ECOSOC SIDE EVENT: System-Wide Change for Greater Accountability to People Affected by Crisis

Event polls

During the event, we also asked participants to share their views and advice on the discussed topics. You can find the final results of these below.

1. Accountable Leadership

What concrete action would you recommend to make humanitarian leaders more accountable?

• - Endorse systems that ensure AAP at all levels
  - Encourage local partners to be in the decision making bodies like HCT
  - Conduct Rapid Gender Analysis as a tool of AAP that is sensitive the Gender
  - Formalise the relationship between the decision making spheres and communities
• Include flexible budgets for addressing community feedback
• 1. Conduct regular visits and meet affected people directly, hear from them.
  2. Take the recommendations and Advise from field staff seriously because they are the ones who are very close and working with Affected people.
• 1. Mandate it! clear expectations and non negotiables. This wont happen by a “willingness” and a wish.
  2. Collective efforts - looking at a holistic approach.
• 1. Strategic partnerships and multi-year funding (Principles of Partnerships)
  2. Enforcing the agenda of localization and sharing the capacities among the partners (intermediaries and local partners)
  3. Increasing the direct fundings to the local organizations as committed under the Grand Bargain
• 100% Transparency
• A fully commitment and a really presence on the ground during the crisis (not only into clusters meeting)
• A push from donors to require transparent open accountability. Organisations are not doing it themselves.
• AAP should definitely be at the top of their work plan, and they should be required to provide a debriefing on what they have done concretely in this regard every 6 months.
• Add relevant KPIs to the performance evaluation
• Address the conflict between high numbers and a social and localised approach
• Advocacy need to be improved around AAP. CHS-Alliance need to do a bit of surveys around the Humanitarian organizations if accountability issue is getting relevant attention
• Always put the community first i.e. the local community or the affected community is king. Always ask for the community's opinion before undertaking an activity.
• Apply EDI
• Appreciation of what accountability means and understand the issues which need to be addressed.
• Become CHS Certified!
• Build the capacity of staff for evidence programming (utilization of available statistics to effectively guide planning). This implies conducting effective assessment, responsive designing of interventions, mainstreaming of monitoring in the delivery of services, strengthening feedback mechanism, and deep involvement of the affected person.
• CFRM must be at the center
• CHS to be able to transparently show how organisations are scoring against CHS principles, or at least with donors.
• Come up with home grown solutions based on the specific needs of the people. They can also set an example for accountability.
• Commitment isn’t concrete action, unfortunately. Need to see co-design of programmes + participatory audits/evaluations. The same way proposals require needs assessment + M&E, those elements should include co-design requirements with representatives from affected communities
• Community Feedback mechanisms
• Create a trusted third-party mechanism for doing AAP/feedback/monitoring that grades organizations based on their performance from client/beneficiary perspectives. Could also create a repository for feedback on humanitarian staff for former employer feedback / disclosure of egregious issues.
• Create country-wide systems that are independently monitored by the sector
• Creating time and resources to actually listen to affected persons and let them choose a role in all activities to address their needs.
• Cultural change, stepping away from the for-profit frame of mind. True commitment to the beneficiaries. We need better understanding of the sector as a whole.
• Dedicated resources of building consultation mechanisms in areas facing long-running or recurrent humanitarian emergencies
• Dissemination and presentation of reports on activities to partners and all groups affected by humanitarian activities to promote accountability
• Ensure common understanding of what collective AAP means IN PRACTICE. Encourage (require) use of tools provided through IASC Accountability Portal. Ensure AAP is explicitly embedded in performance evaluations.
• Establish the accountability system and monitor the accountability activity
• First and internal (humanitarian system) analysis on the key barriers: racism, power dynamics and colonial-post-colonial elements embedded in the origin-history of the Western Humanitarian System. A key question: what is Accountability in the eyes of affected people in different contexts?
