‘We’ are the Silo
What does the aid system owe Myanmar’s civil society, and what would real solidarity look like?
Local organisations are kept busy and valued for their capacity, but mostly to deliver emergency responses shaped by that funding. The risk is outsourced with the work: Myanmar ranks among the ten most dangerous places to deliver aid, though many attacks on local responders there are never recorded.
Myanmar’s seafood restaurants are a never-ending party. People talk loudly over beer and cheap whisky, sweet-and-sour fried crab, watergrass and snail soup. Children run around, bumping into waiters who weave between mosquito traps.
A few years ago I was heading to one of my favourite Yangon seafood places, by Kandawgyi Lake, for dinner with colleagues from a UN office. They were not at the tables. A waiter led me to a “VIP room”: because we were foreigners, someone (one of us or the staff) had set us apart, in air-conditioning. Inside sat a collection of expats from East and West, awkward at a work dinner.
One took a selfie to send to the head of the agency. Somebody made a nasty joke about it. I missed my Myanmar colleagues, who would have been far better company. I felt trapped in my privilege.
For a decade (formally since the 2016 Grand Bargain, in reality much longer) the aid world has talked about localisation and “breaking the silos” between humanitarian, development, human rights and peace work, between agencies, clusters and taskforces. But the most tangible silo I know was at that dinner. Inside the VIP room, the expats. Outside, a silo called reality.
Who is “we”?
“We” are the humanitarian, development and peace expats: perhaps a dying breed. I was, and still feel like, one of them. I have seen things many wouldn’t believe. Myself as the unlikely temporary administrator of a municipality in Kosovo. Windowless planes flying into scorched East Timor. The smoke of burning villages, people on the move, the infuriating sight of a malnourished child. People heading hopefully to the polls in Myanmar shortly before a military coup: what Silvio Rodríguez, in “Canción del elegido”, calls cristales molidos, ground glass turning in your head. Ethnic clashes on a bridge blocked by tanks. The distant thud of heavy machine guns and falling bombs.
That is the privilege that comes with the work: the moral kind, the one we put in our bios. Then there is the privilege the work comes with. I have mostly enjoyed the second. Protection conferences in five-star hotels. Beach bars in Cabo Delgado, their car parks full of white 4x4s with agency logos, a mile from the displacement camps. Expensive, stillborn strategies launched over lunch by Lake Como or at The Hague’s Peace Palace. Expats reoccupying coveted colonial-era spaces in Jerusalem, Maputo, Khartoum and Yangon.
And the things less spoken about: senior international staff banking leave, stretching lunches into the afternoon, flying business class between capitals while national colleagues carry the operational weight. In my hometown, the municipal official you are looking for is often “having breakfast”. In the UN, he is “on R&R”. This is not a caricature. In Ukraine, Refugees International found that international staff cost five times as much as national staff, and 17 times as much as local NGO staff. Aid workers say this in private; it is rarely said in the meetings.
The funding collapse that began with the dismantling of USAID in 2025 may cost “us” some of that privilege, lost like tears in rain. But the system’s instinct for self-preservation has never been more visible: community-based approaches were “among the initiatives most affected by funding cuts”, according to ALNAP’s 2026 State of the Humanitarian System. The wars go on, and so does the suffering of the displaced.
A relationship without a name
Donor–partner relationships have a dynamic the sector rarely names. International organisations hold the money, the information and the terms. Local organisations must meet requirements designed elsewhere, report in formats and languages not their own, and follow priorities set by people who have never visited their communities. Push back, and they risk losing access. Conform, and they risk losing their purpose.
This has the structure of an abusive relationship: dependency, asymmetric power, the slow erosion of the weaker party’s autonomy, and a public language of “partnership” masking private control. Myanmar civil society experts call some international partners sesame sprinklers: a Burmese expression for people who add needless flourishes to someone else’s work to show off their own skill. Each sprinkle chips away at trust, and signals that local knowledge counts for little.
