A Bridge Between Humanitarian Actors

The Summary Report of the Webinar on Refugee Integration Policies in Eastern Africa: Local, National and Global Perspectives, held on 30 January 2025. The event highlighted efforts to strengthen peer exchange, collaboration, and collective action within ICVA’s membership across East and Southern Africa and beyond. It provided a platform to connect members, enabling their contributions to ICVA’s global policy and advocacy efforts while influencing refugee integration and durable solutions at both regional and global levels. It also facilitated the sharing of best practices in programme implementation, policy-making, and advocacy, fostering mutual learning among participants.

Click on the below link to read the Summary report.

After nearly 14 years of devastating civil war, which forcibly displaced over 12 million people and claimed more than 600,000 lives, Syria stands at a pivotal moment of transition following the fall of the Assad regime. This juncture offers hope for recovery and stability, but it also brings complex challenges that require a coordinated, inclusive, and principled humanitarian response.

On 16 December 2024, the IASC Principals endorsed a Systemwide Scale-up to intensify humanitarian efforts, marking the third such activation in Syria’s history. Central to the effectiveness of both the Scale-up and early recovery is Syria’s vibrant civil society, which has demonstrated exceptional resilience, leadership, and operational capacity throughout the conflict. Their inclusion in decision-making and resource allocation is vital for both immediate relief and long-term recovery.
Equally vital to success is the active engagement of the international community in fostering the enabling environment for a principled and effective humanitarian response and early recovery.

Drawing from learnings from previous Scale-ups and consultations with ICVA members and NGO networks, this paper identifies opportunities and potential pitfalls to the Scale-up. It also proposes mitigation measures to ensure a principled and effective response and early recovery for Syria.

Click on the below link to read the paper.

The study evaluates the quality of engagement and enabling factors for increased local/national NGO participation in IASC structures – beyond numbers. It examines existing global quantitative data from OCHA’s Annual Coordination Mapping exercise. Additionally, the study gathers new quantitative data from five focus countries—Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, Colombia, and Venezuela—to assess varying levels of participation by local and national NGOs.

The goal is to identify good practices, barriers, and practical recommendations to improve the effective inclusion of L/NNGOs in coordination leadership.

Read the reports here: 

The Interagency PSEA Community Outreach and Communication Fund, a joint initiative between UNHCR and ICVA, was launched in 2020 to support local NGOs in preventing sexual exploitation and abuse. The Fund invests in community-led efforts to ensure that communities know their rights and SEA survivors know how and where to safely report sexual abuse and exploitation. Since its inception, 56 projects have been backed, with nine new projects selected in 2024.  This year, the Fund is also receiving the support of the Office of the Special Coordinator on Improving the United Nations Response to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (OSCSEA), helping the PSEA Outreach Fund to reach more people in need.

This report aims to enhance understanding of the importance and seriousness of various Bureaucratic and Administrative Impediments (BAI) areas and how BAI impacts crisis-affected communities, humanitarian responders, and humanitarian response. It delves into the complexities of understanding, connecting, and tracing the numerous sources and effects of BAI and how BAI intersect and mutually strengthen each other. It also investigates how BAI are dealt with in policy and practice across various contexts. Additionally, the report examines BAI reporting and monitoring mechanisms, including categorization schemes and potential indicators. However, the identified indicators need to be tailored to specific contexts. This is crucial for developing solutions that are suitable for the context, going beyond addressing a specific issue to tackling broader problems that cause bureaucratic obstacles.

The report builds upon the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s (IASC) Framework for a System-wide Approach for Understanding and Addressing BAI, two previous studies on the topic, and two surveys conducted by the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) to grasp the adoption of the IASC Framework. These insights are supported by semi-structured interviews with national and international humanitarian response actors in diverse settings.

Click on the below links to access the:

• Full Report
• Indicators for Monitoring Bureaucratic and Administrative Impediments and Measuring their Impact

The world is increasingly entering a period where conflict and climate related humanitarian emergencies are becoming both more frequent and more intense. Since the formalisation of the global humanitarian ‘system’ and the creation of the Interagency Standing Committee (IASC) structures in the early 1990s, there has also been an increasing and well documented shift towards a more multi-polar international order with far more complex geo-politics.  This has come with increasing risks to several established international norms in recent years, with humanitarian principles and respect for international humanitarian law being more overtly threatened.

To continue to deliver principled assistance under these circumstances, international and national civil society, along with multi-lateral institutions, have increasingly been implementing or considering alternative humanitarian coordination and response models, to varying degrees of success. This has included assistance being coordinated more directly by International NGO (INGO) and National NGO (NNGO) networks, and community-led coordination structures.

Although often developed as ‘work arounds’ to the barriers facing the system, they may also present opportunities for enhancing abilities to deliver principled humanitarian assistance in complex settings in manners that are more contextual, locally owned and accountable. It is critical that there is reflection at both response and global levels on what has and has not worked to date in such settings and how civil society actors at all levels can support such a continuation of principled aid modalities. This research offers some analysis drawing from four specific contexts and their implications for global and response level humanitarian coordination.

Click on the below links to:

• Read the Report
• Watch 2024 AidEx Session: Adapting NGO Coordination in Complex and Estranged Settings

Throughout 2023 and 2024, ICVA, with the support of the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), organised four regional workshops. The workshops brought together International NGOs (INGOs) and Local and National NGOs (L/NNGOs) as well as invited donors and UN actors, to both review the Principles of Partnership and reflect on good practices, challenges, and potential solutions in their implementation. This report summarises the key findings and recommendations from the four workshops.

Click on the link below to read the Report.