HNPW 2026 | Locally Led, Globally Supported: Exploring Ways to Localise the Production and Sharing of Technical Knowledge

Humanitarian actors are facing unprecedented challenges: major and sudden funding cuts, reduced technical capacities, fewer capacity strengthening opportunities and rising expectations to deliver specialised, context-appropriate support in complex, protracted crises. Recent surveys from the Alliance and the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE)  confirm a sharp decline in available technical expertise across all levels from local to global despite humanitarian needs deepening.

Both INEE and the Alliance are actively exploring how to evolve their own global technical support models from a globally driven sector to locally-led and globally-backed solutionsThis session will share emerging thinking from both networks while creating an important space for a broader set of humanitarian actors to feed into the process.

Co-hosted by the Alliance and INEE, this interactive session welcomes frontline responders, managers, policy-makers, advocates, funders, and cluster coordinators to collectively explore what it would take for the humanitarian sector to shift from a predominantly global technical support model to more decentralised, proximity-based approaches. Through practical examples and participant dialogue, we will unpack how to enable contextualised, rapid, and sustainable technical support closer to the point of impact, and identify actionable steps relevant across all sectors.

Expected Outcomes:

• Shared understanding of current technical capacity gaps, drawing on CPHA and EiE survey findings.
• Collective insights into what effective, locally grounded technical support could look like across sectors.
• Gather inputs which help inform how INEE and the Alliance evolve their technical support models in 2026.