Participants were invited to make individual or joint commitments to help achieve the Agenda for Humanity. In addition, they were invited to align themselves to 32 core commitments developed for the 7 High-level Leaders’ Roundtables of the World Humanitarian Summit. Each stakeholders commitments are organized by commitment type in the table below.
2A
Respect and protect civilians and civilian objects in the conduct of hostilities
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
- Save the Children commits to continue working with schools and communities in conflict or post-conflict situations to advocate against the targeting of schools for attack or using schools for military purposes.
- Advocacy
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
- Save the Children commits to playing a lead role in identifying and responding to capacity-building needs among humanitarian practitioners, and in developing sustainable approaches to embedding child protection competencies among national disaster management and social welfare workforces in priority countries.
- Capacity
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
Save the Children reaffirms and strengthens its commitment to ensuring that its humanitarian policy and practice recognise child protection as a life-saving intervention, and to prioritising this across all its humanitarian action, including in the first phase of an emergency response.
- Policy
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
2B
Ensure full access to and protection of the humanitarian and medical missions
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
- Save the Children commits to strengthen and systematically use the best interest of the child both as a principle and as a tool in its programmatic interventions to ensure that every individual child is supported and cared for according to his or her identified needs, ensuring that unaccompanied and separated children receive priority attention and response in its programmes.
- Operational
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
Save the Children commits to strengthened engagement with existing child rights systems in humanitarian contexts, including children's ombudspersons and inter-ministerial coordination mechanisms, to ensure a holistic and accountable response to address boys' and girls' needs in humanitarian crises.
- Partnership
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
Save the Children commits to taking the first turn at being the NGO co-lead of the new Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action, and to use this position to forge close links between this group and the Global Partnership to End Violence against Children, including sharing of lessons learned.
- Partnership
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
Save the Children commits to working with others to build and disseminate evidence on social protection mechanisms that are able to adapt quickly to address the needs of at-risk children and households in humanitarian crises - for example, by being linked to early warning systems.
- Operational
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
- Save the Children reaffirms its commitment through the Social Protection Inter-agency Coordination Board to support national governments to develop and scale-up sustainable social protection systems, including in humanitarian contexts, to protect those suffering chronic poverty and deprivation, as well as those affected by humanitarian crises, particularly children, and those facing discrimination on the basis of, for example, gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity.
- Partnership
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
2C
Speak out on violations
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
- Save the Children reaffirms its commitment to speak out and advocate on behalf of the children in need of humanitarian assistance when existing mechanisms fail to address their needs adequately.
- Advocacy
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
2D
Take concrete steps to improve compliance and accountability
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
- Save the Children commits to advocate for Member States and other actors to uphold existing rules and standards and to integrate such standards into national-level legislation and policy.
- Advocacy
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
Save the Children commits to promote commitments on the Call to Action on Protection from Gender-Based Violence in Emergencies and its Roadmap within its own humanitarian work, as well as national and international policy platforms where Save the Children is involved.
- Advocacy
- Uphold the Norms that Safeguard Humanity
3A
Reduce and address displacement
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
- Save the Children commits to develop new partnerships to encourage innovative approaches to support the self-reliance of refugees and IDPs, through seeking funding for programmatic responses on child protection, education, health and livelihoods; through participation and civic engagement; and through encouraging investment that facilitates access to livelihoods for refugees and host communities.
- Partnership
- Leave No One Behind
Save the Children commits to scale up programmatic responses to forcibly displaced children and youth, and to all children on the move, in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, working across institutional divides and mandates, and in multi-year frameworks to achieve clear outcomes.
- Operational
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children commits to support increased capacities and resilience of host communities and of formal and informal existing systems to quickly adapt to influxes of refugee and internally displaced families and children, guarantee that they access dignified reception, good-quality health services, livelihood opportunities and long-term solutions.
- Operational
- Leave No One Behind
Save the Children commits to support access to child and gender-sensitive social protection for conflict-affected, internally displaced and refugee children and youth, including economic security to meet basic needs; and legal, social and economic opportunities to access education, healthcare, livelihoods, labour markets, and protection from violence and exploitation, without discrimination and in a manner that also supports host communities.
- Operational
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children commits to support additional and expedited pathways for admission of refugees, including resettlement and humanitarian admission, family reunification, private sponsorship, labour mobility and educational opportunities.
- Policy
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children commits to support legal rights to a secure stay in host countries including through adequate, safe and dignified reception conditions and robust registration, including birth registration.
- Policy
- Leave No One Behind
Save the Children commits to support the development of national legislation, policy, strategies and capacities for the protection of conflict-affected IDP and refugee children and youth. This will include supporting and advocating for coordinated policies and practices between countries of origin, transit and destination in at least three key migration corridors and addressing discrimination on the basis of gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality and nationality.
- Policy
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children commits to support the provision of access to good-quality education for all internally displaced and refugee boys and girls equally, and to advocate for this to take place within one month of displacement.
