Feminist Knowledge in Humanitarian Action
Highlights from a conversation spotlighting the publication of two articles by FHN Women’s Rights Organisations members in the Humanitarian Practice Network’s latest edition of the Humanitarian Exchange Magazine. Speaking from the context of Kenya and Palestine, the authors challenge humanitarian actors to rethink who produces knowledge, whose expertise counts, and who holds the power to shape responses to crisis. Both articles make the same argument from very different contexts - the knowledge was never missing. It simply isn’t being recognised.
Watch Event Recording Below:
When a crisis unfolds, who gets to decide what is happening, what people need and what an effective response should look like? Whose evidence is trusted, whose expertise is overlooked, and who holds the power to turn knowledge into action?
For Women’s Rights Organisations (WROs) working through conflict, displacement and climate crises, these are not abstract questions. They shape how humanitarian responses are designed, whose priorities receive funding, and whether the realities of affected communities are reflected in the decisions that govern their lives.
WROs are not simply collecting stories from the frontlines or filling gaps in humanitarian data. They are analysing crises, producing evidence, developing responses and holding knowledge that humanitarian systems too often fail to recognise.
On the 13th of October 2026, the Feminist Humanitarian Network (FHN) and the Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN) convened Feminist Knowledge in Humanitarian Action, a conversation led by four women leaders and FHN WRO members highlighting the publication of two articles by the women leaders in the HPN’s humanitarian exchange magazine: issue 87, Local humanitarian action in a changing humanitarian architecture. Their experiences challenged a persistent practice in humanitarian action on knowledge and expertise coming from outside the communities most affected by crisis.
Led by Madina Yunus of Pastoralist Girls Initiative, Anila Noor of New Women Connectors, Ohaila Shomar of Sawa Organisation, and Majeda Saqqa of the Culture and Free Thought Association, the conversation explored how WROs produce knowledge from lived experience, interrogate dominant humanitarian narratives, and shape responses in contexts of displacement, climate change, conflict and genocide.
Their message was clear. The knowledge already exists. The problem is not an absence of local knowledge. It is a humanitarian system that too often fails to recognise it, resource it and share power with the people producing it to influence decisions and shape what happens next.
Kenya: taking the chair, the table and the pen
On the article by Anila Noor and Madina Yunus, titled From data to power: centring displaced women in climate and humanitarian decision-making which looks at how climate change, gender and displacement intersect for refugee women in Kenya. Anila described what changed when refugee women stopped being consulted and started leading.
““We took that chair, we took the table, and we took our pen to define what the problem is according to us... We showed there was always knowledge. What is missing is visibility and to acknowledge, this is a knowledge.””
She spoke about the process behind Kente Threads, an initiative bringing together refugee women-led organisations to generate data rooted in their lived experiences. For Anila, the work was about moving beyond consultation and reclaiming the authority to define problems, develop indicators and interpret evidence. Her reflection challenges a persistent assumption in humanitarian practice that communities experiencing crises lack the knowledge required to understand their circumstances, and that external actors must supply the expertise to interpret them.
The Kente Threads approach which is documented in the article, demonstrates something different. Refugee women already understand how climate pressures affect their households and communities, including how water scarcity can increase protection risks, how displacement compounds exposure to gender-based violence, and which groups are being left behind. With appropriate tools and support, women can document these realities, analyse their findings and use the evidence to advocate for change.
Madina Yunus of the Pastoralist Girls Initiative reinforced this point. Through community-led data collection and women-led safety and security audits in refugee and host communities, women and girls identify risks that conventional assessments may miss. They also help interpret findings and communicate priorities to humanitarian actors, service providers and community leaders. As Madina explained:
““Displaced women should not just simply be subjects of humanitarian data collection. They must also help shape the questions, interpret the evidence and influence the decisions that affect their lives.”
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The distinction matters. Collecting information about communities is not the same as producing knowledge with them. And inviting women to share their experiences does not automatically share influence with them over what happens next.
Madina offered a concrete example. In a project with the International Rescue Committee funded by Irish Aid, PGI trains women and girls from refugee and host communities as enumerators and has them take part in women-led safety and security audits. They identify risks that conventional assessments miss, such as water scarcity meaning longer, less safe journeys to collect water, and they interpret the findings and advocate for action.
Madina was careful not to overclaim. Community findings do not automatically change policy or resource allocation. The goal is to build systems where “women’s evidence is taken seriously,” decision-makers respond, and communities can see what follows. When women own the process, they can keep advocating long after a project budget ends.
Palestine: collective knowledge becomes a means of survival and response is built from within
On the article Beyond response: women leading humanitarian action in Palestine by Ohaila Shomar and Majeda Saqqa. Both authors reflect on their experiences documenting stories and doing life-saving work.
Majeda Saqqa reminded participants that Gaza is unlike other humanitarian contexts.
