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Self Report 2017

The self-report on WHS Commitments below is organized according to the 24 transformations of the Agenda for Humanity. It is based on commitments pledged at the time of report submission. Click on the 'Expand' symbol to expand each section and read the reporting inputs by transformation.

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3D
Empower and protect women and girls

Core Commitment

  • Commitment
  • Core Responsibility
  • Ensure that humanitarian programming is gender responsive.
  • Leave No One Behind

  • What led your organization to make the commitment?

    The CHS Alliance aligned to this core commitment because it aligns with its own vision (and that of our members) of a humanitarian response that is more responsive and accounts for the diversity of needs people affected by crisis are faced. We wanted this commitment to help us bring more visibility and momentum to specific actions we will take within the context of our ongoing work to influence policy and practice on the issue of gender in humanitarian response.

  • Achievements at a glance

    -The Director of CHS Alliance, in line with this commitment has become a gender champion in the Geneva network.
    -The CHS Alliance has built a gender and diversity index within its CHS self-assessment tool. This will provide members who undertake the assessment to have a clear understanding of any shortcomings they have with regards to their policies or practice as it relates to gender and diversity. The index is user-friendly because it does not require additional work; it only uses indicators found in the various sections of the self-assessment to produce a score on gender and diversity. We have about 15 organisations who have completed the self-assessment to date, and expect another 80 to go through either the self-assessment or another option of the verification framework by the end of 2017.
    -Discussions with GenCAP advisers continue to explore synergies between the gender marker tool and the CHS.

  • How is your organization assessing progress

    Progress is assessed via the annual reports required by the Geneva gender champion network. Additionally, the results of the CHS self-assessment, including the data related to gender and diversity will be made available at an aggregated level by CHS Alliance, allowing to see what is the baseline for a significant proportion of agencies. With time, we will be able to see progress as an organisations needs to devise an improvement plan after the self assessment which is conducted every two years.

  • Challenges faced in implementation

    As we are aware of the limited resources available for us but also our members, we have tried to build synergies so that efforts do not represent a lot of additional work. It is however a challenge sometimes to advocate for the synergies between different crosscutting issues when individual initiatives would rather maintain their singularity for visibility and fundraising purposes. In the next phase, having solid enough evidence to demonstrate impact, for example, will also be a challenge.

  • Next step to advance implementation in 2017

    In relation to the CHS self-assessment, tools are now available and the next steps are mostly related to building the platform that will allow the visualization of data, support our members to take the self-assessment, encourage organisations outside of our membership to follow suit and then analyse and use the data for advocacy purposes where relevant.

  • If you had one message for the annual report on what is most needed to advance the transformation 'Empower and protect women and girls', what would it be

    Aim to make the right behaviour a little bit easier, and the wrong behaviour a little bit more difficult.

  • Cross cutting issues

    ☑Accountability to affected people ☑ Gender

  • Other related Agenda for Humanity transformations

    ☑3D - Empower and protect women and girls ☑ 4A - Reinforce, do not replace, national and local systems

4A
Reinforce, do not replace, national and local systems

Joint Commitment

  • Commitment
  • Commitment Type
  • Core Responsibility
  • The CHS Alliance - over 240 national and international organisations working in more than 160 countries - commits to adopting, using and monitoring the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS), with the objective of making humanitarian action more appropriate, effective, and responsive to the needs of people and communities affected by crises through carrying out a self assessment by end of 2017.
  • Policy
  • Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
Partners: Members of the CHS Alliance - over 240 national and international organisations working in more than 160 countries

Individual Commitment

  • Commitment
  • Commitment Type
  • Core Responsibility
  • CHS Alliance commits to establishing a common approach to providing information to affected people and collecting, aggregating and analysing feedback from communities to influence decision-making processes at strategic and operational levels.
  • Operational
  • Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need

Core Commitment

  • Commitment
  • Core Responsibility
  • Commit to a new way of working that meets people's immediate humanitarian needs, while at the same time reducing risk and vulnerability over multiple years through the achievement of collective outcomes. To achieve this, commit to the following: a) Anticipate, Do Not Wait: to invest in risk analysis and to incentivize early action in order to minimize the impact and frequency of known risks and hazards on people. b) Reinforce, Do Not Replace: to support and invest in local, national and regional leadership, capacity strengthening and response systems, avoiding duplicative international mechanisms wherever possible. c) Preserve and retain emergency capacity: to deliver predictable and flexible urgent and life-saving assistance and protection in accordance with humanitarian principles. d) Transcend Humanitarian-Development Divides: work together, toward collective outcomes that ensure humanitarian needs are met, while at the same time reducing risk and vulnerability over multiple years and based on the comparative advantage of a diverse range of actors. The primacy of humanitarian principles will continue to underpin humanitarian action.
  • Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
  • Commit to reinforce national and local leadership and capacities in managing disaster and climate-related risks through strengthened preparedness and predictable response and recovery arrangements.
  • Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
  • Commit to increase investment in building community resilience as a critical first line of response, with the full and effective participation of women.
  • Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
  • Commit to ensure regional and global humanitarian assistance for natural disasters complements national and local efforts.
  • Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need

  • What led your organization to make the commitment?