- Policy
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children will advocate for a reduction of the key drivers of displacement, including through enhanced programming that reduces these drivers. Advocacy will be carried out through a range of initiatives, including promotion of the Safe Schools Declaration and broader work within the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack; advocacy work on the grave violations against children and gender-based violence and support for the Children and Armed Conflict agenda and Call to Action on Protection from Gender-based Violence in Emergencies initiative and roadmap; documentation within the International Network on Explosive Weapons of the harm caused by the use of explosive weapons in populated areas and the work towards a political declaration to reduce such harm; promotion of international humanitarian law; promotion of concrete action on Security Council Resolution 2242 [2015].
- Advocacy
- Leave No One Behind
Core Commitment
- Commitment
- Core Responsibility
- Commit to a new approach to addressing forced displacement that not only meets immediate humanitarian needs but reduces vulnerability and improves the resilience, self-reliance and protection of refugees and IDPs. Commit to implementing this new approach through coherent international, regional and national efforts that recognize both the humanitarian and development challenges of displacement. Commit to take the necessary political, policy, legal and financial steps required to address these challenges for the specific context.
- Leave No One Behind
- Commit to promote and support safe, dignified and durable solutions for internally displaced persons and refugees. Commit to do so in a coherent and measurable manner through international, regional and national programs and by taking the necessary policy, legal and financial steps required for the specific contexts and in order to work towards a target of 50 percent reduction in internal displacement by 2030.
- Leave No One Behind
- Acknowledge the global public good provided by countries and communities which are hosting large numbers of refugees. Commit to providing communities with large numbers of displaced population or receiving large numbers of returnees with the necessary political, policy and financial, support to address the humanitarian and socio-economic impact. To this end, commit to strengthen multilateral financing instruments. Commit to foster host communities' self-reliance and resilience, as part of the comprehensive and integrated approach outlined in core commitment 1.
- Leave No One Behind
- Commit to collectively work towards a Global Compact on responsibility-sharing for refugees to safeguard the rights of refugees, while also effectively and predictably supporting States affected by such movements.
- Leave No One Behind
- Commit to actively work to uphold the institution of asylum and the principle of non-refoulement. Commit to support further accession to and strengthened implementation of national, regional and international laws and policy frameworks that ensure and improve the protection of refugees and IDPs, such as the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol or the AU Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa (Kampala convention) or the Guiding Principles on internal displacement.
- Leave No One Behind
3D
Empower and protect women and girls
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
- Save the Children commit to building the knowledge of its staff on standards, guidelines and principles applicable to protection, gender, age, disability-sensitive programming, and where appropriate, building specialist skills to address gender inequality, as well as the needs of other vulnerable groups.
- Training
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children commit to using humanitarian assessments, project monitoring and evaluations to collect data that is, at a minimum, disaggregated by sex and age, and incorporates gender, age and disability considerations utilising IASC gender guidelines, IASC GBV guidelines, Child Protection Minimum Standards, and Age and Disability Minimum Standards.
- Operational
- Leave No One Behind
Save the Children commit to working with others to develop cross-agency mechanisms to empower women, adolescent girls and other vulnerable groups to participate meaningfully in programme design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation and to adapting programmes based on feedback received through these processes. It will participate in formal and informal decision-making structures and processes, including assessments, community committees, monitoring and feedback within Save the Children's humanitarian responses.
- Operational
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children commits to designing humanitarian programmes that are gender-sensitive as a minimum and based on data disaggregated by age and sex, and to ensuring that programmes target the needs of vulnerable groups, even at the expense of a more costly or complex response.
- Operational
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children commits to develop, document and share learning from innovative gender transformative pilot projects to promote the empowerment of women and girls and engage men and boys as part of the solution, in order to address the root causes of gender inequality and prevent and respond to gender-based violence in crisis settings by 2020.
- Operational
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children reaffirms its commitment to delivery of the Minimum Initial Services Package for reproductive health, family planning and post-abortion care within 48 hours of an emergency, and ensure safe, gender-sensitive, adolescent-friendly and ethical referral linkages to legal, psychosocial, protection and livelihood services for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.
- Operational
- Leave No One Behind
3E
Eliminate gaps in education for children, adolescents and young people
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
Save the Children commits to being the first agency to formally endorse the Key Principles of Community-Based Safe School Construction; it commits that for every classroom it substantially remodels or rebuilds, Save the Children will adhere to these principles, including by meeting "life safety" standards
- Policy
- Leave No One Behind
Save the Children commits to continue to lead civil society engagement relating to the establishment of the Education Cannot Wait Initiative, and work to ensure ongoing civil society engagement and buy-in.
- Partnership
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children commits to playing a lead role in building the programming and coordination capacity of education in emergencies practitioners and education authorities to respond to humanitarian crises effectively and in line with the Minimum Standards for Education in Emergencies.
- Capacity
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children reaffirms and strengthens its commitment to ensuring that its humanitarian policy and practice recognise education as a life-saving and life-sustaining intervention, and to prioritising the provision of safe, good-quality and inclusive education before, during and after emergencies.
- Policy
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children reaffirms its commitment to co-leading the Global Education Cluster and working with coordination staff and partners at the global, national and sub-national levels to strengthen response capacity and the transition to recovery.
