My Five Takeaways from the Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Week 2020

07 February 2020 Jo de Serrano

Jo de Serrano

Jo is RedR UK's CEO and has worked in international development for almost 20 years, working tirelessly to deliver the best emergency responses in the most pressing humanitarian crises.

The Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Week (HNPW) is the largest humanitarian event of its kind gathering participants from the UN, NGOs, Member States, the private sector, the military, academia and beyond to discuss and solve common challenges in humanitarian affairs. I’ve been at the HNPW for five days and here are my key takeaways, one for every day of the event.

1. Disability. There has been a perceptible shift in how the humanitarian community is addressing disability issues, including presentation of the IASC Disability Guidelines. Organisations now need to further mainstream disability and other inclusion needs in their programming. RedR UK’s Gender, Age and Disability course seeks to address some of these issues. Subsribe to our newsletter to know when the next course will take place in 2020.

2. Climate change and the environment are taking a front seat, with sessions throughout the week. A big shout out to Madeleine O'Brien, Jenna Davis and Devin Osborne, Masters students at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies who presented their work on climate focused humanitarian programmes and government donor expenditure for climate change-related activities.

3. Being accountable to the communities we serve is critical, and the HNPW chose this as one of their key themes. Gone are the days when you get what your given, like it or lump it, the time is now for all to embrace community engagement and accountability in their programming, involving communities in decisions and creating proper feedback and complaints mechanisms. Loop could enable that feedback.

4. Localisation. What does it mean in practice? How do we localise at scale? How does it work in cluster coordination? All important questions which were grappled with during the week. It was great to see the successes and that local capacity is now growing, but it’s not a one way street, we have lots to learn from local organisations as well and we need to keep up the pressure on donors to fund the building of local capacity or progress will be slow.

5. Reporting. Grand Bargain workstream nine on simplification and harmonisation in reporting. Signatories should now adopt the finalised template to implement their own individual Grand Bargain commitments. The new 8+3 template is ready to be scaled up. If more adopt the template, the reporting burden will decrease system wide.

One last thought, the #HNPW2020 continues to be a great place to learn, share and connect. Jesper Holmer Lund wish you had been there.