114. The Humanitarian Ape

This weeks guest is Gareth Owen OBE — Former Humanitarian Director at Save the Children UK (2007-2024). Gareth spent over three decades in the humanitarian sector, beginning his career in Somalia in 1993. He co-founded the START Network and served as Chair of the Humanitarian Leadership Academy. Awarded an OBE in 2013 for services to emergency crisis response abroad and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath.

The End of an Era The conversation explores what Gareth calls the "post-industrial phase" of humanitarianism—a sector that expanded dramatically in the first decades of the 21st century (peaking at $43 billion in 2022) and is now in managed decline. The discussion traces how the business model of big INGOs began failing years before the 2025 funding crisis, with the UK aid budget cuts from 0.7% to 0.3% forcing organizations to retool their approaches.

Loss of the Humanitarian Soul A central theme is the perceived loss of what Gareth calls the "humanitarian soul"—the culture, spirit, and sense of something essential being enacted in a courageous and ethical way. External trauma psychologists visiting Save the Children asked "where's the humanitarian soul?" in corporate headquarters, highlighting how institutional survival has often displaced the cause itself.

First We Lost Our Soul, Then We Lost the Money The conversation challenges the narrative that 2025's funding cuts created the crisis. Instead, it argues that institutional drift, creeping managerialism, and the "tyranny of being busy" had already hollowed out the sector's capacity for deep thought, debate, and disagreement long before the financial reckoning.

Being Human in the Age of AI Referencing the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, Gareth notes that more than half of the top 10 core skills needed for the future are about humanness: resilience, flexibility, leadership, creative thinking, empathy, active listening, and curiosity. In a world dominated by AI, "humans are going to have to be brilliant at being human again."

1. Gareth Owen on Devex
2. Previous Trumanitarian episode with Gareth (Episode 51 - "Panopticon")
3. Substack: The Humanitarian Ape

Books by Gareth Owen

1. When the Music's Over: Intervention, Aid and Somalia(2022) —Repeater Books
2. Unhealed Wounds: Trauma, Aid and Angola— forthcoming (28 March 2025)
3. Chapter inAmidst the Debris: Humanitarianism and the End of Liberal Order

Topics Discussed

1. The Humanitarian Society— A new alumni-style gathering space for sense-making about the state of humanitarianism, launching in early 2025
2. The Alameda Institute— A research institute based out of Brazil, incubated by Save the Children UK, focused on new knowledge production and connecting with social movements globally
3. Human-Centered Leadership Project— A sense-making initiative on restoring genuine human connection in leadership across sector.

People Mentioned

1. Tom Fletcher— UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (appointed November 2024)
2. Rutger Bregman— Dutch historian, author ofMoral Ambitionand presenter of the2025 BBC Reith Lectures: "Moral Revolution"
3. William Shoki— South African political thinker, editor atAfrica Is a Country
4. Viktor Frankl— Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, author ofMan's Search for Meaning
5. Adelina Kamal— Indonesian humanitarian thinker and practitioner with expertise on Myanmar
6. Tom Byrnes— Author ofTom's Aid Dispatchesnewsletter on LinkedIn