The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global crisis. The response to this crisis must be equally unprecedented. In the past, the response to large-scale emergencies has typically been foreign-led, top-down and techno-centric. Today, however, airlines are grounding their flights, humanitarian organizations are grounding their staff, and companies are doing the same. The lockdown is global and national. This creates an unprecedented space for local leadership, agency and ingenuity. Local experts can use this new space to set the agenda and to insist more powerfully for greater ownership over humanitarian responses and development cooperation. They have the opportunity to take more power while international actors have the responsibility to cede this power.
We’ve created this page to document The Power of Local in response to COVID-19. It will feature how local leaders of Flying Labs in 25+ countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America are responding to the pandemic. This will show what local leadership, radical inclusion, equal opportunity and diversity look like during this pandemic. This page will also document how WeRobotics supports local leaders by enabling and accelerating knowledge exchange, technology transfer, new opportunities and South-to-South collaboration. WeRobotics is already providing these leaders with dedicated data protection guidelines, technical resources, internal microgrants and external grant opportunities in response to COVID-19.
