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Foreword
The driving force behind all humanitarian action is the commitment to alleviate suffering, regardless of who is suffering, where or why. It is a demonstration of our collective capacity for compassion. Yet, for those with the privilege to support others, comes the responsibility to maintain human dignity and be held accountable for actions taken.
In the years since the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality & Accountability (CHS) was first developed, it has been applied by many hundreds of organisations. This has shown that the CHS puts people affected by crises at the centre, it provides a means by which humanitarian actors (both local and international) can enhance their institutional and reputational strengths. It reminds us that people caught in the crossfires of conflict or struck by disaster are not passive recipients of aid, but active participants in their own recovery.
Though there remains much work to be done, what has become clear is that the application of the CHS is a driving force in realising the dignity and self-determination of individuals and communities facing crises.
The Nine Commitments of the CHS, when successfully applied, don’t narrow humanitarian action to a prescriptive set of actions. Rather, they provide a foundation – and common understanding – from which the vast array of humanitarian actors can meaningfully cooperate and collaborate in increasingly diverse ways, finding new solutions to entrenched humanitarian challenges, steering the future of humanitarian action. And as conflicts increase and intensify, there can be no doubt that such solutions will be sorely needed, not least to inform how the humanitarian landscape and system needs to evolve.
At the CHS Alliance, we know we are only as strong as our membership, and 2021 was a reminder that our membership – diverse, global and committed – is by far our greatest asset. To everyone with whom we have engaged over the past 12 months we owe a debt of gratitude. May 2022 bring us closer.
Lola Gostelow, joined the Board as Chair in December 2021.
Measuring improvement through verification
Verification against the CHS remains one of the sector’s most effective means by which organisations can measure their improvement in order to increase accountability to people affected by crises.
More than 130 verifications have taken place since the CHS verification scheme began, with many organisations undertaking external verification audits after completing a self-assessment. Much of 2021 was spent promoting this journey to our members and partners across the sector, and, as of 31 December 2021, we had 29 organisations in the process of completing a self-assessment, with 112 organisations having already completed one of the three verification options. These numbers are historic, and indicative of the value of the scheme to the sector.
CHS verification scheme is the means by which improvement can be measured – both at the individual and collective level. Individually, through verification, organisations can analyse their strengths and see what needs to be improved. As the collective level, the aggregated data from those that have undertaken verification alert us to what the sector does well, and where critical attention is still needed. We know the value of verification to the sector, because many verified organisations have shared their experiences – and the impact – of verification with us. Read diverse organisations' accounts of their verification journeys.
Given the CHS was the result of a global consultation process and draws together key elements of existing humanitarian standards and commitments, it makes sense that the CHS should continue to contribute to the much-needed harmonisation of reporting requirements across the humanitarian sector. This is important as it helps organisations reduce the amount of time spent on this as opposed to working on the delivery of services.
Research has shown that the CHS accounts for between 70-80% of most donor due diligence requirements. In 2021, we worked with the Humanitarian Quality Assurance Initiative (HQAI) and major institutional donors to find ways in which we could harmonise due diligence requirements across the sector through a shared recognition of the CHS verification scheme, such as at our joint session with the START network at the 2021 Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Weeks.
Made by our members – raising the standard together
CHS Alliance is its members: our membership sets our strategic direction, determines our priorities and holds us to account.
We are hugely fortunate to have a membership that spans the globe and represents the inspiring diversity of actors working in humanitarian and development action. In 2021, a year of great instability and stretched humanitarian resources, we welcomed 14 new organisations into the CHS Alliance family. This brought our total membership to 162 organisations, which includes 524 affiliates of global networks that are members of the Alliance.
Headquartered in 47 countries, the CHS Alliance membership remains significant thanks to its diversity (some of the world’s biggest humanitarian organisations, and some of the world’s smallest), geographical scope and commitment to the principles of the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS). Today, there are few humanitarian contexts that the influence of CHS Alliance members does not reach, and their promotion of accountability to affected people through the implementation of the CHS. Our membership is a global movement driving change.
The benefits of CHS Alliance membership are many, and most members are driven to become part of this community through the recognition that membership of the Alliance drives improvements in quality and accountability. In our 2021 membership survey, our members shared how they felt that membership conferred recognition of their commitment to the CHS. When it came to verification, 83% say that conducting CHS verification has resulted in strengthened policies. And membership engagement during a time of travel restrictions has been admirable: 87% downloaded or used our online tools, while 61% participated in the virtual global CHS Exchange. In 2021 alone, 61% of the Alliance membership conducted in-house training or helped train partners on the CHS.
