Got ideas on humanitarian effectiveness? Share them now!

One of the discussion streams of the “Europe and Others” online consultation for the World Humanitarian Summit is addressing the issue of how humanitarian and development actors could work together more effectively.

The Sphere Project Director Christine Knudsen is moderating this conversation, which runs from 26 November until 19 December 2014.

“I am very pleased to be acting as moderator for this discussion,” Knudsen says. “Effectiveness is at the heart of what the implementation of Sphere standards is meant to achieve. A quality humanitarian response is an effective response.”

To participate in the conversation, visit the World Humanitarian Summit website and post your response to the discussion question or engage with what others are already sharing there.

The online consultation will inform the “Europe and Others” Regional Consultation Meeting to take place in Budapest, Hungary on 3-4 February 2015. Its goal is to provoke debate and stimulate further thinking about how to keep humanitarian action fit for the future.

Other conversation streams are:

Coordinated by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), the online consultation is chaired by Randolph Kent, Director of the Planning from the Futures project at King’s College, London.

In addition to Christine Knudsen, the other conversation moderators are Everett Ressler (Director of Humanitarian Policy and Programmes at the KonTerra Group) and Nigel Fisher (former UNOCHA Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria Crisis).

To allow for truly global discussions, the consultation website is multilingual, with a machine translation system built in so that users in 70 languages can have their inputs and those of other participants automatically translated.

The UNOCHA has embarked on a global study on humanitarian effectiveness. Their study aims to explore new ways of working that could maximize the collective potential of humanitarian responders to better meet the needs of people affected by crises.

You can contribute to the study by sharing your views through this online survey. The survey is available in Arabic, English and French.

The survey is targeted at individuals representing affected communities, governments, donors, local organisations, the military, the private sector, diaspora groups, international NGOs, UN agencies and other international organizations.