Moments that Matter

Joachim Ramakers
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Moments that Matter is a series of short conversations about moments when experienced humanitarian, development and peacebuilding professionals realised that something they trusted — a strategy, a system, a belief — no longer fully held. In humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding work, we operate within carefully designed strategies, mandates, policies, and institutional responsibilities. These frameworks provide direction, structure, and accountability. They are necessary. They are often sincerely held. But they rest on assumptions. About how systems function. About what people need. About how change happens and what we believe our actions will lead to. And sometimes even about the core values held by others involved. Most of the time, these assumptions guide us well. Until a moment comes when we realise they no longer fully hold. What then? In these moments, continuing as before is often the easiest option. It is rarely the most honest one. The ability to recognise such moments — and to recalibrate without certainty — may be one of the most demanding aspects of responsible leadership. Each episode focuses on one such moment. Guests reflect not on achievements, but on disruption. Not on success stories, but on realisations that changed how they understood what acting responsibly required. These are conversations about responsibility, doubt, legitimacy, power, listening, and course correction in complex environments where foreign aid, project management, and institutional action depend on assumptions that must sometimes be questioned. Episodes are intentionally short, around 15 minutes, and designed for attentive listening. This series is for those who believe that leadership in these sectors is not only about delivering results, but about recognising when the way we see no longer holds — and understanding that credibility is not asserted through authority, but rebuilt through attention.

  1. 2d ago

    When saving lives is not enough - With Reshma Azmi

    After years working across some of the world’s most fragile humanitarian contexts, including Myanmar during the military coup, Afghanistan during the regime change, Yemen during active conflict, and now South Sudan as Country Director for Plan International, Reshma had become deeply accustomed to the logic of emergency response. Move fast. Deliver. Save lives. Food distributions. Water trucking. Emergency shelter. Targets. Timelines. Reporting cycles. The assumption was clear: if the aid arrived quickly enough, the response was succeeding. Then, during a conversation with a crisis-affected community, something shifted. People were asking what would happen after the food had arrived. Where would they get water once the trucks stopped coming? Who would repair the shelters when they began leaking? What would happen when the food ran out? For Reshma, these questions landed “like a mirror.” The issue was not the absence of humanitarian action. The issue was the assumptions embedded within it. Aid was being treated as a series of isolated deliverables, while communities were experiencing crisis as a continuous survival system. Food, water, shelter, safety, trust, dignity, and relationships could not be separated so neatly. What changed for Reshma was not her commitment to emergency response, but her understanding of what responsible response requires. Speed still mattered. Lives still had to be saved. But she realised that speed without listening could push organisations rapidly in the wrong direction. The deeper problem was not operational. It was relational. Communities were too often consulted after plans had already been designed. Engagement existed, but frequently as formality rather than as a core operational discipline. Humanitarian actors arrived with expertise, funding, frameworks, and urgency—but without sufficiently grounding those interventions in the lived reality of people navigating crisis day after day. Reshma began to rethink not only programme design, but leadership itself. Listening became non-negotiable from the earliest stages of response. Adaptation was no longer viewed as an occasional programme adjustment, but as a daily responsibility. Plans stopped being treated as fixed documents and became “living things” that had to evolve continuously as conditions changed. Most importantly, communities stopped being viewed primarily as beneficiaries or programme participants. They became partners in understanding reality. This changed how Reshma measures impact. The question is no longer only how many lives were saved, but whether people were helped in ways that allowed them to feel human again—with dignity, agency, and trust intact. Her moment points to a recurring tension within humanitarian work itself. In high-pressure environments, organisations are pushed toward speed, scale, visibility, and measurable outputs. Yet the very urgency of crisis can also create conditions where listening becomes superficial and assumptions go unchallenged. For Reshma, responsible humanitarian action means resisting that drift. Community engagement, she argues, cannot remain ceremonial. It must become operational. Not an additional activity, but part of the infrastructure of response itself. What ultimately shifted was her understanding of impact. Impact is not something organisations deliver from the outside. It is something they earn—through listening early, adapting continuously, and remaining accountable to the people living through the crisis long after the distributions end.

