Key Visual for Centre for Humanitarian Action Conference

For the Key Visual for the Centre for Humanitarian Action Annual Conference 2023, titled: ‘Tackling power imbalances in humanitarian action - with technology and locally led management?’, it was essential that the outcome of the Key Visual made ‘equitable partnership’ and ‘power imbalances’ between the individual actors in humanitarian aid quickly visible. In humanitarian work, when trying to convey the importance and urgency of a project, effective communication of key visuals is essential to make projects understood and presented to a diverse audience, including policymakers, donors, beneficiaries, and fellow humanitarians. CHA’s conference this year aimed to emphasize and question how tackling power imbalances in humanitarian action with technology and locally-led management, in equitable partnership. That means that everyone had the same power and voice, and the inflection point of the conference was stating how power imbalances can be tackled with local management and data sovereignty, with the affected people leading the way out of the situation. It was important that the 4 actors in humanitarian action were represented. In the middle leading the way are the Affected People. To their right, local NGOs. To the left of the Affected people, International NGOs and Donors above. Parting from the power imbalance statement and understanding that the intention and work are to achieve greater balance, we came to the notion of equity as a concept to be represented with symmetry or an attempt at an exact correspondence between different things. In turn, the Key Visual Illustration we developed highlighted different digitalization and management icons and attributes in the stream that lead up to and make these systems of interactions and reflect on, whether can digital solutions not replicate the imbalances, and introduce new ways.