    These two individual commitments represent the heart of the CHS Alliance mandate, with a vision to make humanitarian response less supply driven and more demand driven. With the Core Humanitarian Standard, we want, with other members of the CHS management group (Sphere and Groupe URD) to influence the practice of our own stakeholders in order to ensure humanitarian responses based on communication, participation and feedback on the one hand, and aim to have humanitarian response that is appropriate, relevant, effective and timely on the other hand.

  • Achievements at a glance

    A key achievement was the recognition for the Core Humanitarian Standard at the WHS and in the Grand Bargain. Some actions worth mentioning include:
    - Support provided to the Humanitarian Country Team in DRC through OCHA, with the objective to operationalise the CHS in the way collective response is planned and delivered. Perception surveys have been introduced, and accountability is central in the strategy of the humanitarian response plan.
    - All members of the CHS alliance will conduct a self-assessment against the nine commitments of the CHS by end of 2017, getting clear direction on area as they need to improve in order to be more responsive to the needs of people they aim to assist.
    - The CHS Alliance is part of the advisory group supporting the creation of a common approach to engaging with communities under the leadership of UNICEF, OCHA and IFRC.

  • How is your organization assessing progress

    As in the case of gender, the CHS Alliance has developed a self-assessment that allows its members and any other organisation to assess the degree to which it complies with the requirements of the standard, including from the perspective of people and communities affected by crisis. We anticipate that close to a hundred organisations will have completed the self-assessment by end of 2017 and will be able to get a visual representation of their performance with detailed analysis functions, including benchmarking against the score of similar organisations.

  • Challenges faced in implementation

    Resources are an issue when it comes to producing tools, data and analysis studies solid and useful but we are doing our best to produce systems that are sustainable and cost-effective. We are working hard to develop synergies with other parts of the Grand Bargain in particular but it takes a lot of discussion and advocacy to get there.

  • Next step to advance implementation in 2017

    The CHS Alliance will step up use of the CHS self-assessment and aim to reach close to a hundred organisations completing the process, being ready to work on areas they need to improve as well as sharing their experiences in good practice to help their peers improve their own ways of working. The CHS Alliance will also continue to support the development of tools and approaches that help aid workers better account for the feedback of people affected by crisis. Finally, we will adapt the CHS self-assessment for donors to ensure they really enable their partners' ability to be responsive.

  • If you had one message for the annual report on what is most needed to advance the transformation 'Reinforce, do not replace, national and local systems', what would it be

    Getting aid organisations to better listen to communities affected by crisis and involve them in the decisions at every stage of the response is a change of mindset which requires efforts that go beyond just sharing good practice. Success on this front will only happen if we carefully engineer change.

  • Cross cutting issues

    ☑Accountability to affected people ☑ People-centred approach

  • Specific initiatives

    ☑Charter on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action ☑ Grand Bargain

  • Other related Agenda for Humanity transformations

    ☑4A - Reinforce, do not replace, national and local systems

4B
Anticipate, do not wait, for crises

Core Commitment

  • Commitment
  • Core Responsibility
  • Commit to a new way of working that meets people's immediate humanitarian needs, while at the same time reducing risk and vulnerability over multiple years through the achievement of collective outcomes. To achieve this, commit to the following: a) Anticipate, Do Not Wait: to invest in risk analysis and to incentivize early action in order to minimize the impact and frequency of known risks and hazards on people. b) Reinforce, Do Not Replace: to support and invest in local, national and regional leadership, capacity strengthening and response systems, avoiding duplicative international mechanisms wherever possible. c) Preserve and retain emergency capacity: to deliver predictable and flexible urgent and life-saving assistance and protection in accordance with humanitarian principles. d) Transcend Humanitarian-Development Divides: work together, toward collective outcomes that ensure humanitarian needs are met, while at the same time reducing risk and vulnerability over multiple years and based on the comparative advantage of a diverse range of actors. The primacy of humanitarian principles will continue to underpin humanitarian action.
  • Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need
  • Commit to improve the understanding, anticipation and preparedness for disaster and climate-related risks by investing in data, analysis and early warning, and developing evidence-based decision-making processes that result in early action.
  • Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need

  • What led your organization to make the commitment?