    25 min

  2. May 28

    When development becomes truly locally led - With Peter Batchelor

    Peter Batchelor’s moment takes place in Iraq in 2013, during one of the most volatile periods in the country’s recent history. Peter is a South African development practitioner with more than 30 years of experience working with the United Nations, governments, NGOs, and academia. He has led UN teams at headquarters level in Geneva and New York and in field settings across the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and the Caucasus. He is currently an Associate Fellow with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and previously served as an economic adviser to the Mandela government in South Africa. As UNDP Country Director in Iraq, Peter was working in a context where the international community remained largely confined to Baghdad’s Green Zone under constant security threat. Yet it was in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, that he encountered a model of development cooperation that would stay with him for the rest of his career. Together with the Kurdistan Regional Government and Minister of Planning Dr. Ali Sindi, Peter helped establish a joint UN–government trust fund. The arrangement was simple but unusual. The regional government provided the financial resources and defined its own development priorities. The role of the United Nations was not to lead implementation, but to accompany the process through technical expertise, international experience, and capacity building. What made the moment significant for Peter was not the mechanism itself, but the shift in ownership it created. Development priorities were no longer shaped primarily by donor agendas or externally driven project logic. The regional government was firmly in the driving seat—from identifying priorities to financing, implementation, and monitoring. International actors were there to support, not direct. Looking back across decades in development work, Peter describes this as one of the clearest examples of genuinely locally led development that he experienced. What changed for him was his understanding of the conditions under which it becomes credible. The decisive factor, he explains, was ultimately something deeply human: trust, relationships, and mutual respect. Difficult conversations about priorities, corruption, inclusiveness, costs, and technical quality were possible because the relationship itself was credible. This also shaped how expertise was used. Rather than replacing local knowledge, international consultants worked alongside local counterparts in a process of accompaniment and capacity building. Expertise became collaborative rather than extractive. Peter’s moment reveals a tension that runs through much of humanitarian and development work. International actors often speak about local ownership, yet funding structures, visibility demands, and project control frequently remain external. In Kurdistan, that assumption no longer held. What emerged instead was a different understanding of partnership: one in which local actors define the direction, and international organisations contribute by listening carefully, accompanying responsibly, and strengthening capacities without displacing ownership. For Peter, the lesson remains highly relevant in today’s changing aid environment. His conclusion is strikingly simple: “Listen, listen, listen.”

    14 min

  3. May 3

    When listening shifts what we ask for - With Marina Navarro

    Marina Navarro’s moment does not centre on a single event, but on a pattern that repeated itself across her career. With over two decades of experience in development and human rights, Marina Navarro has held leadership roles across the United Nations and civil society, including leading Amnesty International Perú, coordinating the UN Millennium Campaign in Spain and working with organisations such as Peace Brigades International Colombia and InteRed. She has also volunteered and worked with grassroots organisations in Colombia, Peru and Spain. The first moment took place early on, when she was working with a grassroots organisation of working children in Colombia. At a public hearing, an eleven-year-old girl named Angie stood up and addressed the room. Adults were debating policies to eliminate child labour. Angie interrupted them with a simple question: if she stopped working, who would support her family? What struck Marina was not only what Angie said, but what it revealed. Decisions were being made about children without listening to them. The policies, though well-intentioned, were based on assumptions that did not hold in the reality those children lived. Years later, in a very different context in Peru, Marina encountered a similar moment. Meeting with families who had lost relatives during protests, she spoke with Señora Celia, a Quechua-speaking mother whose son had been killed. Amnesty International came with proposals that felt responsible and achievable: reparations, public apologies, institutional recognition. Señora Celia rejected them. She did not want charity. She did not want apologies. She wanted justice. She wanted those responsible to be held accountable. Again, the gap became visible. What institutions considered reasonable did not match what those affected experienced as right. Across both moments, the assumption that organisations know what should be done quietly collapsed. What followed was not a better technical solution, but a shift in understanding. Listening was no longer a step in the process. It became the basis for defining the problem itself. In Marina’s work, this has shaped how campaigns are designed and led. Right holders are not only consulted, but involved in defining messages, priorities, and demands. External expertise still plays a role, but it is no longer treated as the primary source of knowledge. The most relevant knowledge is held by those who live the reality the intervention seeks to change. Her moment points to a recurring tension in humanitarian and development work. Interventions are often built on assumptions about what people need, what is feasible, and what constitutes a reasonable outcome. But when those assumptions are not grounded in lived experience, even well-designed actions can miss their mark. Listening, in this sense, is not about inclusion alone. It is about alignment. When people are not heard, we risk solving the wrong problem. When they are, the terms of action change. Marina’s moment shows that responsible leadership begins not with deciding what is possible, but with understanding what matters to those affected, even when it challenges what institutions are prepared to offer.

