Haitian aid workers take over Sphere capacity-building

The workers are staff of Haiti’s Civil Protection Department and of national and international humanitarian organizations working in the country. The new group will be registered as a local association.

“Our group will keep the flame alight by promoting Sphere standards among national and international humanitarian agencies working in Haiti,” say Rose Luce Cadot and Mimose Jeune, two members of the new group.

“As humanitarian workers, our job is to assist victims and lessen their suffering. Before Sphere, we were providing a service. Now, the focus has shifted to those we serve and how to fully respect their dignity. With Sphere, we are committed to serving the population in dignity.”

The new working group intends to continue to improve the quality and accountability of humanitarian response in Haiti by promoting learning activities aimed at implementing the Sphere Handbook: Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response.

Pointing out that “all of the group members are trainers who are extremely busy during the cyclone season,” Cadot and Jeune mention that additional funding for administrative support over the coming six months “would be fantastic”. Reviewing Sphere’s work in Haiti, the project evaluation recommends international and national NGO support for the new group.

The Sphere Capacity-Building Project – most recently represented by Rosario Iraola – was deployed to Haiti soon after the 12 January 2010 earthquake until the end of May 2011. It provided basic training on Sphere standards and how to apply them to more nearly 600 aid workers, many of whom were new to the humanitarian sector. In evaluating their training, most participants recommended extending it to all actors involved in the humanitarian crisis in Haiti – NGOs, government agencies, media and civil society.

The deployment of Sphere capacity-building support aims at improving the quality and accountability of the response in humanitarian crisis. The priority is to strengthen the local knowledge and build local capacity in implementing Sphere’s minimum standards and Humanitarian Charter. The latest deployments have been in Haiti (February 2010 – May 2011) and in Myanmar (following the cyclone Nargis in 2008) in response to requests from field-based organizations.

“Raising awareness of the right to life with dignity,” responds Rosario Iraola when asked what she achieved during her 10-month stint as the Sphere Project’s capacity building coordinator in Haiti.

“The most difficult part of my assignment was to convince humanitarian agencies of the need to train their staff in Sphere’s humanitarian standards,” Iraola says. “Given the context and magnitude of the disaster, people were immersed in such a dynamic that little space was left to training and capacity-building. So my job was to advocate for the need to train humanitarian staff even amidst the fast-paced response to the crisis.”

Iraola finds it rewarding that a local group of humanitarian workers decided to promote Sphere’s minimum standards after her departure.

“Despite de challenges arising from the urban context of the disaster as well as of the structural, social and economic problems of the country, the fact that local humanitarian staff created this group to promote training and implementation of Sphere’s standards means that Sphere is relevant in the Haitian context. That’s the best achievement we could have wished for,” she says.