• First, we should not call people affected by crisis as beneficiary, but we should call as primary stakeholders. This will change the perception of leader toward to community.
• Focus on publishing the proportion of decisions made that respond to the needs of affected diverse groups
• Follow the rule, people centered, strong governance system within the organisation, accountability policies and practices including transparency mechanism will help.
• Go to the field and see the affected people nearly share with them what they face, not only listen to the people have complained. because some of them remain silent and say nothing.
• Have genuine respect for the governments and concern for the affected people
• Having worked with community-based organisations, I think the capacity building of local partners regarding AAP has not been emphasized. Some ED is not accountable to their staff and does not take their staff welfare seriously, how do you expect such persons to be accountable to unknown people he/she is not attached to in any way. in order not to compromise on AAP donors need to ensure that the welfare policies of their partners are fair enough or else you will battle with issues of short-changing and negligence throughout the project cycle.
• Humanitarian Leader must be responsible to address his work to the community.So they know they have to do their works
• Humanitarian leaders need to reconnect with the people and communities locally and build trust with them on the ground. The leaders need to pool the best practices and knowledge as approaches for AAP in place to improve adoption of practices and procedures standardized for enforcing them and teams to be more accountable collectively. The humanitarian leaders need to be as accountable to the communities as to the donors.
• Humanitarian leaders should emulate inclusive leadership skills. Need to interact with your project participants.
• Immediate first step — install term limits for key positional leadership roles — hold them against benchmarks for performance success.
• Improve communication to affected people and focus on improving the feedback mechanisms and action as a result of this.
• Incentives and link with donors
• Including affected people in clusters/HCTs, perhaps not all the time but at least from time to time
• Independent public monitoring of institutional accountability. Commitment might be words first, measurement is a better way to show actual progress
• It must be part of their key performance areas and they must illustrate examples of having done this during their performance appraisals.
• It should be mandatory for every organization to provide evidence of accountability to the affected population.
• Leaders have to go to the field more often and get closer to the community.
• Leaders need to develop common approaches and hold open discussions on AAP. Leaders should make AAP part of the reporting process and must be reported on during coordination meetings
• Leadership work in different ways to develop and engaging local & national organizational partner in strategic humanitarian response & accountable
• Link funding to level of AAP implementation.
• Listen to and involve the local communities in all interventions
• Lobbying and awareness raising, relentless reminding leadership of their responsibility to actually take the lead on this important cause.
  Clear donor requirement to comply with and report on CHS and AAC. No compliance with donor requirements = no funding. Money talks.
• Looking for more sustainable solutions in POCs' life
• Make accountability tools such as grievance redressal mechanisms, participatory program designs and evaluations, as well as local humanitarian leadership (Charter4Change commitments) a core requirement of all major donor proposals and appeals.
• Make it part of their performance reviews
• Make leaders accountable for making mistakes about the relevance, quality and effectiveness of assistance their organizations provide. Embed this accountability into their performance reviews and public accountability processes. Require that they spend time in joint decision-making with local organizations, local/frontline staff and affected communities. Work with finance, HR, legal & risk, procurement teams to remove existing barriers that prevent adaptive leadership and adaptive management in ongoing response and programmatic changes based on feedback.
• Make leadership inclusive. Having an entire SMT of an organization being led by whites or having the HQs of Organisations with the decision makers seated in Europe or America who only speak theoretically without any understanding of the contextual realities may never move the radar of AAP where it is effectively implemented. I would recommend- 50% or more inclusion of affected population in the SMT of organizations inclusive of moving the organizational HQs away from Europe and America and setting up offices in regions/countries where aid is provided. Also Donors/funding governments should be flexible to our countries and regions affected by conflict/crises decide their own priorities rather than donors deciding what the funding priority should be even one these priorities are not contextually evidenced based
