Written evidence submitted by Dr Youngmi Kim, University of Edinburgh, Mr Aung Ko Ko and Ms Naw Grace Thalay Pay, Mosaic Myanmar, and Dr Matteo Fumagalli, University of St Andrews

Introduction

1. This submission addresses the UK Parliament’s call for evidence related to the future of UK aid and development assistance. Our submission focuses on the shift from international intervention to local provision and specifically on ways in which the UK’s approach can be made sufficiently flexible to respond to what its development partners need the most. in this contribution we illustrate our point with reference to the response to the March 2025 earthquake, although our points are more widely applicable, to the country and the borderlands, and beyond.

2. This evidence is submitted by Dr Youngmi Kim, Mr Aung Ko Ko, Ms Naw Grace Thalay Pay and Dr Matteo Fumagalli. Dr Kim is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has led participatory arts initiatives with artists and activists from Myanmar, fostering positive intercommunal and cross-faith relations in Yangon and the Thailand-Myanmar borderlands. Mr Aung Ko Ko is the founding Executive Director of Mosaic Myanmar, an NGO based in Yangon, Myanmar. He has extensive experience in promoting peacebuilding, social cohesion and civic inclusion. Naw Grace is a programme assistant of Mosaic Myanmar. Her research focuses on migration, displacement, and issues of unofficial minorities in Myanmar. Dr Fumagalli is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews specialising in conflict transformation, humanitarian aid and development assistance in Asia. Together, the four authors have recently completed the project ‘How Inclusive is the Revolution in Myanmar?’, supported by the Scottish Council on Global Affairs.

Executive summary

1. The changing nature of warfare in the opening decades of the 21st century, away from inter-state to internationalised intra-state wars has made current approaches to aid and development assistance obsolete. Existing approaches both fail to capture the complexities and intersecting dimensions of current crises and use categories and tools no longer adequate, if they ever were, to capture evolving dynamics on the ground.

2. Among so many of the contexts where the UK provides aid and development assistance, the state has become the problem, not the partner and conduit to the solution. In Myanmar the state has fragmented, and different territories have distinct governance arrangements, some consolidated over decades and with state-like institutions (health, education, justice, public administration).

3. Localising aid and ‘making aid work better’ means recognising these realities on the ground. There is strong capacity in the form of both hard and soft infrastructure in key Myanmar borderlands, though this is unevenly present across the borderlands depending, in part, on the extent to which Myanmar’s neighbours are willing to allow cross-border aid operations to function.
4. The UK should work with its partners in Southeast (Thailand) and South Asia (India, Bangladesh) and those ASEAN members such as Malaysia and Indonesia that are keener to see an end to violence in Myanmar to step up efforts and scale up the cross-border air organizations that has existed in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands for decades.

Evidence

5. Myanmar (Burma)[1] is home to some of the world’s longest-running conflicts. Nearly four years after the 2021 military coup the people of Myanmar remain caught in mutually reinforcing crises of war, mass forced displacement and humanitarian needs.[2] The challenges to Myanmar are manyfold and deeply entrenched.

6. Myanmar is not unique in these circumstances, with territories further afield, such as Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, to name just a few, experiencing similar humanitarian crises, all competing for attention and resources.

7. In Myanmar the humanitarian crisis is extensive, but it varies across its territory.[3] Different regions of the country experience locally-specific conflict dynamics, each with distinctive actors, alliances and coalitions, agenda and outcomes.[4] In some cases borders and border control is contested. Different governance arrangements apply, with some parts of the country under the control of the military and military-affiliated militias, with others controlled by ethnic resistance organizations (some of which have been fight even from before the country became independent).

8.On 28 March 2025 two powerful earthquakes struck in short succession, the first a 7.7 magnitude one northwest of Sagaing (in central Myanmar, near the city of Mandalay), and the second a 6.4 one, south of town, with aftershocks continuing since. The earthquake tremor was felt further afield, in Bangkok in Thailand, some 600 miles away from the epicentre, Southwest China and India. More than 5,000 people have died, thousands were injured, hundreds of thousands displaced, and infrastructure destroyed.


How can the UK’s approach to development be sufficiently flexible to respond to what its development partners need the most?

