If you have ever worked in or with an INGO’s regional office, you know the feeling. It sits between headquarters and country teams, trying to be strategic while also being operational, local while also global, supportive while also directive. It is the middle child of the international system, constantly asked to coordinate, align, harmonise, and represent, often with authority that exists more on paper than in practice and rarely with the attention needed to match the responsibility.
Some of us like the regional office, others are traumatised by it. Some see it as a bridge, others as a barrier. And in reality it is like a water bottle you carry in your bag. On some days it is essential, it keeps you moving. On other days you do not drink a single sip and it becomes pure weight, slowing you down for no reason. The value is not in the bottle itself. It is in when, how, and why you use it.
This piece is not about criticising people. It is about design. It is about how regional offices can move from structure to function, not through dramatic Capital C cuts such as dismantling it, turning it into an HQ hub, elevating it to executive level, or relocating it entirely, but through precise small c cuts, small changes that can gradually return them to the purpose they were meant to serve.
Everyone Has Opinions About the Region. No One Has a Definition.
In HQ corridors the regional office is often seen through a blurry lens. Some view it as a coordination layer meant to keep things tidy. Others see it as an expensive middle tier that should either prove its value or be folded back into HQ. The questions repeat in cycles. Should the region exist, shrink, expand, or become a hub.
Country management teams tell a different story. For them the region is either their strongest ally or their most frustrating neighbour, sometimes both on the same day.
Donors are asking the same question. They review the costs allocated to the region, request justifications, ask for ToRs and field visit reports, and increasingly mark the costs as unnecessary or disallowed. And when funding cuts arrive, the regional office is often the first part of the system placed on the sacrifice table, not because it failed, but because the system never unlocked its value.
Most regional offices sit inside mandates that sound impressive but mean little in practice. Words like support, coordination, and quality assurance appear everywhere, yet no one can describe what they look like when a country team needs a decision, an approval, or troubleshooting.
Different people at country, region, and HQ use the same vocabulary for different purposes, often repeating the same tasks. Confusion grows. Accountability fades. Everyone is involved, yet no one is responsible.
This is where the first small c cut begins. Examine the purpose with honesty. Create a one page mandate that clearly separates what is advisory, what is decision making, and what is coordination. Replace abstract language with verbs that describe real actions. Begin with why the region exists, what it must deliver, and how. A clear mandate tells everyone who decides what, who supports what, and who is accountable for what. When the purpose is clear, decisions move faster, delegation becomes easier, and the system stops wasting energy interpreting roles and starts delivering results.
Design the Region Around Logic, Not Legacy
Many regional setups were created so long ago that no one remembers why. Some were drawn around geography. Some around language. Some because someone once said “the countries felt similar”. Some countries sit together because they share a border, even when their operational realities and languages could not be more different. Others are grouped because a donor once placed them under one office, even though their risks and crisis dynamics have nothing in common. Some regions operate in two or three languages simply because the countries did not fit anywhere else. And in many cases, countries remain in the same region simply because they always have been. The reasons faded. The structure stayed. Regions stitched together by habit rather than purpose.
When the logic behind a region is unclear, the support becomes unclear too. The regional office ends up juggling contexts that pull in opposite directions. Time is spent aligning mismatched environments instead of enabling delivery. Everyone works harder, yet the value stays shallow.
Here is where the small c cut does its job. Rebuild the idea of a region around operational logic. Start with the real reasons a cluster of countries should sit together: shared risk patterns, similar donor ecosystems, cross border dynamics, economic ties, cultural proximity, migration routes, supply chain corridors, political influence, or simple accessibility. Some regions may be shaped by language. Others by crisis type. Others by movement and trade patterns or the positioning of key actors. There is no single formula, but there must be a clear rationale.
Roles Should Supplement, Not Mirror
In many INGOs, the country role does the work while the regional role quietly turns into a reviewer, an editor, or a compliance checker. The title is different, the location is different, but the task list looks suspiciously similar. One produces, the other comments. One delivers, the other approves. One manages, the other recruits. When the only real difference is the city on the contract and an “R” in the title, the value of the regional role slowly disappears and the regional office no longer fits its purpose.
Here is a small c cut: simple, practical, and overdue. Redesign the regional role scope to bring what the country role does not have: cross border insight, donor intelligence, operational coherence, deeper technical expertise, or the ability to oversee regional projects. Then translate that into real actions, clear timelines, and explicit responsibilities. Regional roles should add what the country and HQ roles cannot. They should strengthen, unlock, or accelerate. Not mirror, not reformat, not duplicate, and not decorate.
