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Call it Grand Bargain 3.01.
Signatories to the humanitarian reform package known as the Grand Bargain meet in Geneva this week to figure out how to move forward on long-stalled promises.
The annual meeting is the first since the sector’s once-sprawling reform agenda was slimmed down to a version 3.0 last year, focused on improving support for locally led response, quality funding, and accountability to people who use aid.
Change has been slow since the original 2016 promises were made by a mix of donor governments and big aid groups and networks. Signs of the old roadblocks remain: Funding for local aid falls well short, a few big players in the international system call the shots, and people affected by crises have little say in what happens.
That’s why the emphasis this year is on practical steps. There’s a proposed “implementation agenda” – the Grand Bargain agenda has its own agenda – with targets and actions for donors and aid groups. Unusually, several big international NGOs are asking to be held accountable for promises missed and kept.
Local organisations, in particular, are keen to move forward with so-called “national reference groups”, which are in-country forums seen as a tool to keep tabs on promises at ground level.
“One of the things I’m hoping to see is not continued rhetoric but clear commitments,” said Hibak Kalfan, head of the civil society network, NEAR.
Many say more attention needs to be put on addressing power imbalances, or that the so-called localisation agenda is missing core decolonial perspectives.
“The coloniality of it must be addressed,” said Sudhanshu Shekhar Singh, who heads Delhi-based Humanitarian Aid International. “Everything is through a Western angle.”
There’s also a sense of urgency in the mix, as Israel’s onslaught continues in Gaza and expands in Lebanon amid fresh warnings of war crimes. Crises are deepening elsewhere, from the Sahel to Sudan and Myanmar, while humanitarian funding gaps are the widest on record – underscoring the original Grand Bargain intent to make aid better, faster, and more inclusive.
“We’re not in the same position we were a year ago at the Grand Bargain meeting,” Kalfan said. “So I’m really hoping that leadership from UN agencies and from donors come with greater openness and greater want to actually move forward and be a little bit more practical.”
Where things stand
The dozens of Grand Bargain signatories include NGOs and UN agencies, most of the sector’s top donor governments, and local civil society networks.
That makes the Grand Bargain a rare forum, where, its most optimistic backers say, the disparate parts of the humanitarian sector meet at the same table – even if that table is in Geneva, far from most of the world’s emergency responses.
Much humanitarian funding passes through one or more intermediaries – UN agencies and big NGOs. It’s not uncommon for donor governments to have little contact with the grassroots groups that receive trickles of funding but are closest to the ground.
At this year’s meetings, there’s a bigger footprint among local humanitarian leaders (at least those not barred by prohibitive visa rules).
“We are a little bit far from these discussions,” said Nur İncetahtaci, a board member of Sened, a Gaziantep-based group that works with refugees with disabilities in Türkiye and northwest Syria.
It took her a full day of travel to reach Geneva for her first Grand Bargain meetings, where, among other things, she’s participating in a roundtable with donors.
“We have to remind people that we are all here in order to build up a better system,” İncetahtaci said.
But that system is lagging behind on many of the core Grand Bargain commitments. And it may not even be using the same measuring stick, analysts say.
For example, several big aid groups who have signed on to the Grand Bargain say they give at least 25% of their funding to local organisations. But independent analysts say this closed-book self-reporting is impossible to verify. Instead, only 4.4% of trackable funding went to local aid in 2023, according to analysis outfit Development Initiatives.
There are similar discrepancies for self-scored metrics like sharing overhead funding, sharing risk, and acting on feedback from people who use aid.
In contrast, a recent survey by the Alliance for Empowering Partnership, or A4EP, a network of local civil society groups, found a third reported receiving zero humanitarian funding last year.
Less than half had access to multi-year funding; only 28% said their funding was flexible; only 43% said they were involved in coordination meetings, and many felt their participation was “more ceremonial than meaningful”.
Even big international NGOs acknowledge there’s a problem.
A statement from 35 major international NGOs released before the meetings warns that accountability for localisation is “weak or absent”.
Some aid groups are taking “genuine substantive action” while others are not, but donors aren’t holding UN agencies and NGOs to account. The statement calls for regular progress checks and “mutual accountability” when promises fall short.
“The statement is kind of a mea culpa, both recognising how INGOs need to get their own house in order, but also how that is shaped by donors and their policies and practices,” said Howard Mollett, head of humanitarian policy at CAFOD, the Catholic relief charity.
He also wants to see the Grand Bargain’s “implementation agenda” focus as much on power imbalance as it does on dollars and cents.
“Some international agencies might score very well against some really crude metrics, against the total sums or percentages of funding that they direct to local organisations,” Mollett said. “But if the relationship is entirely top-down, inflexible, delegating risk to the local partners, and is… arrogant and even denigrating – not treating the local organisations with any dignity or respect – then the funding metrics are missing in a big way the important part of the picture.”
What comes next
For many humanitarian leaders at local aid organisations and networks, the so-called national reference groups are a key part of this accountability.
The groups are envisioned as locally led forums at the country level, where the Geneva-level promises made this week can be better measured and discussed.
“These are tools to make Grand Bargain commitments…functional,” İncetahtaci said.
Some NRGs, as they’re also known in aid parlance, have been created in the past, but didn’t get much formal support and were poorly linked to the overall Grand Bargain process.
Yousra Semmache, senior advocacy advisor at NEAR, says they’re a way to bring international agencies to the table at ground level – and a lever to monitor progress and push for accountability.
“There’s been a lot of talk around accountability,” Semmache said. “The Grand Bargain is as strong as its signatories want it to be. So, [NRGs] might sound a little bit process-oriented. But at the same time, it’s looking at concrete solutions that could really move the needle when it comes to the commitments.”
It has been eight years since the Grand Bargain was born amid the hype of 2016’s World Humanitarian Summit. Today’s pared-back version has an uncertain future beyond 2026.
Many attending these meetings agree that meaningful reforms have been slow. But they still see value in this week’s discussions – if there’s a mindset to move things forward.
“We can keep saying that ‘nothing’s changed, nothing’s changed’. But there are some changes that are happening,” said Smruti Patel, founder of the Global Mentoring Initiative, which works with many local aid leaders.
“I was at the World Humanitarian Summit. And there, there were no local actors at all, anywhere, to do with the Grand Bargain,” Patel said. “And now local organisations and networks are signatories. Now, they’re actually at the table and speaking.”
Mila Leonova, director of the Alliance of Ukrainian Civil Society Organisations, is attending a Grand Bargain meeting for the first time, after a 24-hour border-crossing journey out of Ukraine.
She comes well-equipped with aid figures: Ukrainian organisations received a fraction of a percentage point of humanitarian funding; they’re 32% more cost-efficient than international groups.
The international system is often seen to be dragging its feet when it comes to reform. But this week, big international aid groups and local ones are sitting at the same table, she said.
“We don’t need to fight for resources,” Leonova said. “In Ukraine, we have space for everyone. We just need to think about how to share resources with dignity.”
Edited by Andrew Gully.