Power is also information. When one Myanmar organisation asked an international intermediary managing multimillion-dollar funds about coordination, the meeting was short. It was told to go through the intermediary’s partners, with no names or contacts given. The door shut.
Who are “them”?
Outside the international “we” there are, first, the powerholders. In Myanmar, that means the military that seized power in 2021 and, after staged elections in December 2025 and January 2026, installed coup leader Min Aung Hlaing as president in April 2026: a civilian façade over the same rule. Then the ethnic resistance organisations, many fighting the military on and off since 1948, and the resistance forces born after the coup. And then the civil society organisations of recent decades, largely treated as subcontractors by UN agencies and international NGOs.
Even “local” is not neutral. Myanmar civil society researchers have documented how the term has been stretched to cover state authorities, community groups and, increasingly, entities created by international agencies to tick the localisation box while keeping control of money and strategy. “Local” has become a position in the aid system rather than an identity: organisations count as local because they can navigate funding and compliance, not because they are rooted in communities. The deeply rooted but administratively light are filtered out.
Ten years after donors pledged, in the 2016 Grand Bargain, to channel a quarter of humanitarian funding “as directly as possible” to local and national responders, most of what reaches Myanmar’s civil society still arrives second-hand: as sub-grants from INGOs, UN agencies and pooled funds, with overheads taken and conditions added at each layer. Local organisations are kept busy and valued for their capacity, but mostly to deliver emergency responses shaped by that funding. The risk is outsourced with the work: Myanmar ranks among the ten most dangerous places to deliver aid, though many attacks on local responders there are never recorded.
What international solidarity actually requires
Watching the international order and its “responsibility to protect” being dismantled, from Ukraine to Gaza and Sudan, I began supporting Myanmar civil society organisations pro bono while scouting for consultancies to pay the bills at home. Side by side with them, I came to understand the precariousness and disenfranchisement they face daily, so unlike the safety net international staff take for granted. UN bodies, including the very pooled funds meant to reach local responders,often answered our requests with silence. Many of the CSOs are contemplating closing down. And this in a context where the UN counts 16.2 million people in need in 2026, a third of the population, and over four million displaced.
I had seen another way before. In 2015, a year before the World Humanitarian Summit put localisation on the agenda, I moved to Myanmar to help isolated communities obtain civil documentation. The national staff were extraordinarily knowledgeable and committed; the expats came and went, absorbed in internal power struggles. I was lucky to be posted to Dawei, in Tanintharyi, an almost expat-free zone where I saw national organisations fight to protect farmers from land grabs. The efforts were imperfect but sincere, and they showed me that a different mode is possible. Later, working remotely for a UN agency, the contrast was sharp: the further from the field, the more the system revolved around itself. Meanwhile, the protection that actually reaches villages was being done by civil society organisations.
Talking about localisation while not funding or trusting national actors is the central dishonesty this piece names. Myanmar civil society is asking for concrete things:
multi-year, flexible funding that reaches them directly;
real seats where priorities are set, not consultations after the fact;
genuine risk-sharing, instead of pushing security, legal and fiduciary risk downwards;
transparency about where decisions are made and where money flows.
In Myanmar, solidarity must not be co-opted by a military now dressed as a civilian government, nor consumed by the institutions delivering it.
Myanmar’s civil society researchers put it plainly: real partnership is not an optional extra of development; democracy depends on it. Without it, Myanmar’s civil society will remain implementers in a system that needs them as strategists and as the voice of the people it claims to serve. There is only one useful strategy forward is to support national actors: make international ones accountable, and use them only when necessary. The door of the VIP room has to be opened from the inside.
Source: ‘We’ are the silo: What the aid system owes Myanmar’s civil society, and what real solidarity would look like by Jose Arraiza
José María Arraiza is an independent consultant and photojournalist with over 25 years of experience in UN missions and humanitarian work, focused on housing, land and property rights, digital identity and civil society support. He supports Myanmar civil society organisations pro bono. Photos: José Maria Arraiza
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