Aid is meant to save lives. But no one wants to depend on it. Families don’t wait in hope for cardboard boxes — they organize, barter, build, and survive. Yet the humanitarian system continues to treat them as passive recipients, delivering assumptions instead of answers. In this episode of Builders of the Broken Bazaar, Dr. Tabish Zaman speaks with Marina Kobzeva, a former aid recipient turned humanitarian leader, about what’s broken in the global aid system — and what real accountability should look like. From post-Soviet Azerbaijan to two decades inside the sector, Marina shares why 90% of aid money never reaches communities, how colonial mindsets still shape aid delivery, and why true innovation lives in mutual aid, remittances, and grassroots resilience.

🎙 “People don’t want charity — they want agency ...