• More attention to downward accountability (to those affected directly) than upward accountability (to the donors).
• More power for affected people to enforce AAP at all levels
• More walking the talk. monitoring and describe concrete indicators
• Need to apply the knowledges and other stuffs that've already known as the practical actions.
• Need to well understand the humanitarian principles and ensure make in line with those principle.
• One of those is to ensure they have practical - from the field - experience. Also enable proper communication flow and brainstorming within their organisations, with field staff and community reps
• Put it in their PDR! Get donors to make funding dependent on it.
• Raise more awareness among the people on their rights to life and basic needs, who the humanitarian leaders are to them and the need for them to speak out and demand for accountability
• Signing a binding agreement towards accountability to affected population
• Sometimes leaders work more for themselves, for the career and CV.... without any personal experience of the challenges, sometimes they are part of an elite. It is an existential tension, it needs an existential revolution. I would recommend them to accept humility, accept to stand up when they get contradictory injunctions from donors, be critical and self critical. Break denial. Accept living for 1 month in a village. Stop spending hours on papers that are so well written. Promote leadership among survivors. Require cultural change among their team members. Value soft skills and courage in their teams appraisal. Reject bureaucracy, that kills activism, common sense and courage. It needs courage. Agree so much with Najat, thank for her testimony, very inspiring.
• Spend time listening to those we seek to assist.
• Take into consideration every single actors that show any exploitation
• The funds should be allocated on equity basis and without any political reasons, relationships and political involvement.
• The government should be ready to work together with humanitarian leaders so that implementation can be made according to the crisis affected people.
• The need to increase an umbrella organizations and membership for all organizations engaged in humanitarian action and making audits and mandatory criteria
• There should be a qualitative+ quantitative global/ country wise ranking of organisations which are open to accountability to affected populations.
• They must be held accountable with consequences.
• They need to build trust with the person of concern and have continued communication and interaction. The people of concern to be able to complaint in case they have and the agency and the leader must establish this realistic and functional feedback mechanism.
• They should responses to the complaints raised by the affected immediately through feedback mechanism to give them assurance that their complaints will be addressed or should remaining unresolved due to the nature of the complaints raised.
• This just a personal opinion. Basically for humanitarian leaders to become more accountable to the response to crisis is that they need to understand what really the "idea" of humanitarian response. Most of the humanitarian leaders are politicians and sometimes (most of the time) they use the crisis as step up for their political career. Maybe if it is possible that there should no politicians inside the core for humanitarian crisis.
• To ensure that Affected populations are not only listened to in terms of humanitarian response or programming, but that their voices are heard and decisions respected and help shapes programming. Feedback and complaint mechanism needs to be robust enough to capture Affected populations perceptions to measure if they are inline with practice and standards.
• To ensure that there is adequate funding towards AAP and ensure that Donors are also held accountable besides holding NGOs accountable.
• To give them the recognition on the work they do.
• To make it mandatory.
• To really ensure resources and commitment to empower children and communities on accountability
• Treat communities as equal partners; take collaboration seriously including when analysing their situation to inform humanitarian (and development ) responses
• Understanding how their actions affect communities
• Yes its true if the humanitarian leader more accountable , he can perform more better work , and also support of community

