Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluation Steering Group, Coordinated Accountability and Lessons Learning Syria, 2015

On 15 January 2013, the Emergency Relief Coordinator activated a system-wide Level 3 response to the Syria crisis, which triggered a number of activities, including the mandatory conduct of an Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluation (IAHE) within 15 months of the L-3 declaration. However, given the regional dimension of the Syria crisis, its complex political nature and the ongoing conflict, the IAHE Steering Group decided to initiate a joint evaluative effort in lieu of an IAHE. To this end, the Syria CALL Initiative was launched.

To date, the Syria CALL constitutes a unique effort to present an overall picture of the evaluative work conducted by various humanitarian actors of the response to the Syria crisis.

The following activities have been conducted under the Syria CALL initiative to date:

-The Syria Learning Portal (www.syrialearning.org), hosted by ALNAP, is as a central repository of documents on the Syria crisis response, including monitoring reports, reviews, evaluations and other type of studies. Documents are accessible from the Portal for anyone interested. With over 300 documents collected, the Portal has proved an effective tool to facilitate access to a large number of documents on the Syria crisis from a single entry point, and to support other activities under the Syria CALL.

-The Syria CALL Common Context Analysis (CCA) 2014 presents an analysis of the most significant political and humanitarian events that have recently taken place in Syria and the region. Given the fast pace of the Syria crisis, a second report, providing an update of the Common Context Analysis was prepared in 2015 to provide an account of the humanitarian and political events taking place between June 2014 and August 2015. The two CCA reports have been widely cited in other research and studies on the Syria crisis.

- Using the documents collected in the Portal, a mapping exercise identified evaluative materials and offered an overview of evaluation activity on the Syria crisis. These evaluation materials have been used to prepare the Syria CALL Evaluation Synthesis and Gap Analysis (2016). The synthesis report provides an analysis of recurrent themes, common findings and gaps from 24 publically available evaluative exercises from a wide-range of humanitarian organizations, which, taken together, account for the majority of the total humanitarian expenditure to date.

Day-to-day management to the Syria CALL initiative is provided by a Management Group composed by OCHA, UNICEF, WFP, UNHCR and ALNAP. Overall leadership and strategic direction is provided by the IAHE Steering Group.