Ian Burbidge

Standing on a dusty road in Kajo Keji, looking at the notice proclaiming the next community meeting would take place under the Big Mango Tree, feeling my bodies sweat response to the sun beating down, I found it hard to label the emotions that overwhelmed me. My geographer’s curiosity of new places and people, never having felt this sense of remoteness or distance from home, tempered with the self-consciousness of being another white visitor from another humanitarian organisation, was mingled with deep-rooted childhood imaginings of the magic of Africa (the 12-year old me would think this was wild, that older me had somehow taken a wrong turn and emerged in someone else’s dream).

Landing in South Sudan a few days before launched me into an ongoing period of wild uncertainty through which I found the only approach was to harness my ability to go with the flow, to surf the unfamiliar and not fight it (of course, my unfamiliar is someone else’s normal). I will save the words necessary to bring these experiences evocatively to life for another time; for now, let me simply share this one idea. For as the landing gear was deployed and the streets of Juba came into focus I could start to see, for the first time in the year I’d worked in it, the humanitarian sector IRL. It dominated. 

Here was an airport with precious few recognisable tail fin markings. No BA, Emirates or Qatar. Instead, white planes dominated: UN, World Food Programme. And as my time in South Sudan progressed so it continued: humanitarian workers in their white Toyota Landcruisers, each branded with the relevant INGO label (Oxfam, Save the Children, WFP…). All the big charities in their compounds, secured with 10ft wire-topped walls; staff living in bocks of flats in different secure compounds. Being driven between these places (before the 7pm curfew kicked in, of course) there were few familiar signs of a capital city. It seemed, in effect, as though Juba had been taken over by an occupying force. What must it feel like, my geographer brain wonders, to be a resident here when everywhere you go you are slapped across the face with these insanely visible and impossible-to-ignore signs of foreign presence. Here’s how the system looks and feels when you get to the crunch, where the sector’s purpose is fulfilled by the delivery meeting the need. 

Seeing the system is a phrase I have used in numerous workshops helping collaborators to share their part of the picture and start to construct a collective flip-chart-sketched view of the whole. Yet here it took on a totally different meaning: I could literally see it. I was now a part of it, engaging with its processes and procedures and seeing it in action and contemplating why on a near-continuous basis. It was not longer something that existed in theory; it had sprung to life for me in the most visceral ways. 

More than anything, perhaps, was the almost inevitable conclusion – when faced with the sheer dominance of the sector here – that the gravitational pull of the system was so great that escaping from it, creating change, would require an almost herculean effort. And yet, the hopeful systems- and complexity thinker in me countered this with the notion that it also illustrated the need for change. And we know that big change can come from small actions. This is the critical space for community innovation: small actions in communities by communities that can illustrate different ways of engaging and working not in theory but through collaborative practice. The proposition changes from ‘how can we help you?’ to ‘how can we help you help yourselves?’ until at some impossible-to-predict point in the future the  release of human potential and agency breaks the dependency on the system as it currently exists and change occurs. When people reclaim the individual and collective self-confidence for change the boundaries of what’s possible can expand exponentially. 

When this happens a fundamental shift can occur at the deepest levels of our beliefs about how the world works, mental models which are often so embedded and taken for granted that we can’t even see them. Which is why innovation programming is such an important component of systems change in the sector: it can challenge entrenched beliefs and help surface new ones through practical action. We are working to support our intermediaries to step out of the very humanitarian paradigm that we have schooled them in and forced them to adopt, saying instead that a different way is not only possible here, but that – more than anything – it’s required.

From linear planning that requires Gantt charts and implementation plans showing how each step follows its preceding one, complete with cost allocations and contingency plans should we fall off the path. Towards innovation programming that encourages the openness to learn from each step and use the insights to guide the next one, all the while proving that there can be a different way. Perhaps the challenge has always been to overcome the blocks we put in its way of the new; perhaps innovation is really not so radical, after all. But without it, without people at the edges experimenting with new ways of doing old things we might never reach the tipping points of change beyond which the promises of new systems lie.