Working with communities

There is a growing gulf between aid workers and the populations they assist. Several factors contribute to this: transformations in humanitarian aid, the increasing size of programmes and the means allocated to them (4WDs, sat phones, guards, etc.), along with the turnover of expatriate staff. As projects become ever more technical and caught up in their plethora of procedures, they increasingly exclude non-professionals and demote the populations to the status of mere “users”.