More than a decade into Yemen’s civil war, humanitarian actors work across divided administrative, banking, and regulatory systems, with regional tensions adding further risk. This report examines how funding flows from donors through international and local intermediaries to community-level actors, and what would need to change for that system to better support locally led action.
Drawing on research with large Yemeni intermediaries, international intermediaries, and their downstream partners, the study identified comparative advantages of different intermediary types and examined commonly raised themes, including around capacity strengthening and local decision making. Capacity strengthening is seen a strength of both local and international actors, but project-specific training tends to be over-resourced while institutional strengthening is rarely funded on its own. Downstream partners judged relationships less by grant size or efficiency than by whether they were genuinely listened to and treated as sources of knowledge rather than delivery channels.
The report offers recommendations for donors and for international and local intermediaries on long-term flexible funding, institutional strengthening, and direct communication between donors and Yemeni organizations, among other suggested actions. This study is part of The Share Trust’s series of work on intermediary models for locally led action.
