NEAR MENA Regional Convening Wrap Up and Insights · Istanbul, Türkiye · 29 September 2026

Istanbul, Türkiye:  The final day of NEAR’s MENA Regional Convening brought together local and national civil society actors, regional partners, and humanitarian practitioners to examine how the region can strengthen locally led action in a period of political, financial, and operational uncertainty.

The fourth and final day of the Convening combined a regional webinar on political complexity and donor alignment with a dialogue of the MENA Advisory Group on humanitarian research and data . The discussions called for a shift from transferring risk to local organisations toward genuine risk sharing, stronger sovereign and community-based financing, and local ownership of evidence and decision-making.

The regional webinar was convened by the MENA Advisory Group steering committee and facilitated by the Al-Asafri Foundation, CHS, IHH, and NEAR. It brought together 20 participants in the room and 77 participants online. The subsequent MENA Advisory Group committee dialogue focused on the group’s priorities, membership, joint work, and plans for the next six months.

The key messages from the regional webinar were:

• Risk sharing, not risk transfer: Sanctions, registration restrictions, banking barriers, and compliance pressures continue to constrain local operations. Speakers stressed that localisation must include fair allocation of authority, resources, and risk, supported by flexible and longer-term funding.
• Sovereign and community-based financing: Participants explored waqf, community finance, and asset-building approaches that can help organisations move beyond short-term project grants and build institutional resilience.
• Local legitimacy as resilience: The discussion linked sustainability to community trust, local decision-making, diversified relationships, and the ability of organisations to remain effective when formal funding or access channels are disrupted.
• Long-term institutional support: Donors were encouraged to support organisational development, governance, and locally defined priorities (not only short project cycles or implementation activities).

Key messages from the humanitarian research and data localisation dialogue included:

• Local interpretation matters: Participants criticised top-down assessment systems that exclude local and national NGOs from designing, interpreting, and validating data. Locally produced evidence is most useful when it is also interpreted through intimate knowledge of the context.
• Evidence for policy and prevention: The dialogue highlighted Syria’s field research initiatives and the experience of women-led civil-society organisations in Iraq, calling for research that informs policy, supports prevention, and reaches decision-making spaces rather than remaining within humanitarian silos.
• Capacity and regional bridges: CHI/IHAHA’s capacity-building work was presented as an example of connecting local and regional actors with wider humanitarian platforms, including opportunities for research dissemination and advocacy in global spaces such as Geneva.
• Localisation is a power shift: The phrase “My friend, I am the local context” captured the day’s central principle: localisation is not only about who implements projects, but who defines the problem, controls knowledge, sets priorities, and makes decisions.

Following the webinar, the MENA Advisory Group committee met to discuss its focus, membership, joint work, and priorities for the coming six months. The discussion will inform continued regional collaboration on evidence, policy influence, capacity building, and locally led humanitarian action.

The MENA Regional Convening closed with a shared commitment to strengthen locally owned knowledge, financing, and decision-making across the MENA region. NEAR thanks IHH for hosting the convening and supporting the exchange among members and partners.