Humanitarian Innovations and Professional Networks

Since its inception, humanitarianism has grown from the practical efforts made by a few initiatives towards the relief of human suffering into an international movement engaging between 210,000 - 595,000 workers [1]. The number of humanitarian workers is estimated to be growing at an average rate of around 6% per year [1]. There are currently over 250 international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) involved in humanitarian work, running a multi-billion combined annual budget. In addition to these are thousands of local/national NGOs (LNGOs) and community-based organizations (CBO) which can play a key part in the humanitarian delivery system in many settings: United Nations (UN) agencies and INGOs often depend upon them for the end-stage implementation of their aid activities [1].

Despite the rapid growth in, and magnitude of people impacted globally by the humanitarian sector, there is currently no internationally-agreed framework defining what a humanitarian worker is, what standards should guide one's activities, or what the training and skills needed to be defined as such are.

Humanitarian action remains inherently a multi-faceted field of practice drawing from various technical and scientific fields including, among others, communications, engineering, law, logistics, medical and social sciences, and organizational management.

In addition, there are no established paths to disseminate information on innovations and best practices across the humanitarian sector, mostly due to the limited professional development and training capacity within humanitarian organizations. As described in the recent major Enhancing Learning & Research for Humanitarian Assistance (ELRHA) report, Global Survey on Humanitarian Professionalisation, much effort is needed to systematize professional training opportunities for humanitarian workers [2]. The humanitarian workforce is composed of distinct segments with varying degrees of access to professional development opportunities: from local staff engaging in frontline operations at the field level to transient workers and managers migrating from one region to another based on their agencies’ needs. As a result, there is not yet an agreed set of professional benchmarks or curricula encompassing all the required knowledge, competences and skills of humanitarian professionals [3].

As access to professional development opportunities varies considerably among humanitarian workers, so do demands for particular competences and skills. Recent studies show that most professional training efforts currently target new hires at an induction level and that the proposed proficiency standards remain agency-specific [3]. While there are a growing number of opportunities for advanced professional development in humanitarian action, the vast majority of them are provided by institutions of higher learning in the North and remain inaccessible to the majority of humanitarian workers in the South [4]. As a result, according to the ELRHA survey, half the humanitarian workforce do not have access to professional training opportunities to develop their capabilities and fulfill their professional expectations. This lack of access is most prevalent among local staff in countries affected by humanitarian crises [5].

While the lack of access to traditional professional development activities such as courses and academic degrees has certainly limited the ability of many to develop their humanitarian careers, it has not prevented them from performing in often challenging and complex humanitarian environments. It is apparent that the essential professional knowledge, competencies and skills needed to perform in the humanitarian sector are actually acquired on the job through informal guided practice and mentoring by more seasoned professionals, rather than through the means of formal training activities.

Humanitarian workers are therefore dependent on their immediate working environment to receive guidance on professional standards, best practices and innovations in the humanitarian sector, primarily from the people they work with directly. The concept of humanitarian innovations is intended here not only to capture technical or technological ones, but also much broader innovative ideas, such as in education, communication, conflict resolution, leadership, managerial methods and practice paradigms. Since the quality of guidance and pedagogical skills vary from person to person, it is probably a matter of who one actually works with during the early stages of a humanitarian career that sets one's professional attitude and behavior, rather than deployment to or employment by a particular region or organization. The propensity to find good mentors is also most likely to vary according to region and agency.

This interdependency of co-workers for learning about innovations and best practices implies that professional networks within and across humanitarian organizations play a crucial role in the formation and dissemination of these, as well as of the norms and principles that define this sector. Evidence of this would indicate that professional development resources may be most effectively distributed along such professional networks and highlight the importance of their normative and transformative function. It may also indicate that the appropriate method to promote professional values and cultures across networks should focus on modulating the experience of the everyday working environment rather than on didactic curricula which can be hard to translate into practice at any significant scale.

Paradoxically, the lack of access to professional development opportunities is mirrored by an absence of standardized assessment tools to measure the overall proficiency of a humanitarian practitioner according to established evidence, international norms or professional consensus of best practice. While various components of the UN system have adopted particular sets of standards (e.g. pertaining to the selection and training of humanitarian coordinators), courses and testing tools centered around these are technical in nature and limited to a particular institutional domain. Consequently, humanitarian workers are unable to readily assess and compare their respective professional backgrounds nor easily identify priority areas for further development.