This week’s Grand Bargain Annual Meeting in Geneva brought together NEAR and several of its members and partners from the Global South.
A key member of the NEAR delegation was Nadine Saba – member of the NEAR Leadership Council and one of two Global South Sherpas. We sat down with her after the meeting to hear about her first Grand Bargain Annual meeting, her views on the process and her hopes for the next chapter.
How did you become involved in local leadership?
I’m from Akkar on the northern border of Lebanon, a region that has always been deprived of development opportunities and services. I’m a lawyer but have been working with civil society since 2006. I worked with an international organisation, with the donors, and then I moved back to Akkar and co-founded Akkar Network for Development (AND). It’s been a roller-coaster ride for the last 12 years.
When people ask me what our focus is, I tend to say, “our focus is Akkar”.
We do various kinds of programmes and interventions, but we don’t work outside this area. Our focus is truly local. We have a range of programmes, from tackling gender-based violence, to child protection, youth engagement and environmental sensitivity. It is also very important for us to work with the local authorities to have a real sustainable impact.
What does it mean to you to be a Sherpa?
Firstly, it’s about representation: ensuring that you get your voice across as representative of your constituency, which are the local actors in the Global South. But it is also a two-way street - you must be able to revert to your constituency and advise on what you are seeing and ask for their opinion. We need to ensure that the challenges faced by our members are highlighted and that policy, guidance or frameworks are responsive to those needs.
On a personal level, I feel that in my work I tell women and girls to go ahead and take opportunities to grow, learn and contribute. So, I have to practice what I preach and role model female leadership.
The team from Akkar doing outreach activities
What was your sense after your first meeting this week?
To be honest, it made me wonder how much gets lost between our reality and these meetings in boardrooms. We are not dealing with abstract numbers, we are dealing with people’s lives, with the possibility of making a real change in a real life. It is so important not to get lost in “the bubble” and always get a reality check. There is no survey or focus groups that can replace what you learn in the field, when you talk to people and look in their eyes. My commitment to myself is not to lose sight of why I am sitting in the boardroom and what I bring there – the reality check!
This week we heard a lot about quality funding, partnerships and flexibility and so on, but I think it transcends that. It’s much more about a change in the mindset. There is a paradigm shift that local actors in the Global South are asking for: it’s about sharing power, about using influence and shaping the interventions. I cannot say we are changing the system at the moment because that mindset is still quite rigid, and it's been ingrained. However, we will do our best to ensure we never lose sight of the views and needs of local actors and the communities they serve.