The 2005 Humanitarian Accountability Report

This report, produced for the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP), is intended for Members, donors and humanitarians concerned with accountability. It should provide a ‘progress report’ on accountability and quality management during 2005 – across the
humanitarian sector, among HAP Members and within the HAP Secretariat.
Humanitarian accountability is the exercise of ‘giving intended beneficiaries a proper say’ in humanitarian action as the report explains in the introduction. During the last decade, the absence of such accountability – and the broader ‘quality and accountability deficit’ in relief operations – has been widely recognized. International NGOs launched several joint initiatives to address the deficit: the Sphere Project, ALNAP, HAP, Compas Qualité, and People in Aid among them.
HAP, the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership, was formed in 2003 to “make humani- tarian action accountable to intended beneficiaries through self-regulation and compliance verification”. A small group of committed agencies set out then to implement lessons learned from HAP’s predecessors, the Humanitarian Ombudsman Project and the Humanitarian Accountability Project, and from other quality and accountability initiatives that have strug- gled to get standards off the shelf and into programmes.