What should be kept
Humanitarian principles and life-saving capacity. Aid must continue to protect humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence, especially during conflict and disasters.
Solidarity and international responsibility. Global support remains essential where national systems and communities are overwhelmed.
Technical expertise, innovation, and quality standards. International actors can contribute knowledge, research, technology, safeguarding, and access to global resources.
Accountability to affected people. Communities must retain safe channels to influence programmes, report concerns, and assess whether assistance is useful and dignified.
What should be changed
Shift leadership and decision-making locally. National organizations, women-led groups, local authorities, and communities should participate from the first assessment through budgeting, implementation, learning, and evaluation.
Replace short-term projects with flexible, multi-year financing. Funding should support humanitarian response, recovery, development, peacebuilding, climate resilience, and institutional capacity together.
Fund outcomes rather than activity counts. Success should not be measured only by distributions, trainings, or beneficiary numbers, but by whether families become safer, more resilient, and more self-reliant.
Share power, resources, and risk. Local organizations should receive fair overheads, full-cost recovery, direct funding, and protection from disproportionate financial, legal, and security risks.
Move from fragmented sectors to the HDP Nexus. Humanitarian, development, peace, climate, gender, and protection actors should use joint analysis, shared outcomes, and coordinated financing.
Treat women and communities as leaders. Women and girls should not be included only as beneficiaries. They should shape priorities, govern resources, and lead solutions.
Use evidence and local knowledge together. Data, service mapping, community feedback, and contextual analysis should guide adaptive programming.
What should be discarded
One-size-fits-all interventions. Standardized external models often ignore local culture, markets, conflict dynamics, and community priorities.
Tokenistic localization. Local actors should not be used merely as subcontractors while international agencies retain budgets, visibility, and decision-making power.
Permanent emergency thinking. Repeating relief distributions without investing in livelihoods, services, resilience, and peace can deepen dependency.
Parallel systems and unnecessary duplication. International actors should strengthen existing local institutions and platforms rather than creating temporary structures that disappear when funding ends.
Risk transfer disguised as partnership. Compliance burdens, security threats, delayed payments, and reputational risks should not be pushed entirely onto national organizations.
Competition that weakens collective action. Aid architecture should reward collaboration, shared evidence, and joint outcomes rather than organizational visibility alone.
Core message
The future of aid should move from delivering assistance to enabling dignity, resilience, and self-reliance. It should move from international control to shared leadership, from fragmented projects to integrated Nexus solutions, and from managing vulnerability to addressing its root causes.
For Yemen, this means investing in locally led Nexus pilot funds, women-led organizations, flexible multi-year financing, and national platforms that can demonstrate and scale solutions grounded in community realities.