Do Not Turn a Regional Post Into a Second Country Position
We have all seen it. Some of us have done it. A colleague moves from a country office into a regional role and continues working exactly as they did before. They stay involved in day to day country tasks, jump into operational troubleshooting, and quietly take over responsibilities that belong to country teams. Country teams love it because it feels like gaining an extra pair of hands. The region and HQ rely on it because things move quickly. On the surface it looks like a gift. In reality it distorts everything.
It blurs the mandate. It creates dependency. It hides capacity gaps at the country level. It weakens the regional function. It confuses accountability for both sides.
A small c cut begins with discipline. Keep the work inside the mandate so the structure can hold its shape. A regional role must act as a regional role. A HQ role must act as a HQ role.
These roles are designed to guide, unblock, connect, and strengthen. They are not designed to replace country work or compensate for poor performance elsewhere. Helpful behaviour should be institutionalised, not improvised through one person’s goodwill.
Turn Shadow Influence Into Real Architecture
Every regional system has its shadows. The country director whose phone never stops ringing because everyone trusts their judgment. The country advisor who becomes the unofficial focal point for three neighbouring countries simply because they reply fast and make sense. The manager who travels between countries for gap filling, substitution, or secondments more often than they spend time in their own base. We admire it. We rely on it. Sometimes we even design half the coordination model around it. But shadow influence, while helpful in the moment, quietly bends the system. It creates dependency on individuals instead of on design, and it weakens the regional function without anyone noticing until something breaks or that person leaves the organization.
A small c cut begins by looking directly at the shadows and understanding where real capability, trust, and speed actually live. Do not fight it. Formalise it. If one person consistently guides others, turn that reality into structure. Build technical clusters across countries. Create simple advisory platforms when needed. Set clear processes for short term support, substitution, or emergency secondments. When the system reflects where the real strengths sit, leadership stops depending on personalities and starts relying on architecture that can actually hold the weight.
Reporting and Proposals Are Not Seasons, They Are Climate
Anyone who has ever worked in a regional structure knows the truth. Every month is reporting month. Every quarter is proposal quarter. Every week brings a new concept note, an advocacy paper, or a SITREP dressed up as something urgent.
And the dance is always the same.
A donor deadline appears.
Country teams start running in circles.
The region reviews or edits.
HQ comments or commands.
Someone asks for alignment.
Someone else returns the document with eighty comments that mostly say, “Please refine.”
Refine what. No one knows.
Someone asks for the “latest latest latest version.”
And right in the middle of it all, someone suddenly goes on leave with an auto reply that says, “Thank you for your message. I will have limited access to email while reconnecting with nature.” At that moment, nature has never had more enemies.
Emails fly. Then Teams messages. Then a calendar invite for coordination. Then a second reminder in case the universe or the Grants team forgot.
People start editing the document like it is a group therapy session.
Comments arrive faster than decisions. Someone corrects a comma. Someone rewrites an entire section at midnight. A program manager counts paragraph characters like a monk counting prayer beads. A finance coordinator grows three grey hairs per budget review. And the Grants person survives entirely on Red Bull and questioning their life choices while updating the logframe.
And this is where a small c cut quietly changes everything. Start by placing the reporting deadlines from the actual contract somewhere visible. If not on a board, then at least in the calendar. Build a simple submission plan for reports and proposals that states who will do what by when. No complicated trackers. Just clarity.
Make people the start and the end. Let AI tools be the middle.
One person drafts the ideas, the logic, and the content that matters.
An AI tool cleans the language, polishes the grammar, sharpens the flow, checks the length, and aligns terminology.
Then one human does the final technical review, confirms compliance, and ensures the writing respects the dignity of the people represented.
Then stop. Close the document. Submit.
No group therapy.
No thirty comment threads.
No cross-platform reminder festival.
Just clarity, efficiency, and the mental wellbeing of everyone involved.
Coordination Is a Muscle, Not a Meeting
Alignment calls. Strategy workshops. Cross functional catch ups. Regional management. Technical management. All region updates. Periodic reviews. All created with good intentions and meant to solve problems or create alignment, yet most of them circle around the same issues because the structure offers no alternative path. When the mandate is blurred and the roles are duplicated, meetings become the performance. People give updates, restate the same points, and politely fill the hour because no one truly knows what the region owns, what it drives, or what decisions it can actually make.