Here’s what our members had to say on the Alliance's 2021…
"The Alliance is doing well in inspiring a culture of continuous improvement in our organisation." John Abraham Ayieko, Caritas Homa Bay
"We are grateful for CHS Alliance for the support... helping our organization to continue improve its accountability and program quality." Frewengel Woldemichael, Tearfund Canada
Complaints
CHS verification data continues to show the sector needs to do more to meet Commitment 5 – complaints are welcomed and addressed. In 2021, the CHS Alliance Membership Complaint mechanism received eight complaints, all of which were addressed and closed during the year. The Alliance also closed one complaint that had been received in 2020. Our complaints mechanism is available online.
Influencing the aid system locally, nationally and globally
At the CHS Alliance, we know that to be operationally valuable in the diversity of regions in which it is being used, the CHS needs to be brought closer to the people using it.
To this end, and in spite of the continuing barriers to engagement in COVID-active environments, in 2021 CHS Alliance partnered with our valued national members and partners to conduct eight online workshops with actors in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, the occupied Palestinian territory, Pakistan, Turkey and Zimbabwe.
More than 400 participants joined this series of workshops, representing more than 230 organisations. The aim was to create a space in which local actors could share their experiences of applying the CHS, and foster CHS leadership. Overall, participants had found that the CHS crystalised staff focus around their rights and duties, while undertaking verification gave organisations the capacity to clearly analyse and learn from their actions. Participants recognised the reputational benefits of engaging with the CHS and CHS verification both in terms of funding and collaboration.
Participants also noted barriers to engagement, both in terms of the availability of the CHS and CHS-related tools in local languages and in terms of resource constraints. The CHS Alliance pledged to continue to expand the number of languages in which the CHS is available – to date, 27 – and promote the new self-assessment tools and the HQAI Facilitation Fund, which assists organisation with the costs of verification, and supports the training of auditors. We listened carefully to how we can better support national actors to make the most of the CHS to be held to account by those they serve, using all that we heard to reshape our priorities and ways of working.
In September 2021, we welcomed more than 380 participants, joining from over 90 countries, to the second virtual CHS Exchange. Bookended with keynote speeches from Jane Connors, the UN's first-ever Victims' Rights Advocate and Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), participants could join more than 20 sessions ranging from panel discussions to thematic workshops over the course of three days. This year’s Exchange cultivated a space in which the global audience could share good practice, connect with the global CHS community and learn from others, and once again demonstrated the power of technology to connect our geographically dispersed community. Watch all the plenary sessions in the 2021 CHS Exchange playlist.
Expanding the reach of accountability to affected people
The drive for greater accountability to affected people (AAP) underpins everything that the CHS Alliance does.
In 2021, the CHS Alliance worked closely with the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Results Group 2 on Accountability and Inclusion to develop the new IASC AAP Results Tracker with the Core Humanitarian Standard. By structuring the Results Tracker around the Nine Commitments of the CHS, we are bringing coherence to the monitoring of AAP throughout the humanitarian system. Working largely from data that is already being collected (and, therefore, avoiding placing additional burdens on organisations) analysis from the tracker will provide real-time snapshots of the status of AAP across a response, and eventually across the entire system.
Last year, we closed out an important project with Ground Truth Solutions, tracking the perceptions of people affected by crisis in Chad in order to monitor the implementation of Chad's Humanitarian Response Plan against the CHS through community perception surveys. Through five rounds of perceptions surveys, respondents were asked to rate, in alignment with the CHS, the aid that was provided, allowing everyone involved in the response to plot the change in perceptions of aid delivery over time, and react. The conclusion was that much more needed to be done to close the gap between short-term aid and long-term solutions in order to build resilience among communities.
Stamping out abuse & supporting survivors
Every humanitarian organisation has duty to protect those people it employs and the people it serves.
In 2021, the CHS Alliance and the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University (ISS), with funding from the Government of The Netherlands, launched a three-year project, Closing the Accountability Gap, to help organisations ensure that survivors/victims can safely complain and have their complaints effectively addressed. In 2021, this project began to be piloted in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and the occupied Palestinian territory.
In October 2020, the CHS Alliance published an updated PSEAH (Protection from Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Sexual Harassment) Index in order to give organisations verifying their performance against the CHS the ability to determine whether they have the policies and practices in place to better protect people from SEAH. In 2021, we published the index in Arabic, French and Swahili, and released an animation to raise the profile and importance of the index. In addition, in June 2021, we hosted a webinar, Raising the Standard, to discuss and increase aid worker understanding of the many standards and assessments have been developed to help tackle SEAH.
All aid organisations should be supported to report sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment when it occurs. However, there is little work being done to overcome under-reporting and standardise the approach to collecting data across the sector. To help address this, CHS Alliance joined forces with the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response, publishing in 2021 the Increasing Transparency on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in the Aid Sector report.