    In terms of preparedness, localisation and bridging the humanitarian - development gap, the CHS Alliance decided to come to action because its membership is reflective of different groups, national and international NGOs as well as organisations who only work on humanitarian issues or development issues as well as those who are dual mandated. With this commitment, we hope to better leverage the diversity of experiences that our members have. Commitment 3 of the CHS in particular is relevant to this theme.

  • Achievements at a glance

    During this period, the CHS Alliance maintained engagement with the ALERT project of the Start network, where the Core Humanitarian Standard has been used as a basis to define preparedness measures to be taken at country level by organisations active in the given context. Thanks to its online platform, information from different organisations can be aggregated to identified the degree of preparedness at the country level, allowing to identify and address gaps and speed up the response. In the context of the CHS self-assessment, we have also developed a localisation index which will help organisations to identify any weaknesses in terms of how the support local capacity and make it easier to identify areas that need to be addressed.

  • How is your organization assessing progress

    The main way for us to assess progress is again through the CHS self-assessment, which once it has been completed by our members and other interested organisations will provide us with objective, evidence-based data on the performance of the sector in terms of its efforts to support local capacity, something that will serve as a baseline against which progress will be assessed once organisations go through a second round of self-assessment two years after the first one.

  • Challenges faced in implementation

    Supporting members going through a self-assessment is a resource intensive process and with limited resources, it does take time to move forward. Even though we have a network of members around the world, given our size and being based in Geneva, it is sometimes more challenging to be able to meaningfully engage with national NGOs in their country. The efforts to better integrate national NGOs in global processes can also have a perverse effect as they do not always have the capacity to attend the many meetings such processes come with.

  • Next step to advance implementation in 2017

    In 2017, we will adapt the CHS self-assessment for organisations working in development contexts, adapting the wording in particular to better reflect their own circumstances. We will continue supporting members going through self-assessment and make results available, in particular when it comes to the various indexes, including the localisation index. We will also continue to accompany the ALERT projects as it moves towards implementation phase.

  • If you had one message for the annual report on what is most needed to advance the transformation 'Anticipate, do not wait, for crises', what would it be

    Getting the aid system to better work with national responders will require a change of mindset. Success on this front will only happen if we carefully engineer change, and support these efforts through very strong, persistent advocacy.

  • Cross cutting issues

    ☑Country-based pooled funds ☑ Disaster Risk Reduction

  • Specific initiatives

    ☑Charter for Change ☑ NEAR - Network for Empowered Aid Response

  • Other related Agenda for Humanity transformations

    ☑4A - Reinforce, do not replace, national and local systems ☑ 4B - Anticipate, do not wait, for crises

4C
Deliver collective outcomes: transcend humanitarian-development divides

Core Commitment

  • Commitment
  • Core Responsibility
  • Commit to a new way of working that meets people's immediate humanitarian needs, while at the same time reducing risk and vulnerability over multiple years through the achievement of collective outcomes. To achieve this, commit to the following: a) Anticipate, Do Not Wait: to invest in risk analysis and to incentivize early action in order to minimize the impact and frequency of known risks and hazards on people. b) Reinforce, Do Not Replace: to support and invest in local, national and regional leadership, capacity strengthening and response systems, avoiding duplicative international mechanisms wherever possible. c) Preserve and retain emergency capacity: to deliver predictable and flexible urgent and life-saving assistance and protection in accordance with humanitarian principles. d) Transcend Humanitarian-Development Divides: work together, toward collective outcomes that ensure humanitarian needs are met, while at the same time reducing risk and vulnerability over multiple years and based on the comparative advantage of a diverse range of actors. The primacy of humanitarian principles will continue to underpin humanitarian action.
  • Change People's Lives: From Delivering Aid to Ending Need

  • What led your organization to make the commitment?

    As the CHS Alliance is not an operational organization, our answers to 4C and are the same as the report on 4B.

  • Achievements at a glance

    See report on 4B

  • How is your organization assessing progress

    See report on 4B

  • Challenges faced in implementation

    See report on 4B

  • Next step to advance implementation in 2017

    See report on 4B

  • If you had one message for the annual report on what is most needed to advance the transformation 'Deliver collective outcomes: transcend humanitarian-development divides', what would it be

    See report on 4B

  • Other related Agenda for Humanity transformations

    ☑4B - Anticipate, do not wait, for crises