Towards a global partnership for humanitarian standards

The Sphere Project currently has companionship agreements with four humanitarian standards initiatives that are complementary to the Sphere standards and sectors: education in emergencies ().

These agreements have helped us collectively harmonise and consolidate humanitarian standards by agreeing on a common structure and language, exchanging on training and learning and developing advocacy approaches on the use of standards in practice.

But we know we can do more to affect the quality and accountability of humanitarian response.

Each of these companionship arrangements is bilateral, which means that they remain somewhat narrow in scope; we have seen that this can limit our collective ability to address key challenges in practice and to take our joint contribution in support of field work to scale.

We are now gearing up to constitute a global humanitarian standards partnership which would be more than the sum of its parts, maximise a collective voice and create a forum for new standards as they are developed, based on evidence and experience.

We believe that this partnership of standards-setting initiatives has the potential to bring about improvements in the quality and accountability of humanitarian response in a variety of ways.

If you find humanitarian standards helpful in your work, you will surely benefit from a yet more coherent approach to developing standards, indicators, guidance and training tools. At a time when standards are becoming an ever more important part of professionalisation in an increasing number of areas of humanitarian work, a tested-and-proven concept can go a long way towards greater usability and impact.

Please respond to the survey – it should take less than 10 minutes of your time. (The survey will close on 18 September.)

Your views matter to us.