Urban Competency Framework

With the increasing growth and vulnerability of cities to natural and manmade disasters, there is a growing need to adapt humanitarian expertise to urban crises. One key factor that has challenged effective humanitarian response in urban contexts has been the lack of sufficient personnel with the appropriate knowledge and skill sets for working in urban settings.

The newly developed Urban Competency Framework will address this need by providing the minimum standards of competency required for an effective humanitarian urban response. This includes both guidelines to soliciting the support of non-humanitarian professionals, as well as competency standards required of humanitarian actors deployed to urban crises settings.

Urban Competency Framework is produced through funding provided to the International Rescue Committee from EU Humanitarian Aid (ECHO). It is part of a wider project for the Global Alliance for Urban Crises (GAUC) entitled ‘Developing the skills to meet the needs of urban populations in crises through the alliance of urban responders.

The competency framework will draw from other successful competency frameworks, such as the Core Humanitarian Competencies Framework, to avoid duplicative messaging and ensure uptake, clarity, and ease of use.

By building consensus around the competency framework through consultation, the aim is to create a robust document that is useful to non-humanitarian and humanitarian actors and includes relevant expertise from a variety of sectors that do not typically collaborate on such resources. The consultation and development of the framework will help to identify where there are skills gaps, and how these could be addressed by recruitment based upon specific competencies and/or further refinement of existing training and capacity building.