Our Executive Director, Degan Ali, attended a June Global Washington roundtable on decolonizing global development and the role of U.S-based INGOs. She emphasized trust and humility, to have more trust in the local people on the ground and be humble to listen to and learn from them.
Read more from the article here:
“Trust surfaces again as Ali, who worked for the United Nations and eventually took over Adeso leadership, recounts trying to generate aid community support for making cash transfers to vulnerable populations during the 2003 Somalia famine. She says many aid organizations balked, seeming to not trust local families to make good decisions with the cash and assuming the effort was doomed to fail. Adeso did, in fact, wind up pioneering successful large-scale cash transfers after securing backing from a major donor organization.”
Adeso, with a coalition of several NGOs, is soon to launch Pledge for Change which will raise critical issues on how global humanitarian aid and development systems operates.