The big tent that’s really needed in humanitarian response

By Christine Knudsen *

Some 900 high-level representatives from a wide range of stakeholders in humanitarian action will be meeting in Geneva from 13 to 16 October. The global humanitarian capital will live up to its name – and hopefully the promises behind it – as it hosts the Global Consultation for the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS).

The gathering will be the last opportunity for the broad community of governments, UN, NGOs, private sector and others to discuss issues face to face, set priorities and decide what will be different by the time an even larger community meets at the Summit in Istanbul next year.

Among those issues, effectiveness and quality of humanitarian response already rank high, but remedies and recommendations are still vague or only incremental. As the recently launched State of the Humanitarian System 2015 report reveals, a majority of humanitarians grade the sector’s effectiveness low. We know we must do better.

While accountability – both to affected populations and among various actors – has been the touchstone of a decade of humanitarian reform, questions related to the quality of assistance have been remarkably absent in the debates on reform and in the thematic preparations on effectiveness within the WHS processes.

Yet quality is what makes the difference between mere survival and life with dignity for millions of families, women, men, girls and boys when crisis strikes.

As the Sphere Project`s submission to the WHS states, not only is the overall quality of humanitarian response important to its outcomes and impact, but a common framework of quality standards is the basis for any meaningful discussion of accountability itself.

While the WHS hopefully moves towards a commitment to a more inclusive humanitarian approach and more contextualised responses, the need for this shared framework is clear. Actors from different traditions who seek to relieve humanitarian suffering – based on solidarity, principles, religion or other drivers of committed action – already consider that a common operational language can help them to be more complementary, more effective and, ultimately, more successful in saving lives.

Since its creation in 1997, the Sphere Project has been a home for this this common language to develop. An integrated approach to quality assistance, Sphere is frequently used to plan, design, monitor, evaluate and coordinate relief efforts.

Equally successful with civil society and humanitarian NGOs as well as with governments and national authorities, Sphere’s role as a comprehensive global framework for humanitarian policy and practice, advocacy and response has grown over time.

The 2011 edition of the Sphere Handbook laid out an integrated approach to humanitarian action encompassing the “why” (the Humanitarian Charter), the “how” (Core Standards – now being replaced by the Core Humanitarian Standard – and Protection Principles) and the “what” (minimum standards for four life-saving sectors of response) of humanitarian response.

It also allowed the collective wisdom and experience of thousands of humanitarian professionals to be brought together, debated, distilled and adapted to context. At the same time, such common language has enabled many people engaged in good-faith relief activities to work with humanitarian actors in coordinated approaches.

The World Humanitarian Summit can extend such a “big tent” approach even further by calling for the Sphere principles and standards to be the basis for inter-operable planning, programming, monitoring and accountability against which the broadest community of practitioners can measure their achievements, gaps and progress in saving lives together.

A further opportunity to continue enlarging this tent will come on the heels of the WHS: from May 2016, the Sphere Handbook will begin a deep and far-reaching revision process in time to publish a fourth edition for the 20th anniversary of the Handbook in 2018.

We are committed to ensuring that this next edition benefits fully from community-based contributions, the network of Sphere practitioners in all regions of the world and national authorities working on adapting the standards to their own context and quality approaches.

We know that the Geneva Global Consultation will be a powerful moment in our sector’s history, and we encourage all WHS participants to live up to the expectations of people affected by disaster or conflict by taking decisive action to ensure quality humanitarian assistance for life with dignity wherever people are in need.

* Sphere Project Director