Rethinking Risk Management in the Humanitarian and Development Sector

A conversation with Sabrina Segal, Director of The Risk Collaborative, on what risk actually is once you stop treating it as compliance. Sabrina, Kim Kucinskas, Thomas Jepson-Lay, and Ali Al Mokdad work through risk as the effect of uncertainty on objectives, which means threats and opportunities, not a register of bad things that gets dusted off once a quarter for the trustees. The conversation moves from why so much of the sector still does risk as a tick-box exercise, to risk sharing instead of risk transfer (a woven rope, not a chain where the weakest, least-resourced link is the one expected to break), to using the language of risk as a Trojan horse to get localization and power-balancing into the rooms where funders actually sit. It closes on what Ali Al Mokdad calls the generational fight: clearing out the outdated governance and process so the sector can focus on the problems that matter.