AMEND CONTENT

External Commitments to Partnership and Localisation

CI’s External Commitments to Humanitarian Partnership and Localisation

CARE has made its partnering ambition clear, enshrining Partnership as a core Program principle and endorsing the Principles of Partnership (2007), the Charter for Change and the Grand Bargain (2016).

With these commitments, CARE welcomes the extensive consultations and discussions on humanitarian partnerships, operationalising the recommendations arising through the WHS process. CARE commits to deliver change within our own organisational ways of working so that southern-based national actors can play an increased and more prominent role in humanitarian response.

Principles of Partnership

The Global Humanitarian Platform, created in July 2006, brings together UN and non-UN humanitarian organisations on an equal footing. Committed to building and nurturing an effective partnership, the organisations participating in the Global Humanitarian Platform agree to base their partnership on the following principles:

  • Equality. It requires mutual respect between members of the partnership irrespective of size and power. The participants must respect each other’s mandates, obligations and independence and recognise each other’s constraints and commitments. Mutual respect must not preclude organisations from engaging in constructive dissent.
  • Transparency. It is achieved through dialogue (on equal footing), with an emphasis on early consultations and early sharing of information. Communications and transparency, including financial transparency, increase the level of trust among organisations.
  • Result-oriented approach. Effective humanitarian action must be reality-based and action-oriented. This requires result-oriented coordination based on effective capabilities and concrete operational capacities.
  • Responsibility. Humanitarian organisations have an ethical obligation to each other to accomplish their tasks responsibly, with integrity and in a relevant and appropriate way. They must make sure they commit to activities only when they have the means, competencies, skills, and capacity to deliver on their commitments. Decisive and robust prevention of abuses committed by humanitarians must also be a constant effort.
  • Complementarity. The diversity of the humanitarian community is an asset if we build on our comparative advantages and complement each other’s contributions. Local capacity is one of the main assets to enhance and on which to build. Whenever possible, humanitarian organizations should strive to make it an integral part in emergency response. Language and cultural barriers must be overcome.

Charter for Change Commitments

  1. Increase direct funding to southern-based NGOs for humanitarian action: Commit through advocacy and policy influence to North American and European donors (including institutional donors, foundations and private sector) to encourage them to increase the year on year percentage of their humanitarian funding going to southern-based NGOs.
  2. Reaffirm the Principles of Partnership: Endorse, and have signed on to, the Principles of Partnership, (Equality, Transparency, Results-Oriented Approach, Responsibility and Complementarity) introduced by the Global Humanitarian Platform in 2007.
  3. Increase transparency around resource transfers to southern-based national and local NGOs: Commit to document the types of organisation we cooperate with in humanitarian response and to publish these figures (or percentages) in our public accounts using a recognised categorisation such as the GHA in real-time and to the IATI standard.
  4. Stop undermining local capacity: Identify and implement fair compensation for local organisations for the loss of skilled staff if and when we contract a local organisation’s staff involved in humanitarian action within 6 months of the start of a humanitarian crisis or during a protracted crisis, for example along the lines of paying a recruitment fee of 10% of the first six months’ salary.
  5. Emphasise the importance of national actors: Undertake to advocate to donors to make working through national actors part of their criteria for assessing framework partners and calls for project proposals.
  6. Address subcontracting: Our local and national collaborators are involved in the design of the programmes at the outset and participate in decision-making as equals in influencing programme design and partnership policies.
  7. Robust organisational support and capacity strengthening: Support local actors to become robust organisations that continuously improve their role and share in the overall global humanitarian response.
  8. Communication to the media and the public about partners: Promote the role of local actors and acknowledge the work that they carry out in any communications to the international and national media and to the public, and include them as spokespersons when security considerations permit.

Grand Bargain Commitments Localisation Workstream 

Content coming soon.