Grand Bargain transparency workstream co-convenors, the World Bank Group and the Government of the Netherlands have today launched the new IATI Humanitarian Data Portal to support greater transparency of humanitarian assistance. The portal enables users to explore the humanitarian assistance provided by some of the world’s largest donors and humanitarian organisations.
As part of its Grand Bargain commitment and approach to ensure people and communities affected by crises influence humanitarian responses, IFRC has been championing its real-time community feedback mechanism during the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They gathered more than half a million individual insights (ranging from feedback, rumours, concerns and misconceptions) from affected people in less than two years – and acted upon them.
Today the humanitarian community launched the COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan to enable us to fight the virus in the world’s poorest countries, and address the needs of the most vulnerable people, especially women and children, older people, and those with disabilities or chronic illness.
Workstream 4 (Reduce duplication and management costs with periodic functional reviews), co-convened by the Government of Japan and UNHCR, is conducting an Independent Review of Individual Donor Assessments on Humanitarian Operations. Financed by the Government of Japan and carried out by GPPi, the review will map scope and variety of individual donor assessments covering ICRC, UNICEF, UNHCR, OCHA and WFP. The review will also look into the effects of these assessments on partners using selected country case studies.
Workstream 6 (Participation Revolution) organized two briefings in recent weeks to provide updates on the workstream activities, including progress on implementing the agreed 2019-2020 Workplan:
Aligning donor approaches to accountability to affected people
The Grand Bargain calls for aid organisations and donors to increase multi-year humanitarian planning and funding. However, the extent to which progress is being made remains unclear. Existing data sources – including the Grand Bargain self-reporting process, the Financial Tracking Service (FTS) of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and independent research – do not currently provide a clear picture of the quantity of multi-year funding passing through the humanitarian system.
On 14 January 2020, the Accelerating Localisation through Partnerships programme (led by Christian Aid) and the Humanitarian Policy Group of ODI hosted a closed-door roundtable under Chatham House Rule to discuss the challenges for large INGOs without a traditional partnership approach to move towards partnerships in humanitarian contexts. This discussion took place within the framework of on-going efforts by the humanitarian system to support more local and locally-led humanitarian action.
The Global Education Cluster (GEC) held a workshop on localisation in Geneva, Switzerland, 17 – 21 February, 2020, with participation from the new members of its Strategic Advisory Group (SAG). The new members of SAG represent local and national NGOs (L/NNGO) from 7 countries with an existing education cluster.
Please see the summary report of the workshop below.