In 2021, the CHS Alliance hosted the SCHR-led inter-agency Misconduct Disclosure Scheme, which aims to stop perpetrators of sexual misconduct from moving between aid organisations undetected. The scheme was launched in 2019, with 14 members piloting the initiative. By the end of 2021, more than 100 organisations had signed up, including the CHS Alliance. The result thus far, has been the rejection of 140 employment applications due to misconduct. The Alliance encourages all of its members and partners to join this Scheme.
Finally in 2021, we started designing a new four-tiered Investigation Qualification Training Scheme based on a newly-developed SEAH investigation guide. You can find out more about this in “Developing a CHS knowledge community” below.
Cultivating people & changing organisational culture
There can be few sectors that demand so much from those people who work in it. But we cannot expect our staff to ensure that crises-affected people are at the centre of their work if we do not put those same staff at the centre of ours.
To facilitate this, in 2021, we launched the Code of Conduct Toolkit designed to assist organisations in developing, implementing, and reviewing effective and integrated codes of conduct which are aligned with their organisational goals and human resources and people management systems. We also worked with partners at the Safeguarding Resource and Support Hub to translate the toolkit into French and Spanish, along with creating a simplified version. In 2021, we also published our Whistleblower protection guidance which provides practical guidance and a policy framework for CHS Alliance members and other organisations to develop or update their own whistleblowing policy and to help foster a culture in which people feel safe to speak up.
In June 2021, we welcomed 136 attendees from 38 countries to the virtual 2021 Humanitarian HR Conference. The event is unique in the humanitarian sector and is one of the few spaces in which humanitarian HR professionals get the opportunity to connect and share best practice and perspectives on how to navigate accountability in HR. Close to 90% said they would recommend this event to colleagues, and participants described the event as “outstanding”, “inspirational” and “appreciated”.
In 2021, CHS Alliance and ICVA invited 15 humanitarian leaders from among their shared members to participate in a project exploring the risks and opportunities associated with staff well-being and organisational culture. We published the result of these discussions: Leading Well: Aid leader perspectives on staff well-being and organisational culture.
For the past few years, the CHS Alliance has been supporting the development of the initiative Cultivate Caring, Compassionate Aid Organisations to explore the intersection of people management, mental health and organisational culture using the lens of care and compassion. On 20-21 May 2021, a virtual Global Gathering took place with the overarching theme of “Living our values: Care, culture and power in aid organisations.” More than 300 people in 56 countries registered for the event. Panels, sessions, workshops and practice sessions were held on the connections between the themes of care, culture and power, and the CHS. We pooled enough resources to fill 27 pages in a Resource Repository, which was previewed during a community sharing session.
The CHS Alliance podcast, Embodying Change, remains at the forefront of discussions around aid organisational culture, and in 2021 we released eight new episodes, bringing the total number of episodes to 22. If you have yet to listen to these great discussions, the time is now.
Developing a CHS knowledge community
As the world continued to battle with COVID-19 and the related restrictions, the CHS Alliance’s training continued to be offered entirely online, which enabled us to reach more people in more countries than ever before. In total we trained 360 people across 60 countries in three languages (English, French and Spanish) in 2021, with trainings in PSEA and Investigation for Managers, SEA Investigation, CHS Training of Trainers, and CHS for Sphere Trainers, including our new training: Introduction to the CHS.
What participants said:
"As a result of taking the workshop I was nominated to be part of an investigations team internally. I used the knowledge and tools from the workshop during the investigation. I have sensitized my team and also my partners on SEA investigations."
"I've incorporated my learnings around investigation techniques into our employee handbook, training modules, and have brought some examples from the workshop to peer-to-peer learning sessions."
“Thank you so much for this great learning experience. You all inspire me to my best to apply what I learned in this course so that people that receive training from me will have great experience and create impact in their work.”
The Introduction to the CHS E-learning continued to drive interest and understanding, and was completed by over 5,000 people in 2021, taking the total number of people who have taken this course to close to 20,000.
In 2021, we started work to design a new four-tiered Investigation Qualification Training Scheme based on a newly developed Sexual Exploitation Abuse and Harassment (SEAH) investigation guide. The development and implementation of this scheme is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, in partnership with Humentum. Credible, independent and impartial investigations in to SEAH allegations are critical to tackling the problem and providing support and justice to victims and survivors. The IQTS will provide the humanitarian and development sector with a standard qualification for investigating allegations of SEAH.
2021 Financials
For the full, audited CHS Alliance 2021 financial report, see our 2021 financial statements online.
Photo credits
In order of appearance: 1. ACT Alliance; 2. CHS Alliance; 3. Rossella De Berti/iStock; 4. Tino Adi P/Shutterstock; 5. Alessandra Zaffiro; 6. Maximum Exposure PR/Shutterstock; 7. UN Women Ryan Brown; 8. i_am_zews/Shutterstock; 9. GCShutter/iStock; 10. ACT Alliance.
Published by: CHS Alliance
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