2. Inclusive System and Architecture

If you have been involved in any interesting initiatives, what are those and where are they taking place?

• Pooled funds conversations, local humanitarian leadership programming and stabilisation programming and conflict analysis that underpins foreign policy efforts (as local stakeholders cannot be avoided there).
• On the adoption of CRRF approach, I advocated for the establishment of Refugee Engagement Forum, a platform that allows refugee leaders to voice refugee issues at the field level to the national level so as to influence decision making in favour of the challenges on the ground. Similarly, the platform enable refugee leaders to communicate policy to the refugees they lead thus enable them to effectively participate effectively issues on ground that affect.
• Decolonizing philanthropy
• The initiatives are internal to our organization (Plan International Canada) but there has been establishment of the Diversity, Equality nd Inclusion committee which has been gradually working on improving DE&I in all aspects of our work (from communications, to hiring processes, to programming).
• Empowering partners on Accountability and on the importance of participation in decision making
• Auditing NGOs against the CHS
• Identification of new refugees influx (having no legal documents), mapping and providing food and NFIs support to them. These were taken place in the host communities where they came to start living and they needed support.
• Talk to Loop being used in the Philippines, Somalia, Indonesia, Ukraine/ Poland and Zambia
• The actions I took were in Sudan on areas of:
  1. Getting women as a leader of AAP committee for our WASH Projects
  2. Selecting CBOs with women leadership member for capacity building (organizational capacity building)
• Here two examples of InsightShare’s work:
  Nepal: https://www.cdacnetwork.org/news/learning-from-communities-in-nepal?rq=insightshare
  Bangladesh: https://www.cdacnetwork.org/news/putting-communities-in-control-of-evaluations-the-participatory-video-approach?rq=insightshare
• Jordan. Development of a two way digital interface for communication and dialogue with refugees and vulnerable communities.
• We are starting a project with GTS in Burkina To make sure that perception studies are extended to children, using appropriate method. This is very exciting work... just starting.
• I have been involved in conducting Information Ecosystem Assessment to ensure that the project design is more inclusive and meets the needs of the affected community
• Group and individual meetings held with community leaders and representatives to identify explosive hazard contamination, priorities for response and type of response needed
• I have been involved in the Grand Bargain Participation Workstream but admittedly our progress there has been mostly on raising awareness of AAP but still limited in actually shifting power.
• Within my organisation CARE at response and national level.
• Co-creating health flash cards with Rohingya community members in Bangladesh so that their experiences with risks were reflected in the content. As OCHA Afghanistan AAP advisor, I worked on a methodology and conducted a series of workshops with especially underrepresented women in the country for them to help design community feedback channels they would trust and could access. I am writing the report now on those workshops.
• At Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY) under United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), YOUNGO youth constituency for UNFCCC, Youth for disarmament and Youth for Biosecurity network they have a collective system built in for facilitating youth and children participation for various activities including sub committee and formal high level meetings to participate in the dialogues inclusive of the voices and interventions from their respective regions inclusive of Global South and under represented communities in a more holistic approach which enables a capacity building for youth to become future leaders in having an inclusive, accountable and just societies. By participating and engaging with youth representing from various parts on a safe space created and led by communities facilitated by the network enables a sustainable people centric approach
• A lot to learn from the health sector where patient voices are heard more.. GTS and CHSA did an interesting project in Chad with the HCT there - collecting and adapting plans based on views people
• AAP task force
• We try to involve and engage most vulnerable in the community such as person with disability, widow in the CBOs formed. They become part of decision making
• The participation of L/NNGOs needs to be participatory and truly democratic for ensuring that their voice is listened and considered. In Pakistan, the management of National NGOs Network is constant from last 8 years and not switched. The management is not representative and like-minded organizations are part and there is no democratic process for selecting the management
• At an organisational level, I have managed to successfully advocate for community voices to be present at both planning and evaluation meetings and bringing them into learning workshops. Unfortunately this would not happen without my role pushing for it, we have more work to do to mainstream this way of thinking.
• We did a survey - and we went back to the community to share the the results with simple visualisation (sandbottles, stones, human statistics) with small groups. Even the process was participatory and inclusive: as an international recruited staff I facilitated the preparation atelier, led them familiarize with the statistics, involved a capable comms woman to help facilitate in small groups and in a patriarchal society, where all power roles are occupied by men, I made sure that girls, mothers, women with handicapped are represented. I also shared the results with the people who gathered the data- often they get forgotten but they are local short term recruited people to do the survey and they often are part of the affected population. The community was surprised that a woman facilitated, and the women were well involved and national staff were happy about the creative methods - that this event of validation of the results of the survey was not just a box to tick, but fun to exchange about
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• Inter-agency coordination mechanisms are well placed to enable and promote progress to collective accountability
• The Project supports operations to create space for diverse voices (particularly women and girls) in assessments, surveys, committees etc as well as linking gender progressive CSOs with HCTs and clusters
• Go back to the community. Let the affected community be the primary participants. Like what happen last 2013 Zamboanga Seige. 5 barangays were have been affected. Houses and work really affected. We tried to hear the voice of the affected individual of what possible intervention that could help them in their own perspective. Basically, community participation is really important for improvement.
• Regular community visits, have a strong network with leaders, close communication with People from vulnerable groups.
• Start Network National Hubs
• The activity/ies I was involved in focused in enabling local NGOs to perform project/programme work. The main activity provided by the international partner is about training, capacity building, financial management & resource mobilization, advocacy and reporting. All the mentioned task require expertise and resources often not available to local NGOs, whereby the local members are very good & efficient in project implementation and day-to-day project follow up.
• Engaging affected communities in joint analysis and action planning; working with communities to prioritise key indicators as well as main barriers to durable solutions to their displacement; inviting representatives themselves to speak at events and put forward their experiences and perspectives themselves
• NGO networks that promote greater influence of local voices in different levels of humanitarian system
• Various and numerous citizen activism forums all over the EU
• Empowering the local community to use their voice as the tool of taking actions to humanitarians issues. In Tanzania, specifically in Mbeya region

What concrete action(s) would you recommend for global decision-making to be better influenced by representative and inclusive voices?

