By: Nadine Nimri

A few days ago, while scrolling through LinkedIn, I came across a specialized article about humanitarian and development work and the international trends shaping the sector. One word caught my attention: “Tawteen.” To me, the word did not fit the context of the article at all.

In Arabic, “Tawteen” is associated with granting citizenship or permanently settling refugees and displaced people in the host country. This had nothing to do with what the article was discussing.

It only took me a few seconds to realize that the author was referring to a shift towards locally grounded work, where priorities and interventions are shaped by the local context and where local actors and communities have a greater role in defining and implementing them. In other words, what I was reading was simply an attempt to translate the term “localization” into Arabic.

This took me back to a few years ago, when I was working on a report for an organization I was with at the time. I remember having a long discussion with my colleagues about the most appropriate Arabic translation of the term, particularly because it was an important part of the strategy in the report.

We came up with several options. Some of them were genuinely funny, including one colleague’s attempt to invent the word “Al-Mahallala.” But I think we were sensible enough not to end up using “Tawteen.” In the end, we settled on “localization of humanitarian and development work” or, in Arabic, “محلية العمل الإنساني والتنموي,” which is, in itself, quite a lot of words to translate a single one.

But the issue goes far beyond translating a term. Perhaps the more important question is not how we translate “localization” into Arabic, but how we got to a point where we needed an international term, translated into our own languages, to remind us that humanitarian and development work should be local in the first place.

At its core, the work of civil society organizations is about responding to challenges that exist on the ground, by working with local communities and the people directly affected by those challenges, because they are the ones best placed to identify their own priorities. The role of organizations is to help find and implement solutions.

Over time, other factors have entered the picture: donor requirements, compliance, funding frameworks, performance indicators and reporting. Gradually, the question can shift from “What do people need?” to “What can we fund, implement, measure and report on?”

I do not think the problem is the donor. And just to be clear, by donor I do not mean only an international donor. A donor can be a local company or even an individual.

The problem is the assumption that organizations develop about what needs to be done in order to satisfy the donor. This can gradually turn organizations into being donor-driven, even when that was never the intention.

And assumptions are not the same as facts. In most cases where organizations have presented a different perspective, or moved away from the conventional approach they assumed a donor would expect, the response has been positive. Perhaps that is because donors are not necessarily waiting for us to guess what they want to hear. What they ultimately need is a project based on a genuine need, supported by evidence and by the voices of the people experiencing that need.

That is why needs assessment, listening to people directly affected and bringing their voices into a project proposal is not simply a way to increase the chances of securing funding. In many cases, it is what makes the project itself better and more sustainable.

This reminded me of a story once told by an Egyptian friend of mine. She told me about an organization working in a village in Upper Egypt that implemented a project to bring running water directly to people’s homes, so that women would no longer have to walk long distances to collect water. Less time, less effort, an easier life.

But shortly afterwards, the water system was damaged. An investigation followed, and there were questions about the quality of the implementation and the materials used.

It turned out that the problem was not the quality of the system. The women in the village themselves, the very people the system had been designed to serve, had damaged it.

The reason was simply because going to collect water was not just a tiring daily task for these women. It was also the time and space where they met each other, talked and maintained their social relationships.

What seemed to the organization and the project’s funder to be an obvious solution to a problem was not necessarily seen as a solution by the women themselves.

This is where I think we need to pause and look at how we approach some of our projects.

Sometimes we see a problem from the outside, assume we understand it, and then start thinking about the solution. But the picture we see from the outside may not be complete. And the further people directly affected are removed from defining the problem and setting priorities, the greater the possibility that we will offer a good solution to a problem that was not actually the problem.

This brings me back to the term “localization.” Today, we have literature, strategies, indicators and projects that talk about shifting power to local actors. Yet we can find ourselves falling into the same paradox: we import a concept from elsewhere, look for an Arabic translation, put it into strategies and proposals, and then continue to work in much the same way we did before the term existed.

The question is not only how we translate “localization.” It is why we have reached a point where we need this term in the first place to remind us that humanitarian and development work should begin with the people we work for, with their realities and their needs, rather than with solutions we have already decided are right for them.