Voices from ALNAP’s first 25 years | Manu Gupta: “ALNAP has been a great partner in our push for the localisation agenda”

Manu Gupta, Co-Founder at the Sustainable Environment & Ecological Development Society (SEEDS), on how ALNAP has helped him push the localisation agenda. Read more testimonials from our 'Voices from ALNAP's first 25 years' blog series.

SEEDS is not a conventional humanitarian agency. We look at how resilience can be built up at a local level prior to disaster striking. In 2005 and 2006 we began getting involved with Europe-based networks and national alliances. There was a politically driven northern agenda that involved international organisations trying to control responses and take the lead in local areas. They would train local organisations as subcontractors, determine how aid was given and the quality of that aid as well as set the level of transparency. And many of us southern actors wanted to challenge the status quo.

ALNAP has [...] helped us by providing a neutral space, somewhere that gathers the hard evidence we need for our negotiations on locally led responses.

ALNAP has been a great partner in our push for the localisation agenda. We’ve found ways of engaging by helping facilitate contributions from Asia to each of the State of the Humanitarian System reports. ALNAP has also helped us by providing a neutral space, somewhere that gathers the hard evidence we need for our negotiations on locally-led responses. ALNAP’s openness and knowledge has helped us to bring that evidence together. And the meetings allow us to work as a team to go beyond the rhetoric and actually address technical issues and bottlenecks.