Humanitarian Exchange articles tagged:Coordination

The Principles of Partnership (PoP), endorsed in 2007 by the Global Humanitarian Platform (GHP), were a collective effort to respond to a changing reality as well as create a shared understanding of how effective partnership could contribute to more effective humanitarian assistance.[1] Over the past few decades, a growing proportion of assistance, as measured by financial volume, has been provided by civil society organisations, with many of the larger NGOs consolidating national chapters into international networks with a geographic and financial reach on a similar scale to that of the UN agencies. Within this evolving context there was a sense…

Tucked away in the arid North Eastern Province of Kenya is one of the largest and oldest refugee camp complexes in the world. Twenty-one years old, with a population of over 300,000, the Dadaab refugee camps (Ifo, Hagedera and Dagahaley) host refugees mainly from Somalia, but also from Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Sudan. Humanitarian agencies are under pressure not only to provide services to resident refugees, many of whom have lived in the camp complex for over 20 years, but also to address the needs of the approximately 1,000 refugees who continue to arrive from Somalia every month. They face…

This article highlights the views of local people on how international aid agencies partner with local organisations, and the impact these relationships often have on the quality and effectiveness of aid efforts. Through Listening Exercises, The Listening Project has gathered the perspectives of local people on what has worked well, what has not and what can be done to make international aid efforts more effective and more accountable. In many places, local people do not make the distinctions between humanitarian, recovery or development assistance that aid workers do. While the types of assistance and the people who provide it may…

Bangladesh is exposed to significant flood, cyclone and earthquake hazards. Vulnerability to these and other hazards is exacerbated by socio-economic factors, including one of the highest population densities in the world, rapid and often unplanned urban expansion, poor infrastructure, weak institutions and a lack of diversity in livelihoods, with a high degree of dependence on agriculture. Widespread poverty, with 60% of the population living below the poverty line, further limits the ability of people and communities to protect themselves and their assets against disaster. In such a context, effective disaster preparedness is especially important. To achieve this, capacity-building at all…

Natural disasters are a frequent occurrence in Southeast Asia, killing an estimated 350,000 people in the last decade and causing tens of billions dollars’ worth of damage. With such high loss of life and extensive economic damage, increasing the resilience of its ten member states is a key priority for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).[1] To that end, on 24 December 2010, the anniversary of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER) came into force.   The AADMER The AADMER is a legally binding agreement. As a regional framework that…

Over the last few years there has been a growing recognition that working in partnership can improve humanitarian outcomes. A range of partnership models have been deployed, including North–South cooperation, and partnerships among international NGOs, between them and national and local NGOs and with host and local governments, as well as directly with local communities. This article outlines MERCY Malaysia’s experience of working in partnership in Malaysia, Myanmar and Gaza. Malaysia While Malaysia has not been hit by a major natural disaster, annual seasonal floods affect different parts of the country at slightly different times of the year. MERCY Malaysia…

Partnerships are said to be essential for successful disaster risk reduction (DRR), but basic questions about what makes them work are rarely asked. The rationale for multi-stakeholder partnerships in DRR is clear and compelling: DRR is a systematic approach to identifying, assessing and reducing the risks of disaster. It aims to reduce socio-economic vulnerabilities to disasters as well as dealing with the environmental and other hazards that trigger them. DRR thinking sees disasters as complex problems demanding a collective response from different disciplinary and institutional groups – in other words, partnerships.  No single group or organisation can address every aspect…

Networks, by definition, are shaped by their members. They are often started by individuals or a founding group who have some vision and purpose in doing so. However, it is in the nature of a network that its development is unpredictable – unless it is so tightly controlled by its founders that it is effectively not a network at all. At a workshop in Delhi in March 2008, the newly formed ‘Global Network for Disaster Reduction’[1] defined its vision and purpose. In the short period since that meeting the network has grown rapidly. It has also undertaken a major collaborative…

The Consortium of British Humanitarian Agencies (CBHA) was founded in 2010 in response to a proposal by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) to form a consortium to address some of the challenges facing the humanitarian system, especially around speed, coordination and efficiency. Comprising 15 of the leading UK-based humanitarian agencies, the CBHA’s mandate is to ‘pioneer new approaches to funding and resourcing humanitarian responses which strengthen the coordination and capacity of the “third pillar” – the NGO sector – to deliver appropriate, higher quality, more effective and quicker humanitarian responses over the current decade 2010–2020’.[1] Formation and first…

The challenges the humanitarian community encountered last year in Haiti and Pakistan clearly emonstrate that it urgently needs new knowledge, new expertise and new approaches. At the same time there is a growing expectation that decision-making and programme design by humanitarian agencies should be evidence-based. However, the pressures on today’s humanitarian practitioners to deliver assistance at great speed and often according to predefined goals, methods and targets provide little space for analysis, reflection and investigation. As a result there is a division within our community between those who are employed to ‘think’ and those who are employed to ‘do’. This…