And just when things seem manageable, HQ launches a new set of initiatives and insists everyone must be “represented.” Suddenly everyone is attending three extra calls a week, nodding like air traffic controllers trying to land ten planes with no runway.
A small c cut is simple. Remove every meeting that has no direct operational or strategic value. Keep only what moves work forward. Define the purpose of each meeting in one sentence and cancel any session that cannot justify its existence. Use short sprint reviews focused on what is blocked and what is needed. Reserve regional convenings for genuine cross country value, not routine updates. Replace information sharing meetings with problem solving. Make coordination a habit of removing friction, not a calendar of recurring calls.
And when gray areas appear, use them to refine the mandate, not to create more meetings. Clarity gives meetings purpose. Without clarity, meetings become the system’s escape route.
Representation Is Not a Karaoke Performance
Too many regional offices end up acting like message couriers. They pass HQ talking points to donors and country teams. They echo country updates only to consolidate them into a tidy summary. They draft advocacy letters that sound impressive but change nothing. They post on social media, get a few likes from colleagues, and call it visibility. They attend donor meetings only to restate what has already been said. Regional managers speak to donors and NGO leaders without gaining or offering operational, strategic, financial, or policy value. Representation becomes a transcript, not a contribution.
Here is the small c cut that turns logic back on. Create a simple donor presence plan. Define who speaks to which donors, with what authority, and with what value. Make representation a space where insight lives, not a relay channel. Bring signals from the region. Bring early warnings HQ cannot see. Bring nuance that country teams are too stretched to surface.
And expand the engagement. The ecosystem is much wider than humanitarian actors. Speak with foundations, diplomats, policy makers, private sector actors, and governments. If the only people a regional office talks to are other NGOs, then it is not representing the region. It is standing in an echo chamber, nodding at the same familiar faces, while the real influence is outside in the hallway checking its watch and wondering if anyone plans to open the door.
Field Visits: Tourism With a Clipboard
And then there are the legendary field visits. The HQ and regional travel parade that deserves its own documentary. Someone flies in with heroic purpose, a brand new notebook, and an itinerary that somehow includes every site except the ones that actually matter. They meet people, nod seriously, take photos that will later appear in an internal newsletter, and ask questions whose answers they skimmed from last year’s report. Day one is full of energy. Day two is jet lag pretending to be strategic thinking. Day three brings the classic line, “things feel very dynamic on the ground.” Day four is the request for a debrief meeting no one has time for. Then the visitor goes home with a per diem, a phone full of pictures, a souvenir from the local staff, and a report that gets filed so deep in SharePoint that not even AI can find it. Nothing changes. Nothing improves. The only visible outcome is that the country team loses several days of productivity and gains one more document titled “Field Visit Report” that everyone promises to read later.
This is where the small c cut steps in and the noise steps out. If someone is getting on a plane, the visit must create operational or strategic value. Define in advance what the visitor will unblock and what value and support they will deliver. Visit with purpose. Visit with clarity. Visit in a way that makes the team feel lighter when you leave, not heavier. And give country teams the ability to request a visit when they need one. If a field visit produces only photos, polite emails, and a forgotten report, it is not a field visit. It is sightseeing
The Region Is Not Failing, It Is Overloaded
Regional offices inherit everything from HQ. Localization frameworks. Climate commitments. Digital transformation pilots. Policy updates. New toolkits. New guidance. New working groups. New reporting requirements. And more on the way every quarter.
Country teams add to that list with operational support requests, reviews, compliance issues, coordination demands, fixing something with HQ, fixing something inside the country, fixing something between countries. The region ends up stretched so thin it begins operating in permanent catch up mode instead of actually supporting. Not because the region is weak, but because the system keeps handing it every global and country priority at once. It becomes a backpack everyone keeps adding weight to without checking if there is still any space inside.
A small c cut begins by reducing the weight so the work can move again. Build one regional timeline for all initiatives. Put every project and priority on a single page. Layer them to see overlaps, repetition, impossible pacing, and all the quiet duplication sitting below the surface. Then sequence the work based on actual capacity, not organizational optimism. Set the rhythm according to what can be carried, not what looks good in a global meeting.
And add this truth with a smile: you cannot cook six different meals on one stove at the same time unless you are willing to burn at least four of them. Choose the dishes. Choose the heat. Serve what the system can actually eat.
Leadership Is Not Weak, It Is Unanchored
Picture a magician stepping onto a stage. They smile, lift the hat with confidence, reach inside, and find nothing. The audience waits for the rabbit that never appears. The music rises, the lights intensify, and the magician keeps performing, pretending the trick is unfolding while quietly panicking about the empty hat.
