Humanitarian systems have become more structured and coordinated over the past decade. Yet for many people affected by conflict, accessing available support remains complex and uneven. This article explores the “coordination paradox”: how improved coordination among organisations does not necessarily translate into accessible pathways for individuals.
Anna Kuznetsova is co-founder of ERIDA, an AI-powered, evidence-based platform for refugee integration in Switzerland. Drawing on experience across humanitarian and development contexts, she argues that addressing the navigation gap between available services and people’s ability to effectively find and access them is essential to ensuring that humanitarian systems remain both effective and impartial.
Over the past decade, humanitarian and development actors have made substantial progress in strengthening coordination in conflict-affected settings. Coordination mechanisms have improved information sharing, reduced duplication, and helped align interventions across actors. From an institutional perspective, these developments matter. Coordination mechanisms have become more structured, participation has broadened, and efforts to link humanitarian and development approaches have intensified.
Yet, one fundamental question remains insufficiently addressed: how people affected by conflict actually find and access the help that is available?
This question reveals a critical operational flaw. While coordination has improved internally, access to aid systems remains uneven. This creates what can be described as a “coordination paradox”: humanitarian systems can become better coordinated without becoming easier for the end-user to access and navigate.
The assessment that humanitarian coordination has improved over the past decade is drawn from both operational experience and empirical literature. Experientially, this maturation is evident in contexts such as the Ukraine response, where donor-led requirements have increasingly driven implementation away from single-agency silos toward integrated consortium models, facilitating dialogue and combining complementary expertise. Empirically, these operational observations are corroborated by broader longitudinal analyses. Most notably, ALNAP’s State of the Humanitarian System reports document a measurable, system-wide maturation of coordination mechanisms over time. Across the sector, institutional structures such as the cluster system have become increasingly formalised, while pooled funding instruments and coordinated financing mechanisms have expanded to align interventions.
These changes have contributed to more coherent programming. However, most coordination mechanisms are structurally designed around and for organisations. They aim to improve communication, alignment, and efficiency among operational actors. While this is necessary and appropriate from a governance perspective, far less attention is typically given to how individuals interact with the system. Consequently, coordination operates primarily within the system, rather than between the system and its users.
Recent policy discussions in humanitarian and development circles have increasingly highlighted a structural challenge: while significant effort and resources are mobilised, the effectiveness of interventions is often constrained by fragmentation across systems and actors. Even where coordination mechanisms exist, they may operate in parallel, shaped by institutional mandates, funding structures, and sectoral boundaries.
As a result, institutional support does not always translate into accessible and coherent outcomes for affected populations. Barriers to access are often linked to top-down programme design, limited integration of local actors, and insufficient adaptation to the realities in which people navigate services, including infrastructural and digital constraints.
Approaches such as localisation seek to strengthen the role of national and local actors, drawing on their contextual knowledge and proximity to affected communities. Yet, recent evaluations caution against viewing localisation as a panacea. Systemically, these efforts often stall because power is not fully shared: local actors carry more responsibility and risk, while strategic decision-making remains with international actors. Furthermore, at the community level, devolving power without strict accountability frameworks risks reinforcing pre-existing local power asymmetries. In practice, this can unintentionally empower local elites and dominant groups, while keeping the most vulnerable and structurally marginalised populations even further excluded from accessing support. Agencies also face challenges in prioritising those most in need, including pressure from local authorities or community actors to adjust targeting criteria and beneficiary lists. ALNAP’s survey findings indicate that 22% of affected people identify corruption as a major concern, including interference by local actors and diversion of aid, despite strengthened anti-corruption measures.
Despite the potential of localisation and other user-centred approaches to improve responsiveness and community engagement, they do not fully address the structural complexity of the broader humanitarian ecosystem. In situations where individuals must access specialised or multi-layered services — such as legal protection, asylum procedures, or healthcare systems — the challenge of navigating fragmented systems involving multiple institutions and service providers remains.
Enabling solutions, therefore, requires not only shifting resources and decision-making closer to affected populations, but also addressing the persistent gap between coordination at the system level and accessibility at the user level. This includes developing more coherent, user-oriented pathways that allow individuals to navigate complex systems effectively.
The navigation gap is not merely an operational friction — it has profound implications for core humanitarian principles, particularly impartiality. Humanitarian action is guided by the principle that assistance must be provided based on need, without discrimination. Yet in practice, access to assistance often depends entirely on a person’s ability to identify, understand, and navigate available services.
Where information is fragmented, those with stronger networks, better language skills, or greater familiarity with institutional systems are exponentially more likely to access support. Others — often the most vulnerable — may remain excluded, not because assistance does not exist, but because it is not made accessible to them. In this sense, a lack of navigability translates directly into unequal access, even within systems formally designed to be impartial.
