Meeting Summary: Consultative Workshop Humanitarian Effectiveness.

The Secretary-General’s Five-Year Action Agenda prioritizes strengthening humanitarian aid
and promoting a “global declaration and agenda on humanitarian aid transparency and
effectiveness.” He has also set out the goal of convening a World Humanitarian Summit (WHS)
in 2015. OCHA has begun a consultative process to determine what such a global declaration
and agenda would entail, and to generate ideas on how a Humanitarian Summit might
contribute to more effective humanitarian action.
On 21 March, OCHA held a consultative workshop that brought together leading humanitarian
thinkers and experts for a discussion on humanitarian effectiveness in order to:
Discuss how the humanitarian system defines/should define “effectiveness” and its
component parts;
Identify the gaps and changes needed to improve the effectiveness of humanitarian
action and systems;
Define the scope and methodology for research on humanitarian effectiveness in 2013-
2014; and
Identify possible outcomes on humanitarian effectiveness for the World Humanitarian
Summit.