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For Peter Kidi Utong, one of the new members elected to the CHS Alliance Board this year, holding one of the Board seats for people with lived experience of the aid system, representation on paper isn’t the same as influence in practice.

Good governance, he says, is only as real as the practice it produces: it’s not enough for commitments to be written on documents; they need to show up in how things actually work. He points to a recent government roadmap for refugee self-reliance in Kenya as an example of the gap: an ambitious plan, he says, but one that reads as though it was written to impress donors. Refugees still struggle to get the work permits and documentation it promises to unlock.

That same gap between policy and practice shapes how he sees participation across the sector. He wants organisations to put people with lived experience on their boards and panels, but insists it has to be genuine, not tokenistic: done because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s simply expected. He’s experienced the difference first-hand: invited to contribute his expertise to research and events, but critiqued when naming his rate for that expertise. There is an uncomfortable contradiction, he says, when organisations publicly insist participation matters but the resources don’t follow the same intent.

Too often, he says, engagement with people with lived experience happens at the very end of a process, or is confined to “technical working groups”, while access to advisory or decision-making structures is reserved for people deemed “experts”, as though living through a crisis weren’t a form of expertise in itself. He’s pushed back on this directly, including advocating for a refugee advisory structure to inform national planning processes, rather than being consulted only on their technical margins.

As a CHS Alliance Board member, he sees his role as making sure the Alliance doesn’t fall into the same pattern as the organisations it holds to account, asking questions that keep decisions grounded in what people affected by crisis are actually going through, rather than assumptions made on their behalf.

His biggest ask of the sector is a reversal in direction: instead of decisions flowing top-down and being handed to communities to implement, he wants to see them shaped from the ground up, with affected people as partners rather than subjects or mere “recipients of aid”.

Peter’s poem The Negotiation Table opens the Humanitarian Accountability Report 2026. Read it on page 2.