- Partnership
- Leave No One Behind
3F
Enable adolescents and young people to be agents of positive transformation
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
- Save the Children commits to address the specific needs of adolescents and youth in humanitarian crises, building on their strengths and assets, and supporting them as essential contributors to development and peace.
- Operational
- Leave No One Behind
- Save the Children commits to promoting meaningful engagement with children and youth as a mandatory component of humanitarian preparedness and response, accounting for and addressing discrimination on the basis of gender, age and other grounds. In major emergency responses, wherever possible it will conduct formal consultations with children and young people, ideally in partnership with other child-focused organisations and government counterparts. It will ensure that these consultations inform our programming and advocacy, involve children where appropriate in implementing their recommendations, and where possible provide children and youth with feedback on the way in which their recommendations have been taken forward.
- Partnership
- Leave No One Behind
4A
Reinforce, do not replace, national and local systems
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
- Save the Children commits to develop mechanisms for expanded coverage of health services within national social safety nets and other social protection mechanisms, including health insurance schemes, so as to meet the essential health needs of all populations, including refugees and IDPs, as soon as possible in a crisis, and in line with the global health cluster guidance on advocating for suspension of user-fees in the acute phase of a crisis.
- Operational
- Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
- Save the Children commits to working with governments and humanitarian and development actors to scale-up and better coordinate cash transfers in humanitarian interventions, in a way that responds to needs across sectors and enables cash transfers eventually to be integrated with or developed into social protection systems. Through this work it will build the capacity of local and national actors, particularly governments.
- Operational
- Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
Save the Children commits to strengthen local and national health systems, in particular to manage risks, contain outbreaks, provide training for health responders, and build up national rapid response capabilities. It will continue to intervene directly in exceptional circumstances as needed, including through its standby Emergency Health Unit, deployable within 72 hours to rapid-onset, large-scale emergencies. Save the Children will endeavour to respond through support for existing public services and community capacity/resilience networks rather than undertaking parallel action
- Operational
- Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
Save the Children commits to working toward CHS certification and to continuously strengthen quality and accountability standards across our humanitarian responses.
- Policy
- Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
4C
Deliver collective outcomes: transcend humanitarian-development divides
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
Save the Children commits to improve international coordination of humanitarian action through active participation and advocacy within the IASC global health cluster, the inter-cluster system and other coordination mechanisms. This includes working together with WHO, national ministries of health, other members of the Health Cluster, and other appropriate and interested parties in order to hold WHO to account and to occupy an appropriate place in the response to humanitarian emergencies with important health consequences.
- Partnership
- Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
- Save the Children commits to work continuously across the emergency-development spectrum. It will transition programmes responsibly, consulting with local and national stakeholders as it evolves the intensity of its support and the relative emphasis on different system-building blocks in response to changes in the operating environment.
- Operational
- Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
5A
Invest in local capacities
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
- Save the Children commits to a global target for the proportion of funds to be directed to national and local actors.
- Financial
- Invest in Humanity
Save the Children commits to providing financial, technical and human resources to initiatives aimed at building the capacity of local actors, including the Humanitarian Leadership Academy and other partners. Save the Children recognises the considerable strategic value in supporting start-ups with their ability to innovate and positiviely disrupt in a way large organisations are not well placed to do.
- Capacity
- Invest in Humanity
Save the Children commits to undertake humanitarian capacity building work in order to train and strengthen the capacity to respond of our local staff and partners across the globe, especially those located in vulnerable crises affected countries and communities. Save the Children will embrace the potential for innovation in technology-enhanced pedagogy and utilise this in our capacity building work whenever possible.
- Capacity
- Invest in Humanity
5E
Diversify the resource base and increase cost-efficiency
Individual Commitment
- Commitment
- Commitment Type
- Core Responsibility
- As part of the Grand Bargain, Save the Children commits to streamline and harmonise its requirements for partners, namely capacity assessments, funding proposals and reporting requirements. This will include a commitment not to ask more of its partners than what donors ask of it. Consideration should be taken not to let partners take on risks without proper support and/or capacity to manage these.
- Operational
- Invest in Humanity
- As part of the Grand Bargain, Save the Children commits to be transparent about the full costs of humanitarian action, including the resources its transfer to partners, supporting the IATI framework as a suitable methodology.
- Financial
- Invest in Humanity
- As part of the Grand Bargain, Save the Children commits to invest in high-quality assurance to objectively demonstrate its adherence to humanitarian standards and good practices, including how it demonstrates accountability to people affected by crisis.
- Financial
- Invest in Humanity
- As part of the Grand Bargain, Save the Children commits to support more resources to first and frontline responders and more resources to capacity development of first and frontline responders.
- Financial
- Invest in Humanity
- As part of the Grand Bargain, Save the Children commits to use cash as its preferred option where/when appropriate.
- Operational
- Invest in Humanity
Save the Children commits to ongoing membership and hosting of the Start Network as well as management of the Start Fund on the Network's behalf, which will help to ensure responses to crises are managed as effectively and efficiently as possible. The Start Fund provides small-scale grants for small to medium scale emergencies. Commitment to this Fund is paramount to reduce the gap in funding in crises for local agencies to respond.
- Partnership
- Invest in Humanity