• Include women and the People Living with Disability in all decision making. Give them opportunity to work and contribute to the society. This can help to remove stigma and discrimination.
• Consultations with marginalized groups in decision making processes
• I think there should be a specific indicator in the project/proposal that this much % of population will be reached out and their voices heard with specific MoVs. In addition to this global players need to encourage the organizations to be honest and create a culture of accountability within organizations by themselves.
• Promote Talk to Loop as an approved, common and collective open response wide tool that any agency or organisation can use for free, leaving behind a safer, long term feedback mechanism and aggregate data that updates over time.
• We have very good policies and strategies on areas of inclusion but the issue is all about practicing. Therefore, I suggest that real need to be seriously considered especially by Humanitarian agency leaders
• Start listening
• Engage them in direct dialogue through mechanisms that create those spaces like participatory media.
• Programming should be allowed for participation and inclusiveness of affected population, vulnerable population before the actual response in itself. There is need for synergy where all of this are put inplace or already in place so that every organizations can tap into this pool of knowlede or have a role to play in adressing some of the challenges involved
• Bring voices together and bring them to global discussions, include them in processes.
• Ensure that assessment and reporting mechanisms contain views and concerns of affected persons. Logframe and ToC factor this in
• Often we think about participation from our own lenses... the elephant in the room :-) Thinking about participation and empowerment from our own worldview, experience, perception. So my recommendation is to make sure decision making is never happening without in place of... or on behalf of. Also, re-thinking about representation. Often people who represent others have not the legitimacy to do so . Having 1 person representing a group is maybe not enough. Maybe we should de-centralize all the decision making spaces ?
• We need to have more local or national organizations be heard at the global level. The design of AAP should adopt a bottom up approach
• Policy implementation.
• Enhanced collaboration among Humanitarian and community-based organizations in reaching and consulting those most at need in the most difficult to reach locations
• Not to feel so proprietary in creating tools, frameworks etc., and, instead, letting communities create them based on common principles.
• Making safe spaces for people to engage and participate in a equitable and representative way. As some under represented, marginalized and vulnerable communities need increased visibility to connect with the leaders for influencing the need to take initiatives to improve opportunities among them.
• Let's try something new. Let's have someone like Gloria to join global meetings. This isn't tokenism - the tone, language and presentation changes if you change who is there at the table..
• Must be refuge led organisations at first in every meeting
• Co-ordination and collaboration
• The global leadership working in the humanitarian sector needs to trickle down to the grass root level rather focusing and relying on some of the opportunists. Rather needs to be more open to increase the participation of real time organizations working at the grass root level and give them opportunity to raise their voice and ensure that their voice are heard and considered
• I think organisations should bring in local voices to funding / donor meetings so donors can see where needs and power imbalances lie.
• Bring CSOs and other forms of communities representation to ALL processes, i.e. when designing a tool, when discussing projects, research, etc. How many CSOs and community/native/indigenous people representatives/researchers were invited to this meeting?
• Investment in national disaster response mechanisms, accompanied by standing consultation and accountability structures
• We need to involve community in all aspects of the program cycle and provide funds to be able to achieve this. It needs to be very intentional.
• Convene consultations/webinars at times that suit zones other than Geneva and New York
• Make sure that we must hear what really the demands of the affected individuals because they are more knowledgable regarding the (their) needs than us.
• To give resources to the vulnerable groups.
• Increased engagement of the affected populations
• Global decision making to be better.
• Equality and diversity
• The HAP should include more organization in partnership who are working in humanitarian system and invest in capacity building.
• We need better understanding, using our brains instead of asking (sometimes really stupid) questions, taking up too much time and effort from people who are suffering.

3. Quality Resourcing

If your organization/agency/government had additional resources dedicated for AAP, how would you use them?

