OXFAM: Prioritizing Partnerships: Modelling an alternative international humanitarian response in the Ukraine crisis

The February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation caused the largest humanitarian crisis in Europe since the Second World War. With no existing presence in the region and recognizing the strong civil society that had already begun responding to the needs of affected communities, Oxfam decided to implement a partner-led humanitarian response model. This prioritized partnerships with local and national actors, especially women’s rights organizations (WROs), those working with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, queer, intersex and asexual people (LGBTQIA+) and Roma communities, and organizations focused on the needs of some of the most marginalized communities.

By June 2022, four months after the invasion, Oxfam had established 28 partnerships across Ukraine, Poland, Romania and Moldova. The decision to implement a humanitarian response that prioritizes support for local partners is aligned with Oxfam’s commitments to strengthen civil society and local humanitarian leadership and feminist principles, all of which are premised on addressing power inequalities in the humanitarian system.

In 2023, Oxfam commissioned a learning review of partnership approaches in Oxfam’s Ukraine response to gain a comprehensive understanding and assess the experiences of its partners across the four countries. The review was designed to document achievements, challenges and changes made throughout the response, focusing on the partner-led approach and how this was implemented, accountability mechanisms, areas of risk, organizational learning and Oxfam’s strategic initiatives on local humanitarian leadership.

The results, outlined in this report, provide insights into not only lessons learned for Oxfam’s partnership approaches in the humanitarian response in Ukraine, but also for the wider humanitarian community and its collective commitments to strengthening local humanitarian leadership in response to the crisis.

The findings should encourage open, shared learning on partnership approaches for all actors in the Ukraine crisis response in order to inform collective progress on addressing harmful power dynamics and strengthened local leadership in Ukraine and the wider region. The report can also contribute to wider learning on progress towards localization commitments globally.