    11 min

  4. Apr 18 ·  Bonus

    When patterns begin to emerge - Season 1 Wrap-Up

    This episode marks the close of the first season of Moments that Matter. What began as a simple idea—to capture the key moments that shaped experienced practitioners—gradually revealed something deeper. Across ten interviews, a pattern started to emerge. Each story pointed to a moment when something long relied upon no longer fully held. An assumption broke down. A way of seeing no longer made sense. And in that moment, understanding shifted. In this solo episode, Joachim reflects on that journey. Joachim Ramakers has over two decades of experience in humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding contexts, working with organisations such as the United Nations Development Programme and the Netherlands Red Cross. His work has focused on crisis prevention, early recovery, and strengthening the quality and credibility of programmes in complex environments. Looking back across the interviews, he introduces a working definition: A moment that matters is a moment when an assumption breaks down and forces a rethink of how to act. This insight became more than a reflection tool. It evolved into a practical question: If these moments reveal deep insight from experienced practitioners, what might we learn by asking similar questions to the people our work is meant to serve? This question led to the idea of Responsible Recalibration. Projects are built on assumptions about what creates change. But when those assumptions meet lived experience, they do not always hold. Responsible Recalibration offers a structured way to listen, compare, and adjust—grounding decisions in reality and returning to communities to validate what has been understood. In this episode, Joachim reflects on how this approach could: Strengthen alignment between projects and lived realityImprove the credibility of interventionsBuild trust through visible responsivenessGive communities a meaningful role in shaping change The next step is a pilot in Sudan, exploring whether this way of listening can move from reflection to practice. What started as a series of conversations may become something more: a different way of understanding, and acting, when what we know no longer holds.

    7 min

  5. Apr 5

    When neutrality and distance stop holding - with Marie-Odile Zanders

    Marie-Odile Zanders: When neutrality and distance stop holding Marie-Odile’s moment did not come from a programme decision or a leadership role, but from living through violence as a minority in a place she had come to see as home. While working in Gujarat, India, she experienced the inter-communal violence of 2002 at close range. What changed her perspective was not only the scale of the violence, but the lived experience of fear, misinformation, and exclusion. For the first time, she became acutely aware of what it means to be visibly outside the dominant groups in a deeply polarised context. This was not an abstract insight. It was a question of personal safety. She describes a moment where she seriously considered whether she needed a weapon to protect herself, and then realised that leaving the country was the only real option available to her. That realisation exposed an assumption she had previously carried without questioning it: that one can remain professionally committed, analytically neutral, and personally insulated at the same time. The violence made clear that this distance was fragile and unevenly distributed. As a European professional, she had an exit option. Many of the people she worked with did not. What followed was not a new theory, but a shift in how she understood inclusion, safety, and responsibility. Concepts she had known intellectually took on a different weight once experienced bodily and emotionally. Inclusion was no longer only about access to services or participation in programmes. It became about what it means to live without a guaranteed way out, and how profoundly that shapes people’s choices, risks, and vulnerabilities. This moment redirected her professional focus. Housing, safety, and inclusion became central, not as technical domains, but as conditions that enable people to live without constant fear or exclusion. Her later work on housing finance and inclusion reflects this recalibration. The emphasis is less on solutions designed at a distance, and more on addressing the structural conditions that make some lives inherently more precarious than others. Marie-Odile’s moment illustrates how assumptions about neutrality, privilege, and professional distance can quietly guide action until they no longer hold. When those assumptions fall away, what changes is not certainty about what to do next, but a clearer sense of what it would mean to act in ways that are credible and right to those who live with the consequences.