• Additional posts in areas like gender, protection, community engagement and ICT that are trained and skilled in AAP and speak relevant languages, have knowledge of the contexts.
• AAP doesn't need separate funding but it has to be mainstream in the organization structure.
• They would be allocated for dedicating a specialised team to ensure better AAP.
• Project needs to be designed in consultation with maximum number of affected population.
• Invest in a common sustainable open mechanism that is not project dependent and provides a safe mechanism for local people. Something structured around people not cluster systems or organisations... Loop maybe?
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• My organization is has dedicated budget even though not that much big resource. For the internal dedicated funds more is an investment on training. We have what we call SADI (safe, accessible, dignified and inclusive) approach. But most of the donor fund is also having dedicated budget for accountability which is more for advocacy
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• First conduct meeting at level operation select who the sector, staff by rolling mapping how to respond and use that resource , who the stockholder can support in this intervention
• Change management to change systems and structures
• Human resources for communicating with communities (including consultation before and during interventions), receiving and documenting feedback, and following up on complaints or issues.
• Conduct a holistic assessment on the perceptions of Affected population on how they want to be served or assisted in terms of awareness, fairness and inclusion, modalities or type of assistance based on needs, relevance of the assistance, feedback mechanism, social cohesion.
• Definitely hire dedicated staff, although it has been difficult to identify Spanish-speaking AAP specialists
• More time for participatory and empowering approaches, completing grants budget, to release the pressure from having to run to reach quanti targets. More time for training and equipping staffs.
• More coordination with the marginalized groups and other partners. Strengthen feedback collection and offer platforms that enable the marginalized be heard. We would also aim at bringing the affected community and humanitarians close on equally footing so that the community can hold them to account
• To empower the people with Education and Skills Training.
• Creation of better policies that govern and solve our humanitarian short comings.
• Field engagement
• Changing the culture in the organization by making accountability a mindset and pushing it beyond only feedback and complaints, improving more on leadership and governance.
• Driving organisational improvements - by using the CHS framework. Make the leadership accountable for this
• Accountability will be taken care across the organizational system broadly rather than project/ program based structure(s)
• I would try to ensure this funding was more flexible, to ensure it can be used in a way affected communities would want to use it. I would also use it to support wider knowledge and advocation for AAP within leadership of local branches.
• I will use them in percentages apportion to various sectors of our work
• Engaging community leaders to keep an eye on the activities as part of the stakeholders
• More staff - who are not involved to focus on indicators or logframe things to report on - but staff who are allowed to follow their own AAP agenda - like a quality element
• with the support of Community and others stake holders
• To resource adequately for proper AAP implementation. This will be for Human resourcing, capacity building and community facing activities that build on AAP.
• Trial different ways for diverse affected groups to influence decisions
• I would make a consultation and assessment with community before to put resources in the right place.
• Yes our organisation is so much involved with AAP through the creation of Menstrual Hygiene Management. We are also dealing with GBV issues which are very complex to be handle by people who not not from our background.
• Draft plan for AAP and recruit qualified staff to ensure AAP
• Support local NGOs to meet their overheads to ensure they less are bothered by financial challengers all along the project.
• Enhanced engagement, research to improve practice and learn from experiences…
• Better mechanisms to listen to community perspectives.
• Inclusive and involvement of all affected persons
• Dedicated strategy at programme design stage and robust dialogue with donors. Better accountability mechanisms for staff to deliver against clearly articulated AAP criteria. More recruitment of national staff, focused and consistent capacity building of national partners.
• I will use them through organizing training and workshops to persons of concerns on AAP in order to enlighten the community on accountability by partners.
• Hire and train more women to monitor on local levels as independent community monitors
• Hire local community liaisons who can use locally appropriate community organizing approaches to regularly collect and respond to feedback and demonstrate how the organizations is adapting based on feedback.

What should donors do to drive a greater commitment to AAP?

