ABSTRACT
The humanitarian system has over the last decades gone through a learning journey on how to provide relevant aid. As a young volunteer in Goma (then Zaire) in 1995 I learned together with the system how harmful aid can be if it is not relevant. Coming back to the same place seven years later, I witnessed another response that struggled to be relevant, and have since then been part of collective learning on how to deliver aid better. I will in my chapter reflect on this learning journey from the 1990s to now, using these two pivotal moments of my career. I am writing from a personal perspective on how they taught me the fallacy of supply-driven responses and how, like the system, they sent me on a learning journey on how aid can be more relevant.