    9 min

  6. Mar 22

    When a Solution Does Not Yet Exist - With Besim Nebiu

    Besim Nebiu – When a Solution Does Not Yet Exist Besim Nebiu had been working on housing renovation projects for years. Like many in the sector, he was used to operating through proposals, technical standards, and policy language. When considering the renovation of ageing apartment blocks in Skopje, the logic was clear: improve insulation, increase energy efficiency, reduce consumption and costs over time. These were sound solutions, supported by data and funding. The moment that changed how he thought about this work occurred during a routine attempt to engage residents. Rather than working through a municipality or intermediary organisation, Besim decided to identify a local leader by speaking directly with tenants. He began ringing doorbells in several similar apartment blocks built in the 1950s. His initial conversations followed the familiar script: façade renovation, insulation improvements, energy efficiency gains. People were polite but unconvinced. The project did not resonate in the way he had expected. At one apartment, an elderly woman opened the door. Instead of continuing with the technical explanation, Besim asked whether her apartment was warm enough in winter. She explained that she could afford to heat only one room, as her monthly electricity budget was fixed and limited. The rest of the apartment remained unheated. That exchange reframed the problem. The issue was no longer energy efficiency as an abstract objective, but whether someone could live comfortably in their own home. When Besim described the renovation in terms of enabling her to heat two rooms instead of one, without increasing her energy bill, the proposal became immediately understandable. She recognised what was being offered and why it mattered. She subsequently spoke with her neighbours, helped organise the building, and played a central role in moving the project forward. What changed in that moment was not the technical solution itself, but the way it was understood. The project had been technically viable before, but it had not yet existed in terms that residents could recognise as relevant to their lives. For Besim, this experience highlighted a gap he had previously taken for granted: that a well-designed solution would be self-evident. He began to see that if people do not recognise themselves in the way a solution is described, the solution does not yet exist in practice — regardless of its technical merits. This insight influenced his subsequent work. He became more attentive to how problems were framed, whose language was used, and where legitimacy actually emerged. He also observed that leadership in such processes did not necessarily come from formal authority or expertise, but from those able to translate solutions into terms grounded in lived reality. Action remained possible after this realisation. But it required a different approach: one that treated understanding not as a given outcome of analysis, but as something that had to be established through language, recognition, and trust. Credibility, he learned, was not something to be assumed — it had to be built in terms that made sense to the people who would live with the consequences.

    14 min

  7. Mar 7

    When skills are not enough - With Enock Nsubuga

    Enock’s moment does not arrive as a single dramatic event, but as a growing unease with something he initially took for granted. Enock Nsubuga is Partnerships Coordinator at MasterPeace Uganda and Co-founder of Job Launchpad Uganda. He supports unemployed and underemployed youth with practical skills, mentorship, and career pathways. His work focuses on bridging the gap between learning and earning through scalable solutions. He is passionate about empowering young people to achieve financial stability and create impact. Early in his work with MasterPeace Uganda, Enock believed that youth unemployment could be addressed primarily through training. If young people were equipped with the right skills, employability would follow. This assumption was reinforced by funding structures, programme designs, and widely accepted development logic. Skills were the answer. Training was the intervention. The moment that changed his perspective came after delivering high-quality training and then watching what happened next. Nothing. Young people completed programmes, gained certificates, and still remained excluded from work. What emerged was what Enock describes as the “then what?” gap. The problem was not a lack of effort, motivation, or ability on the part of participants. It was that the pathway assumed by the programme did not exist in their lived reality. This was not simply an implementation flaw. It was a deeper realisation that employability could not be reduced to individual readiness. Access, networks, confidence, guidance, and real opportunities mattered just as much. Most importantly, Enock recognised that young people themselves already understood this. They knew what was missing, because they were living it. What shifted was Enock’s understanding of responsibility. Helping no longer meant preparing young people to fit an abstract labour market. It meant recognising how exclusion actually operates, and adjusting the intervention accordingly. Credible action required staying with the problem after training ended, rather than assuming that skills alone would carry people forward. This insight led to the creation of the Job Launchpad. Not as a technical innovation, but as a response to a failed assumption. The platform was designed to do what previous programmes implicitly assumed would happen on their own: connect people to real opportunities, provide guidance, build confidence through proximity to work, and make transitions visible and supported. What makes Enock’s moment distinctive is that legitimacy does not come from expertise or distance, but from shared experience. He speaks the language of the young people he works with because he has navigated the same uncertainty. Like the elderly woman in Besim’s story, credibility emerges not from authority, but from recognition. Enock’s moment shows that acting responsibly sometimes means accepting that a well-intended solution does not exist yet. Understanding changes not what one wants to do, but what it means to help in a way that remains believable to those who must live with the outcome.