• Make AAP a core minimum standard for all substantive proposals and appeals (i.e. 10% or 5% of all humanitarian programs to include dedicated AAP funding as well as core reporting requirements).
• Allocate more human and financial resources to ensure a separated unit of AAP.
• Proposals need to be evaluated with the lens of AAP i.e. more weightage should be given to AAP.
• Allocation of more budget and making strong follow up
• Fast response with take note from community who can be support by adding to end basic need , considering for target population who gonna get support according to assessment did
• Elaboration d'un plan simple compréhensif de 5 ans et accessible à tous les acteurs
• Change management to change systems and structures (e.g. new profiles away from technical to social expertise)
• Require documentation and analysis of consultation with communities; provide longer-term funding and simplified reporting requirements for local organizations / partnerships / and locally-led initiatives
• Ask to use AAP results into design of following programming.
• Donors should not be interested on effectiveness of programming but if the effectiveness, approach, or impact were human-centred and decided on by decision of affected populations.
• Support system-wide AAP mechanisms rather than separate feedback mechanisms per organization or project.
• Include in reporting indicators
• Donors should have better M&E on organizations they fund . This way, they are able to gauge result oriented organizations and work with them.
• As a representative of a major donor, I am VERY interested in how participants answer this question. In the GB we have identified this as a "communication gap" i.e. orgs say "we don't have enough flexibility to do AAP effectively" while donors tell us, " our funding for AAP has the flexibililty." We in the workstream want to work with donors to improve and align our AAP requirements and frameworks to be more effective.
• Available good resources and prioritize auditable accountability systems, putting accountability as the lead of humanitarian response by increasing funding and looking for results and ensure feasibility of accountability.
• Demand adherence to the CHS
• There should be specific budget allocations to the accountability systems of the organization and it must be on the long term partnerships basis
• Give directly to local organisations - work through barriers that prevent this happening.
• Don't support unrealistic projects - fast but not good work
• Permit grantees to use up to a certain percentage of any humanitarian grant to invest in AAP. Create an AAP window within UN Country-Based Pooled Funds
• Read Lessons Learned. Much of the data around population preferences already exists.
• Adequately fund for AAP and not just insist for it to somehow happen without intentional and adequate resourcing.
• Publish good practices. Provide funds to agencies/organizations working together with communities on accountability
• Donors should get more information from communities.
• Donors should not be prescriptive, they should fund based on needs assessments
• Strong MEAL system
• Properly fund AAP, have and drive forward a more nuanced understanding of what ‘community engagement’ and AAP actually is (different ways of engaging them), …
• Fund it more, but expect it to be part of the programs they fund
• More funding is required
• Educate THEMSELVES better as to what AAP entails. Streamline and simplify reporting requirements. Move away from box ticking. Greater scrutiny for funding submissiosn and proposals against AAP criteria.
• Ensure funding and M&E is available within programmes for AAP
• Ask for evidence and scrutinize mandatory with independent auditing - this is the silver bullet.

How should organizations prioritize resources to make AAP part of their organizational approach?

• Through networking, partnership with other organizations with similar interest and with donor agency.
• They should develop a separated unit regarding AAP including specialised staff.
• Proper human and financial resources need to be budgeted at the time of design stage and in parallel a full time dedicated AAP department needs to be created within the organization chart and management team.
• Clear and strong strategy and policy document is needed. The AAP strategy should be linked with the organizational values and mission
• Clear strategy for emergency response specialist in countries it have extremely unstable situation because wars other thing beside the develop strategic
• Introduce new profiles, provide time/ budget to support capacity of implementing partners
• Use private funds / initiatives to fund staff engaged in AAP; set guidelines and standards; provide standard resources / templates for CwC to ease the way
• Organizations should prioritize affected population inclusiveness and decision making in programming, and thus provide assistance based on needs. and a follow up to see how this processes make organizations accountable to affected populations
• Spend more time with communities and try to integrate their feedback into concrete actions.
• Include in donor proposals , advocate with donors
• Use the method of Designated Funds in relation to AAP.
• By channelling their resources to the rights projects.
• Communities would be more empowered to build that trust and bridge the power gap or power imbalance.
• Apply the CHS
• Annual review of the organizational strategic priorities, achievements with the engagement of relevant stakeholders including the partners must be a regular event to document the learnings, failures, successes, challenges and the ways/ strategies to overcome those challenges
• Put it into strategy and within programme cycles
• Additional staff who are focusing on quality element
• Dedicated resources for building standing AAP structure in locations with long-running or recurrent emergencies
• AAP resourcing should be non negotiable if it is to be achieved meaningfully and not as a box checked for compliance.
• First be clear on approach and why you want to do it. Then structure AAP within way of working.
• Organizations should be the most efficient brokers between the donor and the community.
• Make it mandatory to put a percentage of AAP in all budgets
• Prioritised methodologies
• Make it a greater part of Job Descriptions/ToRs and annual performance reviews.
• Inclusive planning and budgeting
• More senior and dedicated AAP officers - better awareness of what it means and how to do it. Doesn’t always need more resources but a political will and sensitivity to context.