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Recommendations

©HARP-F partner

1/ Prioritise flexibility and adaptability in programming and operational management to enable agencies to cope with uncertainty and risk      

2/ Agree with partners likely operational and programmatic areas / issues where flexibility and adaptation are most likely to occur and discuss parameters of change.

3/ Document the many adaptations, innovations and solutions to the challenges partners have faced and found way to overcome. 

Our resource library compiles stories on how our partners have adapted their programming to respond to changes their operational context. 

4/ Continue to develop community-based delivery and monitoring mechanisms through participatory structures that involve project participants. 

We have been piloting closer community engagement in delivery and monitoring of WaSH projects and have developed a toolkit for practitioners to review power structures in project delivery. We will be reporting on these soon and discussed them at our webinar in December.

5/ Include a flexible and unallocated budget line for new emergency response in each partner budget to facilitate quick, or anticipatory, response to new hazards. 

6/ Establish autonomous third-party monitoring capacity, through commissioning an appropriately qualified organisation, the use of digital tools for the triangulation of data, and encouragement of collaborative peer monitoring on the ground by national partners.

7/  Set out clear and achievable criteria for trust and low risk operations, including incentives for achieving / applying them so that national partners have a pathway to a light touch partnership. 

8/  Assess demand and need for continued development of the RMP toolkit. 

9/  Ramp up preparations for greater use of cash transfers through multiple delivery systems (cash, bank transfer, hundi and similar informal systems, mobile etc.).

10/  Pre-position and replenish contingency supplies, including food, to facilitate continuous distribution when access is limited. Identify, train, and equip locally based distribution partners.

We funded pre-positioning of supplies by partners as part of our COVID-19 and coup emergency responses.  

11/ Ensure partners have access to and know how to use the communications technologies and digital tools that will be essential to delivery assistance in hard-to-reach areas in future.

12/  Increase the effectiveness of training by correlating the acquisition of new knowledge and skills with the development of management, monitoring and learning systems.

We are sharing knowledge and expertise in our resource library and through our webinar series, as well as setting up a on-demand training platform in Myanmar language to deliver emergency preparedness and response training to small CSOs and NGOs.

13/  Fund core costs of national partners – these funds contribute to and enhance the essential capacities organisations need to both deliver and manage risk effectively

14/  Promote consolidation of community feedback mechanisms on a regional basis.

15/  Establish risk management processes, standards and tolerance levels for use of informal (hundi) cash transfer systems.

16/  Tolerate (partial) failure of some innovative approaches to find new and more successful approaches to working in access-constrained areas.

17/  Ensure partners and their downstream partners have robust security capacity in place and arrange funding, capacity enhancement and communication accordingly.

18/  Develop formal, transparent, and objective criteria for due diligence to ensure the right partners are supported.

For example, we have developed a guidance note on due diligence questions for partners working with downstream humanitarian actors in  remote partnerships in Myanmar.

19/  Adapt the risk management approach to specific partner requirements

What our partners are doing - case studies

©HARP-F partner

©HARP-F partner

CASE STUDY 1: A national partner expands access to health services

One of our partners delivers imperative health services and awareness raising activities in five IDP camps and 10 remote villages in Kachin State.

Prior to the grant from HARP-F, the partner sourced funding from cross-border funds and through foundations and student groups in Australia and America. 

The amount of funding previously received was typically small while the needs were intensifying. HARP-F’s funding was relatively bigger and provided opportunity for the organization to expand its services and serve thousands more women and adolescents in conflict affected areas. In particular, the partner could train 25 community workers and serve 1000 individuals.

Read more

©HARP-F partner

CASE STUDY 2:  An international partner makes the most of community hotlines

One of our partners has been implementing the ‘Promoting needs-based protection and community-based support mechanisms for internally displaced and crisis-affected people in Rakhine State’ project since October 2019. 

The project received two grants from HARP-F, which are focused on protection monitoring and case management. The project supports monitoring of trends and protection issues within Rakhine State. Additionally, the project supports providing information, counselling, and legal assistance (ICLA), undertaking cross-learning with the partner Cox Bazar team and strengthening the communication within communities and accountability to affected populations.

Their approach to remote management, particularly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, was to further focus on community participation and feedback.

Read more

HARP-F partner

HARP-F good practices for remote partnership

1/   Keep it simple – the three pillars of the remote partnership approach (build trust, enhance due diligence, support flexible and adaptable management approaches) are appropriate and helpful as an approach to sustaining humanitarian operations in protracted crisis.

2/   Establish clear criteria for the assessment of partner capacity for delivery and risk management in access- constrained contexts, to enable partners to work towards attainment of the characteristics and competencies of the lowest risk, most highly trusted partners.

3/   Combining training backed up by field engagement, mentoring and ongoing support of all form is a good approach to provide support, resolve challenges in an administratively accountable manner, build resilience and confidence between partner and intermediary.

4/   Donors should consider creating a multi-donor fund for their partners to apply for core capacity funding distinct from project funding. These funds are essential to build and sustain institutional capacity in core functions that any organisation needs to deliver the best results.

5/   Donors must accept the need to fund adequate capacity for reporting and analysis, above and beyond that needed for the direct delivery of project outputs, if they are to fund national organisations directly, without an intermediary to take on these functions. 

6/ Include flexible, unallocated budget lines for emergency response in each grant to enhance capacity for responding quickly to, or even before, new hazards occur.

7/   Use digital solutions widely as enabling technology for remote partnership, including the distribution locally appropriate communications tools (smart phones, tablets, computers, wifi infrastructure etc.) to partners' community-based staff and volunteers, and funding for network service costs and training in the use of relevant apps and software packages  

8/  Innovate for monitoring and evaluating humanitarian assistance in hard-to-reach areas, for example by supporting collaboration among national organisations on M&E, creating common monitoring templates and indicators for all partners operating in similar areas, and financing third-party monitoring capacity 

9/  Document and disseminate the practical, often small, adaptations agreed with individual partners to overcome specific problems, to the wider group of partners, to facilitate real-time learning. This is almost certainly more helpful than dissemination of lengthy guidance documents and toolkits.

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