A Global Plan of Action - Background Paper: Planning and Coordination – Emergency and Protracted Crises

Description

Coordination is vital in humanitarian aid.  It results in fewer gaps and and duplication in humanitarian aid.  “Good coordination,” notes the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), “strives for a needs-based, rather than capacity-driven, response. It aims to ensure a coherent and complementary approach, identifying ways to work together for better collective results.” The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) states:

At its best, coordination can eliminate gaps and duplication in service, determine an appropriate division of responsibility and establish a framework for information sharing, policy agreements, program collaboration and joint planning. Perhaps the greatest challenge to coordination is the inherent difficulty of identifying a common purpose and approach among agencies whose mandates, methods, resources and systems are diverse.

In the context of energy access in humanitarian settings, coordination is all the more important for two reasons. First, no formal mechanisms exist among UN or other international agencies to coordinate energy-related humanitarian interventions. Second, the issue of safe access to fuel and energy (SAFE) cuts across numerous sectors – health, food security, nutrition, protection, education, water and sanitation, telecommunications, and more. Moreover, it involves a broad set of actors, including humanitarian agencies, government representatives, the private sector, development professionals, technical experts, researchers, donors, investors, and others.

At present, energy-related assistance in humanitarian settings is still largely disparate – funded and implemented by individual agencies without reference to each other, to common strategies and principles, or to lessons learned in previous interventions. In recent years, however, the community of actors engaged in the nexus of energy and humanitarian aid has grown and cohered. The advent of SDG 7, combined with record levels of global displacement, presents an opportunity for this community to expand and improve energy programming in humanitarian settings by finding better ways to coordinate, collaborate, and share knowledge.