For decades now, capacity development has performed a crucial role providing a better infrastructure for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery efforts. However, the systems and models predominantly in use to build capacity, have not attached enough
significance to principles of local ownership and grass-roots approaches. Consequently, national and local humanitarian practitioners experience in-built disadvantage at many levels.

Calls to transform current practices have become more frequent and more powerful. This is seen to be a key element in efforts to better recognise and utilise national and local capacity and capabilities with the intention of ensuring that the overall sector can generate more equitable partnerships and better collaboration.

Pursuit of this crucial goal, means it is time to overhaul fundamentally the learning methodologies, technical content, and selection of training providers.

Hosted by RedR and H2H,our expert panel will create a welcome opportunity to examine the challenges faced by local and international actors in making this shift successfully. The session will:

• provide a platform for exploring alternative approaches to traditional views of “capacity” such as community-led approaches, capacity sharing, and peer-to-peer learning; and
• create space for robustly exchanging ideas about how to achieve innovative, inclusive and effective approaches to capacity development in the humanitarian sector – ones that ‘bake-in’ a more equitable way to share resources and power between all stakeholders.