"Decades of experience: For over three decades, Karen community based organisations (CBOs), together with departments of the Karen National Union (KNU), have been providing humanitarian aid to villagers in southeast Burma suffering displacement and food insecurity due to Burma Army offensives, persecution and destruction of farms and rice stocks. The aid has been delivered through our own long-established mechanisms, systematically developed to maximize effectiveness while ensuring accountability to donors. Based at the border for security and logistical reasons, these systems have been able to deliver significant amounts of assistance, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to remain living inside Burma instead of becoming refugees. From 1992 to 2020, border-based Karen organisations assisted over 1.7 million vulnerable persons living in Burma with over US$ 32 million of aid, mainly for rice. This aid has been delivered directly to the beneficiaries without any financial, military or political benefits going to Burma’s military governments since these programs began. Instead of fueling centralization, this border based assistance has helped develop locally governed aid structures as building blocks for a new federal democratic Burma..."