9.The 1 February 2021 military coup in Myanmar confronted the international community, including donors and aid workers, with a significant challenge: how to ensure that relief and life-saving support are delivered to those in greatest need at a time when international attention – and already limited resources – have come under severe stress in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

10. There is a cyclical nature to the dilemmas confronting international donors willing to operate in Myanmar. Brief periods of relative openness led to rapid surges in development assistance, regularly interrupted by long phases of military rule and disengagement by donors.[5] In the aftermath of the coup the encounter between the international donor community, including HMG, and the people of Myanmar has been re-defined by a triple shift in the aid paradigm putting earlier trends in reverse gear: from engagement to isolation, from development to humanitarian aid and from the state and government to non-state and informal institutions in the borderlands.
11. Cross-border aid has a long history in Myanmar, owing to the fact that the Myanmar military does not fully control the state borders and, following the resistance to the 2021 coup, this is even more so as of late 2025.
 

Challenges

12. The banking and financial systems are nearly inoperable in Myanmar.[6] HMG and partners (the US and the EU) have imposed sanctions which have targeted local regime-affiliated banks. This and regime-imposed measures (an inflated foreign exchange rate) means that local aid organizations distribute cash assistance to earthquake affected communities in Mandalay and Sagaing Regions. Cash-based systems are risky for the local partners.
13. Protracted conflict has led to the volatility of the exchange rate, thereby affecting daily operations.

14. Frequent power outages lead to disruptions in mobile connections and thus delayed responses by local partners.

15. Local partners seeking not to work with the military regime are exposed to high surveillance risk, investigation and possibly detention, or worse, by the military regime. Remote management, with fewer international staff on site, meant the localisations of risk too.

16. Amidst a vast and uncoordinated donors landscape local development partners are simply not familiar with donors’ guidelines and standard operating procedures.
17. While working with state authorities is not desirable, not all resistance organizations are the same, as some have been known to commit human rights violations and are themselves microcosms of repression.
 

Potential ways forward

18. Defining who the legitimate ‘state’ now is a complex issue, with several parallel organizations, from the National Unity Government (NUG) to the political wings of the ethnic resistance organizations each controlling sways of territory and people.

19. In practical terms, HMG should therefore engage with multiple actors at various levels: national level, and regional level. Some of these operations will be inside Myanmar, while others outside such as in Thailand as it has been for decades.

20. Given the afore-mentioned challenges of the banking system accepting alternative proofs of receipt (voice notes, encrypted updates), flexible budgeting and monitoring systems (given price fluctuation allowances), allowing simplified reporting formats, offering local partners the opportunity to use various mobile payment platforms (NUG Pay, K Pay, Wave Pay) would enable smoother operations and safe transfer methods.

21. Avoiding overly rigid timelines and offering risk-sensitive compliance rather than standard INGOs-style paperwork would relieve local partners of administrative burdens without compromising on accountability and transparency.

Prospects and recommendations

The following recommendations are for consideration by the International Development Committee:

22.‘Localisation of aid’ is one of the dominant concepts in the contemporary aid industry, but the term means different things to different people in different contexts. At its core localisation is not a technical issue: it requires a political decision about who to engage and with whom not to.

23. Consider flexible, cross-sectoral approaches that address multiple vulnerabilities at once and allow HMG to work even with countries that are not currently close partners. Working with international suppliers of small solar panels can transform the lives and livelihoods of many people at a competitive price, can be scaled up easily across a large country and ensure that local communities are able to recharge their mobile devices and thus, for example, log into mobile pay applications.

24. HMG should consider more flexible, cross-sectoral approaches to dealing with the challenges of the region, including a nexus approach linking food, energy and water security, as the UK has relevant expertise in each of these areas.

25. HMG should bring together key actors located in partner countries, for example stakeholders among Thailand’s government, military and community-based organizations and do so with actors from countries with whom the UK collaborates closely, such as India and Bangladesh, both of whom share borders with Myanmar.

26. The military regime is seeking to bolster its legitimacy and gather international support for the controversial elections that should reinstate the parliament ousted in the 2021 coup. While the elections are likely to be widely boycotted and the result contested, hate speech against religious minorities has already begun on social media platforms, in a way reminiscent of earlier Islamophobic campaigns in Myanmar in the 2010s. HMG should work with international state and non-state partners to counter online radicalization.

November 2025