    12 min

  8. Feb 27

    When listening itself carries risk - With Philippe Stoll

    Philippe’s moment begins with a sense of possibility. Philippe Stoll is an independent expert working at the intersection of technology and war, focusing on harmful information. Until January 2026, he served as Techplomacy and Conflict expert at the International Committee of the Red Cross, engaging with governments, academia, humanitarian organisations and the tech sector to better protect conflict affected people from the impacts of AI and cyber warfare. In the early 2010s, discussions around accountability to affected populations were gaining momentum. At the same time, social media platforms were spreading beyond the West. For Philippe and others working on accountability, this convergence felt promising. Technology appeared to offer a way to rebalance power, to create more direct forms of engagement, and to give people affected by conflict and crisis a stronger voice. The idea was simple and compelling. If people could speak more directly to humanitarian organisations, programmes would become more responsive. Listening would become easier. Participation would increase. What Philippe and his colleagues encountered, however, was that listening was not a neutral act. As engagement through digital platforms expanded, so did the risks that came with it. People were being asked to speak in spaces they did not control, through technologies they did not own, and in contexts where the consequences of being visible were unevenly distributed. Issues of privacy, data protection, surveillance, and unintended exposure came into view, often faster than humanitarian organisations were equipped to understand them. The shift for Philippe came when it became clear that good intentions were not enough. Creating channels for participation without understanding the full chain of consequences could place people at risk, even when the aim was inclusion and accountability. Listening, in this context, was not simply about openness or responsiveness. It required a deeper understanding of how data moves, how information can be used, and how vulnerability changes the meaning of consent. What felt empowering from a distance could feel coercive or dangerous on the ground. This realisation changed how Philippe approached technology in humanitarian action. Rather than asking how quickly new tools could be deployed, the question became whether their risks were understood well enough to justify their use at all. Efficiency and innovation no longer stood on their own. They had to be weighed against severity of harm, likelihood of misuse, and the asymmetry of power between institutions and the people they serve. In response, Philippe helped initiate work that brought technologists, ethicists, legal experts, and humanitarian practitioners into the same conversation. Policies such as Do No Digital Harm and later the ICRC’s AI framework emerged from this approach, not as abstract principles, but as attempts to slow down decision making in situations where speed itself could create harm. Philippe’s moment is not about rejecting technology or participation. It is about recognising that accountability cannot be reduced to mechanisms for listening. Without understanding the consequences of being heard, listening can become another way of shifting risk onto those least able to absorb it. In this sense, understanding did not make decisions easier. It made them heavier. It changed what responsible action looks like when innovation, speed, and inclusion collide with the realities of power and vulnerability.

    13 min
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About

Moments that Matter is a series of short conversations about moments when experienced humanitarian, development and peacebuilding professionals realised that something they trusted — a strategy, a system, a belief — no longer fully held. In humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding work, we operate within carefully designed strategies, mandates, policies, and institutional responsibilities. These frameworks provide direction, structure, and accountability. They are necessary. They are often sincerely held. But they rest on assumptions. About how systems function. About what people need. About how change happens and what we believe our actions will lead to. And sometimes even about the core values held by others involved. Most of the time, these assumptions guide us well. Until a moment comes when we realise they no longer fully hold. What then? In these moments, continuing as before is often the easiest option. It is rarely the most honest one. The ability to recognise such moments — and to recalibrate without certainty — may be one of the most demanding aspects of responsible leadership. Each episode focuses on one such moment. Guests reflect not on achievements, but on disruption. Not on success stories, but on realisations that changed how they understood what acting responsibly required. These are conversations about responsibility, doubt, legitimacy, power, listening, and course correction in complex environments where foreign aid, project management, and institutional action depend on assumptions that must sometimes be questioned. Episodes are intentionally short, around 15 minutes, and designed for attentive listening. This series is for those who believe that leadership in these sectors is not only about delivering results, but about recognising when the way we see no longer holds — and understanding that credibility is not asserted through authority, but rebuilt through attention.

Information

  • Creator
    Joachim Ramakers
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Joachim Ramakers
  • Show Website
    Moments that Matter