““I don’t see colors anymore in Gaza... We lost our workplaces, we lost our homes, we lost colleagues, we lost the sense of safety, but we didn’t go to the victimization side. Without formal structures, people sensed what we need to do, while emergency and preparedness plans proved very far away from reality. The response was strong, because it was locally led.””
She said this describing a situation in which, in her words, nothing is left, even as the world talks about ceasefire and lifting the blockade. She described how, in the first months after October 2023, while international actors debated what was happening, the people responding on the ground were local NGOs, with WROs at the front. For Majeda, the response demonstrated the importance of collective memory, experience and community-rooted knowledge. The lesson was not that planning or coordination are unnecessary. It was that plans developed at a distance cannot substitute for knowledge grounded in the realities of a crisis. Effective responses must be able to recognise, build on and adapt to the expertise already present within communities. WROs were at the forefront of this response, drawing on relationships, experience and collective responsibility to sustain essential services and support their communities.
Ohaila Shomar spoke of the strength of experience and of learning continuously in a context where emergency is a protracted condition. WROs, she said, learn from what worked and what didn’t and carry those lessons into the next crisis. She spoke on the approach Sawa took which is detailed in the article, to innovate response based on changing needs. Her message to the humanitarian system was direct:
““You should trust us, you should build on our experience and not start from scratch.””
Her words directly confronts humanitarian approaches that repeatedly arrive with external frameworks while overlooking the experience and knowledge accumulated by organisations working through prolonged emergencies.
The article on Palestine, and the discussion surrounding it, also raised difficult questions about how humanitarian stories are told. Majeda cautioned against narratives that focus exclusively on victimisation, but also against an uncritical celebration of resilience or steadfastness that can obscure the realities people are enduring. For her, documentation must remain honest about people's circumstances while protecting their dignity. Communities must have the opportunity to tell their own stories, in their own words, and determine how their experiences are represented. This is particularly important in a context where access to Gaza is severely constrained and Palestinian voices and accounts are essential to documenting realities on the ground.
Knowledge production is therefore not simply a technical exercise. It is also about narrative, dignity, political agency and the ability of people to represent their own experiences.
A feminist approach changes how humanitarian knowledge is produced and how action is taken
The discussion brought together several interconnected lessons for humanitarian practice.
Lived experience is expertise and leadership: Communities have knowledge. What they lack is visibility, recognition and a route to influence decisions. WROs are not simply channels through which external actors access communities or subjects of research. They are analysts, researchers, advocates and leaders with knowledge developed through years of responding to crisis. Affected communities must help shape the questions, interpret the evidence and influence the decisions that affect their lives.
Data alone does not create change: As Madina put it, “change happens when the people whose lives are represented by that data have the power to shape the decisions that follow.”
Community-led knowledge requires sustained investment: Training women, girls and gender-diverse persons as researchers and enumerators builds skills and advocacy capacity that outlast project timelines. And while training and participatory tools matter, they must be accompanied by resources, meaningful access to decision-making spaces and mechanisms that ensure community evidence informs action.
Don’t start from scratch: Local and women-led organisations have lived experience of crisis. We must collectively build on it.
Authorship is leadership: Writing about your own experience and providing analysis, rather than being asked only to provide information, is one way power shifts in knowledge production.
These lessons challenge humanitarian actors to move beyond treating locally led knowledge production as a supplementary activity. It must be part of how humanitarian programmes are designed, funded, implemented and evaluated.
Building knowledge and sharing power
The authors reflected on the importance of continuing to share experiences and strengthen connections across contexts, even when organisations are physically far apart. For them, documenting and publishing their experiences was itself a way of making their knowledge visible and building solidarity.
The publication of these two articles in the HPN exchange magazine is part of that effort. It holds space for WROs to document their work, articulate their analysis and contribute to wider debates about the future of humanitarian action.
But publication alone cannot shift the system. That requires humanitarian actors, donors and institutions to reconsider who sets the agenda, who controls resources, whose evidence is trusted and who has the authority to decide what happens next.
The question is no longer whether WROs have the knowledge to shape humanitarian action. It is whether the humanitarian system is willing to recognise that knowledge, share the power to produce it, and act on it.
A feminist approach to humanitarian knowledge production begins by listening differently. It must go further by changing who leads, who decides and who benefits from the knowledge being produced. The people closest to crisis must not simply be represented in humanitarian knowledge. They must have the power to shape it, use it and determine what comes next.
Read the articles and keep the conversation going:
From data to power: centring displaced women in climate and humanitarian decision-making
Beyond response: women leading humanitarian action in Palestine
Both articles along with others by local and national humanitarian organisations are available in the latest edition of the Humanitarian Exchange magazine, published by the Humanitarian Practice Network. Read them, share them with your networks, and share your own learning on the platforms where you are active.