Flagship Initiative

The evolving approach

Despite the vastly different operational contexts and unique challenges faced in each country, the Flagship Initiative has identified five common evolving elements that are transforming the way humanitarian responses are programmed and delivered. These elements, emerging over the past 18 months, are reshaping the humanitarian landscape, moving away from standardized, top-down approaches towards more community-centered, locally-driven solutions. 

The Flagship Initiative approach is revolutionizing humanitarian action through five key elements:

1. Systematic and Participatory Community Engagement 
   This new approach prioritizes participatory engagement based on active listening and iterative dialogue. It aims to truly understand and prioritize community needs, moving beyond traditional needs assessments. Find out more about how community engagement is evolving in the Philippines.
2. Decentralized Area-Based Coordination 
   The initiative implements area-based coordination, emphasizing greater local involvement and decentralized decision-making. This approach focuses on empowering local actors who are best positioned to respond effectively.
3. Funding Local Communities' Priorities and Capacities 
   The Flagship approach utilizes country-based pooled funds to directly support local initiatives and capacities. It introduces micro-grants and develops coherent country-level finance strategies that align with community priorities and focus on building resilience.
4. Programming and Humanitarian Planning Based on Community Priorities 
   Community priorities become the central focus for all actors involved in humanitarian response. The humanitarian response plan is evolving to present area-based strategies organized around these community-identified priorities.
5. Empowering Resident and Humanitarian Coordinators to Drive an Integrated Response that Addresses Community Priorities 
   The initiative empowers Resident and Humanitarian Coordinators to transform the humanitarian business model. They can now develop innovative approaches that directly respond to community priorities and promote integrated programming across humanitarian and development sectors.

Find out more about the Flagship Initiative’s evolving approach.

Learning, adaptation and replication

The Flagship Initiative is an exploratory process: some approaches will work, others will not. The aim is to understand why and, where desirable, how approaches can be replicated and brought to scale. To do so, an external rigorous learning and evaluation function has been engaged to support pilot countries to learn from setbacks, identify promising new approaches, and develop them for replication in other contexts. Following the publication of the Flagship Initiative’s First-Year Learning Report, the first Global Learning Forum was held in Luxembourg in March 2024. You can find a summary of the discussions in our Global Learning Forum Report.