ALNAP Annual Meeting Study launch webinar: Making aid work for people in crisis

Stories of irrelevant aid regularly arise in humanitarian assistance: People affected by disasters or crisis receive food they cannot eat, services they do not want or technologies they cannot use. If they are not getting what they really need, something is going wrong.

So, what needs to change? Although relevance is central to humanitarian principles and standards, putting it into practice is profoundly difficult and potentially disruptive. Realigning the humanitarian offer with the priorities of affected people opens up unique opportunities to do things differently, but in so doing it also poses dilemmas and challenges to the way humanitarians currently think and work.

How do we best understand what is most relevant when people’s needs are diverse, dynamic and sometimes at odds with expert views? Who gets the power to decide what is relevant and how? To what extent can humanitarian aid be culturally and contextually relevant, while upholding principles and delivering on time and at scale? Are current systems getting in the way? What kind of funding, staffing and expertise would it take to do things better?

The 32nd ALNAP Annual Meeting held in Berlin in October 2019 brought together 200 stakeholders from across and beyond the humanitarian sector to address these questions and explore what relevance means in practice. Join us online for a discussion on the different dimensions of relevance identified in ALNAP’s new study. We will take a practical look at how those working in humanitarian policy and implementation are tackling this and the trade-offs and challenges faced in doing so.

Chair:

• John Mitchell – Director, ALNAP

Panel:

• Ombretta Baggio – Senior Advisor on Community Engagement and Accountability, International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC)
• Volker Huls – Global Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Advisor, Danish Refugee Council
• Shashwat Saraf – Nigeria Country Director, ACF Action Against Hunger
• Sophia Swithern – Independent consultant and author of the study