Virtual Dialogue Series: Accountability - who is accountable to whom?

When: October 15, 2020
What time: 11AM (Geneva, Switzerland time)
Where: ZOOM – Link to be shared
Language: English
How long: 90 minutes
Who is it for: Humanitarian and development practitioners working with NGOs, INGOs, UN agencies and academic institutes Format: Presentation & Discussion
Panelists will make a five-minute presentation that will be followed by questions and answers, providing a space for participants to ask questions.

Background and Purpose:

Accountability to affected populations has been a long-standing discussion in the aid sector. During the World Humanitarian summit in 2016 there was a renewed call to accelerate progress. Commitment 6 of the Grand Bargain urges humanitarian actors to enable a ‘participation revolution’ i.e. “include people receiving aid in decisions which affect their lives”. The Common Humanitarian Standard encourages humanitarian actors to create situations where “communities and people affected by crisis know their rights and entitlements, have access to information and participate in decisions that affect them.”

What is becoming more evident for local actors is that Accountability to Affected Populations can only become possible when there is Principled Partnership which creates mutually trustful environment and where accountability is not one-way, but two- ways – not only upward but downward as well. And it requires behavioural change from both partners. Principled Partnership means co-designing; co-creating processes with partners and the community.

Localisation is not only about the transfer of more resources to local actors but requires revolutionary change in the systems and processes to enable real participation of the major stakeholders in decision-making of aid. It is about power and it is about challenging the barriers that perpetuates power imbalance brought about by centuries of unequal relationships in the power structures. The formalistic complaints and response mechanisms and other accountability mechanisms are not adequate enough to address the more deep-seated problems, attitudes, behaviour and mind-sets. We need to establish a more conscious culture of accountability.

The webinar will help to explore:

• Who is accountable to whom?
• What needs to shift to improve partnership to deliver accountability to affected populations?
• How do we deal with the deeper-rooted issues of PSEA?
• How can we create a more conscious culture of accountability?

For more information, please click here.

To Register please follow this link.

ABOUT THE VIRTUAL DIALOGUE SERIES

Members of Alliance for Empowering Partnership are inviting you to a dialogue series, supported by Community World Services Asia and, KUNO (Platform for Humanitarian Knowledge Exchange) and in collaboration with other international and local platforms to contribute to the body of alternative knowledge. 

There are small and large humanitarian disaster all around the world. Normally, it is the local authorities together with Civil Society actors and the citizens who are the first and longer-term responders to those disasters. Their work, however, remains under acknowledged and unrecognised and unsupported. This dialogue series hopes to create alternative knowledge.

In these dialogues, we will hear from the local actors and their partners about their experiences of localisation in practice. Why do we call it a dialogue? We see this as a conversation or discussion to resolve problems. Our focus is to talk about issues of inequities in the aid system and solutions and way forward.

Please find more information here.