyango

  

We are the Regional Representatives of NEAR – and have the pleasure of working with our members on a daily basis. We centre their leadership within their communities in all that we do. We come from across the Global South – Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia – we build this movement together with our members, partners and allies.  

  

This movement – this journey we share – can be understood as a river. It begins with the realities within the communities our members serve – in their struggles, their crises, their quiet questions asked around a fire, and the inner hope to see something different. 

  

We – as NEAR – are in a boat moving with many currents. We are not always reading the river correctly. Sometimes we move too fast, sometimes too cautiously. But we are always learning. And we keep returning to the same questions: are we flowing along the river’s course – or are we obstructing it? 

  

This river doesn’t follow one straight or direct course. It bends and shifts, shaped by local realities, political dynamics, humanitarian crises, socio-economic dynamics, and lived experiences. Our role isn’t to control the river – it’s to navigate it with care and respect. We listen to our members and their communities, help them collectively identify and prioritise the problems they face, bring people together to analyse diverse contexts, and identify opportunities for collective action. 

  

Many are the places where we see patterns being repeated time and again – systems that exclude, aid that disempowers, voices that go unheard. But we also see resilience, capabilities and wisdom rooted in generations of lived experience. Our work is to amplify the voices that carry this wisdom. To connect the dots between the buzzwords and concepts that are often discussed in global spaces – like localisation, local leadership or shifting power – and help translate these concepts in local languages, narratives, and cultures. 

  

We see ourselves as facilitators. The movement is not built by us – it is built by local leaders – with the heart of the movement always centred in the communities. We help hold the space, build trust, and open doors. Sometimes we are the bridges. Sometimes we are just the witnesses. But always, we are in the boat – with humility and purpose. 

 

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the movement is carried by organisations who never wait to be invited. They organise from within – from Bogotá to Port-au-Prince, from Paraguay’s grassroots coalitions to Venezuela’s locally-led resilience networks. As our members shared at the LAC Regional Summit in 2025: the river in this region runs through decades of resistance, and today it runs towards something new. 

 

 

In Africa, local actors are not waiting for the system to invite them to the table – they are building their own. From South Sudan to Ethiopia, from DRC to Somalia, Localisation Labs are generating evidence, building coalitions, and proving that lasting change starts with those who know the soil best. As Nancy Sitima of Kenya reminds us: the models already exist. The question is whether the system will stop talking about them – and start trusting them.  

 

In Asia and the Pacific, local leaders have gone beyond declaring principles – they are codifying them. The Kathmandu Covenant, the AASHA Fund, the Local NGOs Absorption Capacity Tool, Trust Building Cafe and Harvested local solutions: these are not experiments. These are blueprints. As the Asia-Pacific Local Leaders (APLL) clearly expressed at the 2025 Regional Humanitarian Partnership Week in Bangkok: we are not learning localisation. We are leading it. 

 

In the Middle East and North Africa, our members operate in some of the most complex and dangerous environments in the world –where survival is political, and solidarity is urgent. Localisation in this region is not a theory. It is an act of insisting that local organisations – Palestinian, Syrian, Yemeni, Lebanese– are the legitimate architects of their own futures. Our members do not simply respond to crises – they reimagine what is possible beyond them. 

 

The currents of this river are not weakening. Even as the global humanitarian system faces its most significant disruption in decades – with funding shrinking, institutions retreating, and old models breaking – the currents flow stronger. Because the energy driving this river is not institutional. It is human-powered and human-centred It is the energy of people who have always known what needs to change, and who are no longer waiting to be asked. 

 

Our role on this river is not to lead the way. It is to row alongside those who already know where they are going. The metaphorical boat may be NEAR, but the river – the movement – belongs to the communities. 

  

And we are honoured to be in it with them.