Humanitarian Exchange articles tagged:Coordination

The South Sudan NGO Forum is widely recognised as playing a key role in humanitarian coordination in South Sudan. This article identifies key precedents, principles and modalities which may be useful in strengthening NGO coordination in other situations, while recognising that the unique context in South Sudan has shaped the evolution of the Forum. The South Sudan NGO Forum and Secretariat Although the history of the NGO Forum can be traced back to the early 1990s, when it was established to improve NGO representation within Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), the mechanism in place today has changed considerably with the addition…

In natural disasters and complex emergencies, access to high-quality, timely information is a critical precondition for effective aid delivery. Unfortunately, recent crises have exposed the shortcomings of the humanitarian community in rapidly gathering and effectively using information on the key needs and priorities of affected populations. Such shortcomings are largely due to the lack of dedicated interagency resources for the collection, analysis and dissemination of key information. As a result, post-emergency contexts are often characterised by significant gaps. The first gap concerns the emergency phase of a crisis, when the supply of data is insufficient to meet demand. As data…

In November 2011, fighting in Blue Nile State in Sudan led to the flight of some 25,000 refugees to Maban County, in Upper Nile State in South Sudan, where they were settled in two refugee camps, first at Doro and then, from December, at Jamam. More continued to arrive over the subsequent months. Six months later, in May 2012, a second wave of 35,000 refugees arrived, in very bad condition with some dying of dehydration from their journey. After an initial period in transit camps en route, most of this second wave was moved to Jamam camp; new camps were…

Numerous evaluations have highlighted the poor engagement of national and local NGOs within clusters, listing practical concerns such as language, staffing and logistics barriers, but often without a thorough analysis of why national NGOs do not engage, or what their motivations are when they do. Two questions arise. If we focus on the motivating forces behind engagement, can we build better cluster relations with national NGO partners? And by creating a prescriptive format of participation, such as the cluster approach, have we actually created a barrier to true partnership? My research on cluster partner national NGOs from Somalia, Zimbabwe, Myanmar…

Action Against Hunger (ACF-USA) has successfully worked through partnerships in responding to recent large-scale emergencies in Kenya and Pakistan. In addition to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the humanitarian response, working in partnership facilitated a harmonised approach, with agreed programmatic responses, common needs assessments and tailored response analyses. Evaluations have shown that this approach improved coordination and information-sharing among agencies, catalysed debates around different approaches and how to harmonise them and enabled the exchange of technical expertise and lessons learned, not only among partnership members but across the wider humanitarian community. The partnership approach also enabled individual partners to…

Dialogue between military and civilian actors is problematic in Somalia, and no more so than in the southern port city of Kismayo, what was the Islamist group al-Shabaab’s last remaining garrison. Considered the most complex urban space in the country, Kismayo is an important trade centre less than 200km from the Kenyan border, and the ultimate prize for the warring sub-clans in the region. After the fall of Siad Barre in 1991, the city was dominated by a succession of some of Somalia’s most feared warlords, and most recently by al-Shabaab. The liberation of Kismayo, the fulcrum of al-Shabaab’s economic…

Afghanistan has come to be seen as a laboratory for the development of civil–military coordination and informationsharing. However, while numerous information-sharing portals have been established, none has emerged as the single indispensable venue for coordination between civilian organisations and military actors. As this article explains, the limited uptake of such systems reflects three broad challenges: technical problems in the design of information-sharing systems; concerns among civilian organisations that sharing information with the military violates humanitarian principles and puts them at greater risk of attack; and the military’s long-standing restrictions on sharing information. Information-sharing portals for Afghanistan Within Afghanistan, face-to-face coordination…

This article discusses how experience from the 2008 Israeli military operation in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, resulted in important changes to humanitarian civil–military coordination strategies in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). The civil–military component of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is called COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories), a small specialist unit with responsibility for the daily coordination of humanitarian and development activities with the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian population and international organisations in the oPt. COGAT has its own courses and career progression and, unlike many other militaries, which use reserve officers, is staffed by active duty…

International police and Formed Police Units (FPUs) are deployed in a range of contexts and by a range of actors, including the UN, the European Union and the African Union (AU).[1] Their tasks include substituting for national law enforcement actors, empowering or building their capacity and monitoring their performance, as well as joint patrols and co-location with national police forces, crowd control and criminal investigations. These forces have also become increasingly involved in the protection of civilians under threat. This article assesses the experience of the police component of the UN/AU peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID), outlining the challenges it…

In July 2011, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Working Group asked the Task Force on Humanitarian Space and Civil–Military Relations to review and update the IASC Non-binding Guidelines on the Use of Military and Armed Escorts for Humanitarian Convoys (2001). The primary concerns that led to the decision to revise the guidelines were the recognition of a growing reliance on armed escorts, the need to synchronise a more robust decision-making process on the use of armed escorts with the new UN Security Management System (SMS) and inconsistencies in the interpretation and application of the out-of-date guidelines. The revised guidelines, which…