This barrier directly undermines the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) foundational mandate to “leave no one behind.” When access is predicated on navigability rather than need, humanitarian systems inadvertently leave the most marginalised in the dark. Furthermore, this gap heavily intersects with the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. The 2025 UN Annual Report on WPS highlighted that women and girls are disproportionately impacted by compounding crises. Structural barriers — including the digital divide and restricted mobility — mean that when humanitarian entry points are fragmented, women face compounded obstacles in accessing life-saving services. Ensuring impartial access to assistance, therefore, is not only about allocating resources fairly, but also about guaranteeing that structurally marginalised populations can effectively find and access them.
The coordination paradox is not unique to a single context. Across humanitarian and displacement contexts, assistance landscapes are characterised by a multiplicity of actors and services, which reflecting strong support systems, can create significant complexity for users.
In Ukraine, for example, the volume of assistance produced a highly fragmented information environment. In one instance, more than forty separate hotlines operated in parallel, each linked to different organisations and sectors. For individuals seeking help, identifying the right entry point often required prior knowledge that many did not have.
Similar dynamics are observed elsewhere. Recent findings in Lebanon indicate that complex information systems have pushed communities to rely on informal networks and rumours to access aid, increasing risks of misinformation and exploitation. In the Central African Republic, research by Ground Truth Solutions showed that only 19% of affected households knew how to contact a humanitarian organisation to request assistance, pointing to persistent gaps in awareness and accessible communication pathways despite the presence of formal accountability mechanisms.
Crucially, this navigation gap persists even in highly resourced, stable environments. Information may be shared between organisations, but it is not always accessible in a user-oriented way. In developed asylum systems, such as Switzerland, newly arrived individuals must move through complex federal, cantonal, and local structures, thus frequently relying on informal networks or overburdened caseworkers to understand available services. Informal networks also play a key role in shaping access to information and understanding of support systems in contexts such as Austria and Belgium.
Beyond information and navigation challenges, another barrier to access lies in the way funding structures can shape organisational behaviour. Competitive grant processes may discourage deeper collaboration, as organisations seek to protect approaches that support future funding opportunities.
This dynamic has been observed in practice. In livelihood programmes, efforts to encourage voluntary sharing of effective methodologies through coordination platforms often proved difficult. In one case, expanding geographical coverage required a shift from single-partner implementation to a donor-mandated consortium, bringing together international and local actors under a shared funding structure. While this approach enabled broader reach, it also highlighted underlying constraints: coordination does not always emerge organically, and scaling effective solutions can be limited by structural incentives within the system.
Taken together, these examples suggest that the challenge is systemic rather than context-specific: coordination without navigability risks limiting equitable access for those most in need.
Why do individuals struggle to access support within systems that are often well-funded and increasingly coordinated? The barriers emerge across several interconnected dimensions.
One challenge lies in institutional fragmentation. Services are organised across multiple agencies, and individuals may need to engage with different actors for housing, language training, or legal protection. While these services share common objectives, they do not always function as a coherent system from the user’s perspective.
A second dimension relates to data fragmentation. Although coordination may take place at strategic levels, operational data systems are rarely integrated. As a result, individuals often need to repeatedly provide the same information to different actors, which can create frustration and discourage continued engagement.
Finally, information asymmetry remains a persistent barrier. Information about services is distributed across multiple organisations and channels. Although support may be available, it is not always visible or accessible in ways that align with how people seek and understand information.
Addressing this gap requires recognising navigation as a distinct function within humanitarian systems. While coordination enables organisations to work together, navigation is what enables individuals to access the services that exist.
There is growing recognition that improving access requires moving beyond static information tools towards more user-centred approaches. Emerging models increasingly focus on the interface between individuals and complex service ecosystems, for example by creating more unified entry points that allow people to describe their needs and receive tailored guidance on available support.
At the same time, addressing fragmentation requires greater interoperability and more effective use of data. This includes rethinking data not only as a tool for reporting and accountability, but also as a means to improve real-time accessibility and user experience.
Importantly, such approaches are not intended to replace human interaction, which remains essential in many aspects of humanitarian response. Rather, by reducing administrative barriers and simplifying access pathways, they can support more efficient use of resources while strengthening individuals’ ability to engage with complex systems.
Humanitarian coordination has improved significantly over the past decade. However, stronger coordination among organisations does not automatically ensure that people affected by conflict can access the assistance available to them.
The challenge ahead is to ensure that systems are not only well organised internally, but also navigable for those who rely on them. This is not only a matter of efficiency, but of principle: without accessible pathways to assistance, even well-coordinated systems risk undermining impartiality and leaving some of the most vulnerable behind.
This challenge is becoming more acute as humanitarian systems face increasing pressure — from large-scale crises to capacity constraints in asylum contexts. As direct, individualised support becomes harder to sustain, the responsibility for navigating complex systems increasingly shifts onto affected individuals. Strengthening how people access and move through these systems therefore requires more coherent, user-oriented pathways and approaches that recognise navigation itself as a core function of humanitarian response. Doing so is essential to ensuring that humanitarian action remains both effective and equitable.
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