WEF proposes 'new vulnerability and protection business model'

From the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Humanitarian Assistance:

The first requirement of this new business model is a comprehensive risk framework. We often find ourselves having to engage in an enterprise of risk management with incomplete information about how things will unfold. Such uncertainties are only being exacerbated by the impacts of climate change. We must plan to be ready for events for which we cannot plan.
The second requirement is to rework the balance between crisis response and the upstream and downstream issues of prevention and recovery. More resources are needed both to reduce risk in the first place, and reduce the risk of relapse after a crisis occurs.

The default mode of the current humanitarian model in general is external assistance; the default mode of a new vulnerability and protection model should be self-reliance. The third requirement of this new model is to enhance the capacities, readiness and resilience of exposed societies so they can better handle extreme events. Ensuring that civil society and local communities are involved will not only make response efforts faster, but more efficient as their involvement will make it possible to identify and meet the diverse needs of various groups in affected communities, groups differentiated, for example, by gender, age, and social class.

The fourth requirement is to engage the private sector more fully, not just as a source of donations but also as a source of key skills and technologies, during and after crises. We commend the World Economic Forum’s initiative on the private sector in humanitarian relief as well as other efforts to incentivise appropriate and beneficial private-sector investments in risky regions.

The fifth requirement of the business model is to link the humanitarian concern to broader development issues, strengthening social safety nets and supporting resilience. This requirement will necessitate unprecedented collaboration between humanitarian and development actors and interests.

Finally, as cross-border challenges will grow, regional organisations backed by the UN will need to be able to mediate and mitigate these problems as they arise.

Download the full report.

Global Humanitarian Assistance: Update February 2010

GHA have released an update on their GHA report. The series aims to

present simple and objective statistical information on humanitarian financing for people involved in humanitarian aid policy, programming and performance. The goal is a shared evidence base that people can use in their planning and policy work to ensure better outcomes for the women, men and children whose lives are affected by humanitarian crises.

UPDATED: Tufts/HFP: Humanitarian Horizons - a practitioners guide to the future

UPDATED 18.02.10: IRIN highlights guidance on responding to urban emergencies:
Other than urban earthquake preparedness, humanitarian agencies have not yet focused on emergency response in urban centres. The authors of the guide offer tips to humanitarian agencies in this new environment:

1) Programming has to shift from being rural-focused, so humanitarians will now have to reach out to urban planners for effective urban programming

2) Build a knowledge base identifying the differences between urban and rural programmes

3) Re-identify and reprioritize groups most at risk

4) Use of technologies such as cell phone banking and microcredit to deliver aid in an urban context

5) Ensure the creation of better linkages between city and town authorities, and strengthen delivery systems

The blurb:

The Guide "is an attempt to help humanitarian aid agencies look a generation into the future to begin making the necessary changes now to their thinking and organization, to ensure that they continue to deliver the right assistance and protection to the right people in the right ways.

The Humanitarian Horizons project is a futures capacity-building initiative intended to assist the humanitarian sector prepare for the complexities of the future by enabling organizations to enhance their anticipatory and adaptive capacities. Launched in October 2008, the project builds on HFP's analyses of changing dimensions of future crisis drivers, and makes more practical the exploratory futures research conducted under the Feinstein Center's 2004 Ambiguity and Change project.'

Read on! at the Tufts website.

CRED: Disaster data for 2009

In 2009, 328 natural disasters were recorded in the EM-DAT database. They killed more than 10 thousand people, affected nearly 113 million others and caused almost 35 billion US$ of economic damages.

No mega-disasters occurred in 2009, the event ranking highest in death toll being the earthquake in Indonesia on September 30 which killed over 1,100 people, followed by a series of typhoons and floods that caused many deaths, making Asia once again the most affected continent. In fact, six of the top ten countries with the highest number of disaster-related deaths were in Asia. However, when looking at the top 10 countries in terms of number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, the Islands of Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga topped the list.

Compared to previous years (2000-2008), there is a reduction in 2009 in disaster mortality with 10,443 killed, which is below the annual average of 85,541; as well as the number of affected, with 112.8 million compared to the annual average of 230.4 million. In terms of economic impacts, disasters costs were also below the 93.8 billion 2000-2008 annual average and were mainly attributed to winter storm Klaus which hit France and Spain in January (5.1 billion US$), the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy in April (2.5 billion US$) and a tornado in the United States in February (2.5 billion US$).

Read more on Reliefweb.

ALNAP: posted Guide to Real-time evaluations of humanitarian action

This pilot guide is intended to help both evaluation managers and team leaders in commissioning, overseeing and conducting real-time evaluations of humanitarian operational responses. Drawing on a synthesis of existing good practices, it is intended as a flexible resource that can be adapted to a variety of contexts.

This guide concentrates on RTEs undertaken in first phase of an emergency response – where the RTE fieldwork takes place within a few months of the start of the response. This is because such RTEs pose particular problems for both the evaluation manager and the evaluation team. RTEs that take place later on in the response are closer to ex-post humanitarian evaluations, but this guide also addresses how such RTEs can feed into ongoing operations.

The focus of this guide is therefore on what is distinctive about humanitarian RTEs. It does not offer advice on evaluation methodologies in general, but on specific aspects of methodology which make RTEs unique and different. Nevertheless some of the advice will apply to all evaluations and not just to RTEs. This is motivated partly by the authors’ observations of areas of weakness in existing evaluations.

Download the guide on the ALNAP website.

IRIN: Afghanistan: A tight squeeze on humanitarian space

“In the south, south-east and east, isolated reports were received regarding government officials being forced to bribe insurgent commanders in order to facilitate the continued operation of schools and allow for the implementation of certain development projects. This highlights the heightened ability of the insurgents to exert their authority and influence over the implementation of development activities,” the UN Secretary-General said in a report to the Security Council in December 2009.

Laurent Sailard, director of ACBAR, a consortium of over 100 Afghan and foreign NGOs, said aid workers must not make payments to insurgents for security, access or safe passage.

“Buying a passage for humanitarian convoys or access is a bad strategy with long-term negative impacts. Demands could increase, and if not satisfied could lead to increasing threats. It is a never-ending process that always leads to the worst,” he said, adding that aid workers had to ensure access and security through acceptance among local communities and impartial dialogue with belligerent parties."

Movement policy is not to use armed escorts but gain access by negotiating and being accepted by all parties to a conflict.

Read the rest of the article on the IRIN website and read more on the Movement's position here.

Tufts: Humanitarian Horizons: A Practitioners’ Guide to the Future

The Guide merges the projections of global change highlighted by four earlier research papers, with the futures perspectives of operational agencies. The result is an attempt to help humanitarian aid agencies look a generation into the future to begin making the necessary changes now to their thinking and organization, to ensure that they continue to deliver the right assistance and protection to the right people in the right ways.

Download the Guide from the Tufts website.