From Voices to Choices

Expanding crisis-affected people’s influence over aid decisions: An outlook to 2040

People affected by crisis make decisions every day about how to best use their capacities and the resources available to them to meet their needs, but when it comes to the aid that is meant to support them in doing so, they continue to report that they “feel unable to participate in decisions that affect them.” After decades of talk and commitments about putting people at the center of aid, we are still falling short.

Voices to Choices seeks to support efforts to put crisis-affected people in the driver seat of humanitarian action. It endeavors to move the conversation beyond how aid actors use participation to inform their decisions, to look at what is holding back and what may increase crisis-affected people’s influence over aid decisions. The report analyzes the inertias internal to the formal humanitarian sector that have held back transformation and, explores how factors external to the formal humanitarian sector may help to break these inertias and catalyze shifts in power.

For this report we have utilised the content of external partners, such as NEAR and Oxfam Sri Lanka, to ensure the voices of crisis-affected people are heard and best represented. Click on the below image for an example of Reach Me in Sri Lanka and the button to read the full stories.

Shadrock Roberts from Ushahidi and Paul Currion from Disberse, discuss how accessible emerging technologies are to those affected by crisis in our hour long webinar.