Survivor and community-led crisis response

The COVID-19 pandemic saw the rapid appearance and expansion of community support and mutual aid groups around the world as people stepped in to share hygiene and social distancing guidelines and support vulnerable members of society, often when governments and humanitarian organisations were slower to react.
L2GP has been working actively with our colleagues and network since the beginning of the pandemic to explore how community groups are responding to the crisis. Building on our shared experience supporting and implementing sclr, we have been able to share examples of best practice to inspire and guide one another as many local, national and international groups have struggled to respond adequately to the initial and ongoing challenges posed by COVID-19.

Since 2015, L2GP has undertaken in-depth research and analysis of funding flows through the international humanitarian system with a particular focus on how much – or how little is available for local and national humanitarian actors.
This research grew from the Grand Bargain commitments to giving 25% of humanitarian funding directly to local or national actors. Through this research L2GP tracks progress made towards this goal and restoring power local and national responders to crisis.

This paper, published by the Humanitarian Practice Network, distils ten years’ experience of sclr in natural disasters, armed conflict, persistent poverty and social unrest. By presenting evidence from crisis contexts around the world the paper demonstrates the necessity of letting local people and communities take control of the response and shows how it can done in practice. The paper is a call to action for implementation of truly locally-led responses across the aid sector.

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L2GPs work explores how people living in areas affected by natural disasters and complex emergencies understand ‘protection’. Building on initial research in 2009 into how communities and individuals respond to meet their protection needs in a crisis, L2Gp now focuses on how sclr is implemented and used by communities and humanitarian actors around the world to allow people affected by crisis to take ownership and leadership of a response. L2GP has conducted community-oriented action research around the world in Haiti, Kenya, Myanmar, the occupied Palestinian Territories, the Philippines, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria and Zimbabwe.
L2GPs local research uses a community-oriented approach with international national researchers working closely together to interview individuals and focus groups in the contexts we work in. Research findings are discussed with participants, communities and relevant national actors at the draft stages and different perspectives reflected in the reports.

Survivor and community-led response (sclr) is a way of working which recognises that crisis-affected people are the first and last responders in any disaster. Sclr provides a means for aid actors to strengthen the scope, scale and impacts of this autonomous self-help and build on its collective nature.
By rebalancing the relationship between locally-driven responses and external support, sclr allows humanitarian aid to better strengthen the communal resilience of affected people, whether in sudden-onset or protracted crises. It is designed to complement, not replace, existing humanitarian programming.
Sclr uses a range of mechanisms (including appreciative inquiry, rapid transfer of microgrants and networking of knowledge and capacities) to enable large numbers of self-organising groups to quickly identify and implement their own self-help initiatives. The approach can go to scale while retaining relevant levels of accountability, compliance and cost-effectiveness.