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.