CAFOD, the Catholic overseas aid agency in England and Wales, plans to attend to the first ever World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul next week.
It will be attended by governments, UN agencies and a number of international aid bodies.
CAFOD says that it wants to speak for NGOs (non-governmental organisations) in the countries where the most humanitarian aid money is spent.
Anne Street, CAFOD's Head of Humanitarian Policy, (pictured) said: "In any natural disaster or emergency, it is these local partners who are first on the scene."
She said: "Their members understand the local culture better than anyone else, and they will carry on when the foreign experts and the television cameras have departed."
"Yet the amount of funding currently channelled directly to local partners by international humanitarian bodies is astonishingly small: just 0.2 per cent."
CAFOD is supporting Charter4Change, an initiative calling for the proportion of aid money going to local bodies to be increased to 20% by 2018.
You can listen to Anne Street from CAFOD speaking with Premier's Hannah Tooley by clicking here:
