News / Announcements: The Humanitarian Space

The Inter-Agency Standing Committee is seeking experienced humanitarian leaders to join a roster of potential Humanitarian Coordinators, the Humanitarian Coordination (HC) Pool. This process requires you to be nominated by agency affiliated with the Inter-Agency Standing Committee.

The IASC HC Pool, established in July 2009, is a roster of high caliber humanitarian professionals from UN agencies, the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement, IOM and NGOs who have been screened by the IASC as potential candidates for humanitarian coordination leadership positions (i.e. Humanitarian Coordinator (HC), Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator (DHC), Resident Coordinator/Humanitarian Coordinator (RC/HC), Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General/Resident Coordinator/Humanitarian Coordinator (DSRSG/RC/HC), and RC positions in disaster-prone countries).

The selection process is carried out by senior-level IASC panels comprising both UN and non-UN representatives. Nominated candidates are preliminary assessed against the following criteria:

EDUCATION

Advanced university degree in international relations, political sciences, economics, social and/or other sciences, human rights, humanitarian law or related fields. A first level university degree with a relevant combination of academic qualifications and experience may be accepted in lieu of an advanced university degree.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Candidates should have significant experience in the humanitarian field, including management of emergency operations, coordination of multi-sectorial humanitarian assistance operations, preferably at the country level and/or in a multilateral context. Representational and negotiation experience, including humanitarian advocacy at national or international level. Candidates should have strong leadership skills and an interest in serving in any part of the world.

LANGUAGES

Fluency in oral and written English. Knowledge of other languages is a distinctive advantage.

Shortlisted candidates will be assessed against the Humanitarian Coordinator competency model.

On joining the HC Pools, and prior to their deployment, successful candidates are provided with training and development opportunities. Women, French and Arabic speakers and non-OECD country nationals are particularly encouraged to apply.

HOW TO APPLY

Visit the HC Pool section of the OneResponse webpage for application details

The application deadline is 31 May 2012

The Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF) is pleased to announce its third call for large grant proposals. The Fund’s large grant facility, which provides grants from £75,000 for the development, implementation and testing of an innovation, will be open until the 22nd April 2012.

The Fund was established a year ago by ELRHA (Enhancing Learning and Research for Humanitarian Assistance) and ALNAP (The Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action) to support organisations and individuals to identify, nurture and share innovative and scalable solutions to the challenges facing effective humanitarian assistance.

There was an exceptional response to the first two calls held last year. The Fund received more than 340 applications from a wide range of organisations including NGOs (international and local), universities, academic and research institutes, United Nations agencies and programmes, and from the Red Cross/Red Crescent.

To date, eight projects have been awarded large grants and are well underway introducing innovative solutions to long standing challenges in delivering humanitarian aid. For example, our Integrating Local Media and ICTs into Humanitarian Response in CAR project, managed by Internews, was awarded a large grant to create a reliable and sustainable system that will allow local media to gather, in real time, first-hand information from populations and channel it to the humanitarian sector, while at the same time, establishing a two-way communication flow with local communities.

Nicolas Kröger, Manager of the HIF, said: “The competition for our grants is strong, but we are always open to fresh thinking and ‘outside of the box’ ideas. To be successful in the large grant competition an innovation must be ready to be developed and tested in an operational context and be able to demonstrate its potential to transform the effectiveness and impact of humanitarian action.”

The HIF intends to fund 4 - 5 large grant projects in this latest call. The Fund also hosts a small grant facility, which is permanently open for proposals up to £20,000 for the recognition, invention and dissemination of an innovation.

Full details of the Humanitarian Innovation Fund can be found on their website: www.humanitarianinnovation.org. The HIF team will be holding an online webinar on the large grant facility on Wednesday 28th March 2012; please visit the website for more information.

Representatives from the Humanitarian Innovation Fund are available for comment, interview and background briefings. They can also arrange for you to speak with the grant recipients. Please contact: Emily Whitehead – Communications Officer, ELRHA on +44(0)7554 409199 or e.whitehead@savethechildren.org.uk.

International jury selects only global NGO with singular focus on improving the lives of the world’s older people

The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation presents the annual award, the world’s largest humanitarian prize, to an organisation that is doing extraordinary work to alleviate human suffering. The foundation made the announcement today on International Women’s Day in recognition of the invisible role of older women in maintaining the welfare of families, communities and food production across the developing world.

Read more: Help Age wins Hilton Humanitarian Prize on International Women's Day

Given the increasing scale and severity of humanitarian crises, the need for new approaches and innovations is greater than ever. DFID is committed to supporting innovation and the improving ways of responding to humanitarian crises around the world.

DFID undertakes its own research and analysis of humanitarian innovation to establish where the gaps are and support crucial and underfunded areas of innovation wherever possible. Two of our key policy commitments are to work toward making humanitarian research and innovation central to DFID’s research and evidence work, and secondly, to use innovative techniques and technologies more routinely in humanitarian and disaster response.

It is vital that the use of science in predicting and preparing for disasters is improved internationally, and we are working to ensure that scientific data is used to reduce the risk of disasters. At the heart of our strategy is the goal of building resilience so that communities around the world are better able to withstand shocks.

DFID is taking the following steps to ensure we are better prepared for disasters:

• Establishing a ‘virtual’ humanitarian research and innovations team, under the direction of DFID’s Chief Scientific Adviser, to draw on all relevant professions (not just humanitarian). The team will review existing innovative approaches and identify gaps in the humanitarian and resilience knowledge-base.
• Supporting the Humanitarian Innovation Fund aimed at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian response. It is managed by Enhanced Learning and Research for Humanitarian Action, and provides small grants for operational, academic and private sector actors at all stages of the innovation process.

DFID has also funded the following projects that seek to strengthen the overall response to humanitarian disasters:

• The NGOs and Humanitarian Reform Project aims to increase the effectiveness of humanitarian response, by improving leadership, co-ordination, predictability and accountability of funding for humanitarian disasters.
• The Effective Health Care programme has played an important role in the development of the Cochrane Collaboration’s Evidence Aid project. This project is a resource for people and organisations who plan for and respond to natural disasters and major health care emergencies. It points people to the existing online collections of evidence-based research tailored specifically to individual disasters, and highlights the need for similar resources in areas such as shelter, communication, construction, education, security and support for displaced people.

The State of the Humanitarian System Report, ALNAP’s flagship publication due to be released in early summer 2012 (see pilot edition here), is a collective endeavour to measure and assess the entirety of the international humanitarian system. This ambitious report will provide updated descriptive statistics, review key trends, and evaluate the system on overall progress on performance.

To ensure more inclusive and representative sample we aim to include the opinions and perspectives of humanitarian aid actors and the recipients of aid throughout the world. To gather this information two surveys have been developed: 1) the International Aid Practitioners Survey (now online) and 2) the Aid Recipient Survey (to be disseminated to affected populations).

If you are a humanitarian practitioner, working in the field for an international agency; or a national agency; or a host government representative, we invite you to contribute your perspectives and experience by completing one of the global surveys below. Please choose the relevant survey and click on the link for your preferred language:

Survey 1: International Aid Practitioners Survey
ALNAP would like to invite aid practitioners to share their views by clicking on any of the links below to complete the survey in the language most familiar to you. English | French | Spanish | Arabic

Survey 2: Aid Recipient Survey
It would be extremely helpful if anyone working in an agency can help to disseminate a 14-question Aid Recipient Survey to affected populations. If so, please contact Abby Stoddard from Humanitarian Outcomes for more information.

Thank you for your assistance! Your input is vital to make this report as inclusive and representative as possible.

This survey forms part of a review on the application of participatory approaches for disaster-affected communities in humanitarian initiatives, including good practices and recommendations for implementing partners and donors. It is being undertaken for the Directorate General ECHO – the Humanitarian Aid department of the European Commission.

We very much value your input and thank you for taking the time to contribute to this survey, which we estimate will take around ten to fifteen minutes to complete. Individual feedback will be treated anonymously whilst final outputs of the review will be publically available through the DG ECHO website and other dissemination channels to promote good practice.

If you have any documents from your organisation with examples of participatory approaches to support this survey, be they reviews, evaluations, research papers or guides, please send them to r.ward@aguaconsult.co.uk. Thank you.

If you do not want to make documents that you share with the review team publically accessibly please indicate this in your response, otherwise the review team will assume that such documents can be made available,  many thanks. The review team very much look forward to hearing from you and sharing in your experiences in this important area of work.

Please click here to start the survey.

We know that our members often travel with work and that publications are not only heavy but take up valuable luggage space. As a partial solution to this problem we have trialled the publication of Good Practice Review 11: Cash transfer programming in emergencies in 'e-book' format on Amazon's handheld tablet, the Kindle. The e-book can also be used on several other mobile devices. Please note that it costs 86 pence to download the publication, the minimum allowed by the service. If uptake is significant, we will consider uploading more HPN publications as e-books.

Download GPR11 on Kindle

The Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC) is a DFID funded group of organisations carrying out research on livelihoods, basic services and social protection in places affected by conflict. The Justice and Security Research Programme (JSRP), led by the London School of Economics, received a grant by DFID in the same funding round to research justice and security in conflict settings. Both consortia are currently in the inception year of a six year programme. We would greatly appreciate it if you could spare 20 minutes or so to complete this survey on your experience of research in the fields of livelihoods, social protection and basic services, and justice and security in conflict settings. This survey seeks to gather people's views about the strengths and weaknesses of existing research in this area to inform the development of our research agendas.