This is the reality of many regional leaders. They are expected to lead without decision making power, solve problems they are not allowed to resolve, and carry accountability for outcomes they do not control. They stand in front of donors, country teams, and HQ with a hat everyone assumes is full. Everyone expects the magic. No one provides the rabbit.
And beneath that sits a deeper layer. Regional offices live inside power corridors built in ways that often slow the rise of local leaders instead of amplifying them. They can unintentionally reinforce the same imbalances the system claims it wants to dismantle. They filter decisions upward instead of downward. They mediate relationships that do not need mediation. All of this leaves regional leaders navigating daily dilemmas and quiet struggles, and it becomes stress packaged as hierarchy.
This is where the small c cut becomes a leadership act. Anchor leadership to real decision rights. Decide clearly which decisions sit at the region, which sit at HQ, and which sit at country level. Align budgets with those decisions so authority becomes practical, not symbolic. And design those decisions to strengthen local leadership rather than centralising influence above it.
When regional leaders are trusted to act, they can finally stop performing and start leading. And when regional structures are shaped to serve local leadership rather than overshadow it, the entire ecosystem grows stronger.
This is how you fill the hat. This is how the magic returns.
Presence Must Serve Purpose
Across the sector, regional presence is often treated as a geography assignment rather than a strategic choice. Regions end up in the same familiar cities simply because that is where everyone else is. Amman, Dakar, Nairobi, Bangkok. Sometimes Geneva or Brussels. The logic is rarely questioned, and the habit survives long after the relevance fades.
Regional offices are created because a major donor sits nearby, or because the flights are short, or because the city feels convenient, or because the organization has been there for twenty years and moving feels too complicated. None of these reasons guarantee that the region can actually do its work.
A simple truth stands. Geographic convenience is not strategic relevance.
This is where the map stops choosing for us and the small c cut begins. Design regional presence around purpose, not tradition. Ask why the region exists in a specific place or structure. Decide the shape before deciding the city. Some regions need a physical hub because cross-border work demands proximity. Others work better as distributed networks with technical roles placed where they create the most value. Some functions need to sit near migration routes, trade corridors, regional political actors, or innovation ecosystems. Others need proximity to operational corridors or frontline realities. One size fits all has never worked.
Challenge the assumption that a region must be one office in one city. It can be a constellation of roles. It can be fully virtual and follow talent instead of real estate. It can be hybrid and shaped around where people do their best work, not where donors happen to have buildings.
And when choosing a city, choose it for strategic advantage. Not because it is familiar, not because the flights are cheap, and not because everyone else is there.
A region should be placed where it can sense the ecosystem, read signals early, influence the conversations that matter, and stay close to the operational pulse. Presence is not a postcode. Presence is the ability to add value.
A region built around strategic logic becomes an engine. A region built around habit becomes a postcode with a sign on the door.
Holding the Region Between Two Suns
The regional office lives between two suns. One is HQ, with its strategies and shifting global priorities. The other is the country teams, with their realities, crises, and daily pressure. If either sun pulls too strongly, the region loses its orbit. It becomes too top heavy or too field driven, too strategic or too operational, too much of everything and effective at nothing.
When the balance holds, the region becomes what it was meant to be. A bridge where vision meets delivery. A place where ideas turn into practice. A space that gives countries strength and gives HQ clarity.
That balance does not appear on its own. Small c cuts restore it. They remove the noise that weighs the region down, reduce tasks that never belonged there, and help the region stop performing and start serving. They sharpen both mandate and design, and they bring us back to a simple truth. Regions are not identical. Countries are not identical. Support cannot follow a single template. One size fits all has never worked. Best fit is the only logic that holds.
This is why the common reactions fail. Turning a regional office into an HQ hub to cover a donor budget gap rarely solves the real issue. Dismantling a regional presence because of financial pressure usually creates more holes than savings. Removing roles or elevating roles to claim centralisation or decentralisation does not produce transformation. These are structural reactions, not solutions.
Small c cuts work differently. They prepare the ground before any major change. They make the regional office lighter, clearer, and more useful, so whatever comes next is a choice, not a crisis response.
My view is unchanged. Optimization through small steps unlocks big change. A regional office finds its real power when it connects, simplifies, and enables work across borders and systems. Transformation holds when the region stands between the two suns with clarity, purpose, and humility.
Ali Al Mokdad
