FrontlineAid

Missed us at the KfW conference last week? Here's the recap👇

FrontlineAid takes part in BMZ and Kwf Virtual Conference on Digitalisation and Remote Management for Global Development Cooperation - Capoeira4Refugees By: Alessia Baker From the 19th to the 21st of January the virtual international conference organized by BMZ and Kfw discussed how digitalisation and Remote Management, Monitoring, and Verification (RMMV) can help organisations and institutions to improve the impact in global development cooperation...

Join us on 21st of January at the KFW Conference. We will be talking about our tech solutions to meet actual needs in the aid sector!

Conference in January 2021 - Fragile Contexts, Digitalisation and Remote Management, Monitoring and Verification Meet us for a virtual conference in early 2021 to discuss how digitalization and “Remote Management, Monitoring and Verification” (RMMV) can help us to remain operational and sustain impact in global development cooperation. Showcase your project, build your network and join a vibrant virtual co...

New book United Nonsense shows why local organisations cannot make it in the professional aid world. Even though they are the experts desperate to help their own communities.

Localisation of aid is failing. We give around $143 billion dollars in international aid. Almost none of it makes to local people. The grand promise of 25% of Western aid making it to directly to local organizations, up from an astonishing 1%, by 2020 is about to be broken.

Why is this?
United Nonsense is the story of one small, local sports charity trying to make it in the world of professional humanitarian aid. Set up in Syria in 2007 it faced a constant struggle in trying to raise money, find ways to send money to friends working with children in Al Raqqa, ISIS headquarters, or deal with the mental health issues that seemed everywhere amongst international aid workers.

The Founders were a Syrian-German and a Bengali-Brit. This unlikely duo, fought paperwork, while realizing an astonishing vision of a network of local people using sports to help their own communities. Both faced personal struggles in trying to keep their dream alive. Tarek’s family themselves were forced to leave their homes, and become refugees. Ummul, a woman of too many labels –Bengali, working class, Muslim, Londoner – never let anyone else’s expectations stop her from getting the job done.

Professor Michael Barnett, coined the term the ‘humanitarian club’ to better explain why small, local organisations never get a share of power or money. Even if they are best placed to find the answers. What does it look like if you are that small organization trying to work on a project in a war zone, in your own community? And why is it so hard to get support?
Through its own start-up stories United Nonsense shows what it is to be that local organization trying to make it in the world of professional humanitarianism. But never be let into the ‘club’.

United Nonsense to be released in 2020.

FrontlineAid Founder Tarek Alsaleh talks here about the problem of the aid cartel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XErahX5uBjs

Professor Michael Barnett of International Affairs and Political Science at George Washington University and his talk on the concept of the ‘humanitarian club’
https://vimeo.com/321199720

Picture credits and max respect to The Syria Campaign

A great talk on why won't happen. Professor Michael Barnett covers the Humanitarian Club and its mechanisms of exclusion that make it impossible for southern NGOs to break into the club.

The Humanitarian Club - Keynote Lecture with Professor Michael Barnett This keynote lecture with Michael Barnett, Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at George Washington University, examined the causes and consequences…