Celebrity Media Editor's Note: The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has emailed us to report on the progress of their flagship initiative, which was launched in 2023. The initiative aims to reimagine a sustainable and ethical humanitarian system that is prepared to face the new realities of increasingly complex challenges. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs will shift towards a community-centered coordination and response structure.
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has just released the first status update of the initiative, which assesses the work in the four pilot countries - Colombia, Niger, the Philippines, and South Sudan. Please see the report we have reprinted below..
Reimagining humanitarian action
Humanitarian emergencies are becoming more frequent, complex, and protracted. At the same time, the humanitarian operating environment is becoming more resource-constrained, uncertain, and complex.
In 2023, the Flagship Initiative was launched to reimagine a sustainable and ethical humanitarian system, one ready to face the new reality of increasingly complex challenges. The movement aims to deliver solutions and build resilience by ensuring the priorities of crisis-affected communities drive humanitarian assistance. Systematically engaging communities by localizing humanitarian decision-making, empowering local partners, and putting community priorities, capacities, risks, and resilience at the heart of humanitarian programming, the initiative seeks to create the space for a more holistic, community-driven, and sustainable humanitarian system.
The pilot countries
Colombia, Niger, the Philippines, and South Sudan were chosen to pilot the initiative. Since mid-2023, these OCHA country teams have engaged stakeholders in the humanitarian system, including donors, governments, partners, and communities, to promote the shift towards a community-centric coordination and response structure. By fostering continuous dialogue, the team sought to work with communities and effectively capture their priorities, align humanitarian efforts with these priorities, encourage humanitarian leaders to rethink response strategies from the ground up, and sensitize governments and partners to a coordination structure that works directly with communities and a wider set of cross-sectoral actors.
“We want you to recognize us, listen to us, understand us. We want to be equal partners to co-construct interventions.”– Community member at a community engagement activity in Colombia, November 2023.
Despite the diverse contexts in the four pilot countries, five common themes, which will inform the evolution of the initiative throughout 2024, emerged as core drivers for the transformation of humanitarian response: systematic and participatory community engagement, area-based decentralized coordination, support for local initiatives, direct funding to local entities, and community-prioritized humanitarian planning.
The approach
- Community Engagement: The cornerstone of the Flagship Initiative is systematic participatory community engagement. The approach varies across countries but consistently focuses on understanding community priorities, capacities, risks, and resilience and adapting programming accordingly.
- Decentralized Coordination: By moving staff to regions facing crises and integrating local, often non-traditional humanitarian actors and local government in coordination mechanisms, this approach fosters robust collaboration at the local level.
- Empowering Local Initiatives: Recognizing the value of local knowledge and capacities, the Flagship Initiative prioritizes local partners, includes them in humanitarian decision-making, and seeks to both bolster and harness their capacities.
- Direct Funding: A critical aspect of the Flagship Initiative is to effectively channel funding to local actors. OCHA has been exploring the establishment of pooled funds specifically for this purpose.
- Rethinking Planning and Programming: Evidence suggests that current humanitarian response plans don’t effectively serve community priorities because they distort community needs by analysing them through the lens of the humanitarian system. To reduce the bureaucratic burden of humanitarian planning and programming and reframe this around community priorities, each pilot country is looking at ways to develop programmes and response plans that focus on delivering solutions to community priorities.
Learning and evaluation: Understanding and adapting
The Flagship Initiative is an exploratory process: some approaches will work, others will not. The aim is to understand why and, where desirable, how approaches can be replicated and brought to scale. To do so, an external rigorous learning and evaluation function has been engaged to support pilot countries to learn from setbacks, identify promising new approaches, and develop them for replication in other contexts. The first evaluation report will be published in March 2024.