In this blog, Gabriela Villacis Izquierdo (Educator and Academic Researcher), Swarna Rajagopalan (Political Analyst, Educator and Constultant), Catalina Domínguez (Human Rights Lawyer and Gender Specialist), Mihir Bhatt (Director of AIDMI) and Khayal Trivedi (Project Lead, HOISA), discuss the outcome of the panel discussion held in July 2026 on what feminist approaches have to offer to humanitarian action. Organised by the Humanitarian Observatory Initiative of South Asia and EADI Gender...

We often talk about climate adaptation as if it is something designed elsewhere and delivered to people. Plans are written, models are built, and solutions are proposed. But there is a quiet problem in this approach: it assumes that those most affected are waiting to be told what to do. The recent HOISA roundtable on locally led visual methods challenged this assumption in a subtle but powerful way. It asked a simple question: what if adaptation begins not with plans, but with how people...

One of the recurring themes in HOISA's discussions on the use of emerging technology and artificial intelligence in the humanitarian sector has been the lack of complete and unbiased data sets. Regardless of the tool used, its effectiveness depends on the quality and availability of the information that supports it. This problem is more visible in humanitarian settings, where data is often incomplete, outdated, missing, or extremely hard to gather. In wake of further funding cuts in the...