The Flagship Initiative: Rethinking Humanitarian Response (Status Update Three: October 2024)

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The Flagship Initiative and its Evolution

Eighteen months ago, OCHA launched the Flagship Initiative with a clear vision: to shift the drivers of humanitarian assistance, organizing efforts around the priorities of crisis-affected communities rather than the mandates of aid providers. The hope was that, by doing so, we could systematically operationalize the long-held humanitarian promise to put crisis-affected communities at the heart of humanitarian decision-making, including developing community resilience and reducing need rather than fostering aid dependency.

At the end of the first half of this three-year initiative, implementation in selected regions in the four pilot countries – Colombia, Niger, the Philippines, and South Sudan – is providing a growing understanding of how these aims can be successfully put into practice in a range of humanitarian contexts. The result is an emerging collection of practices in the following areas:

  • Community engagement, the bedrock of the Flagship Initiative, while being practiced in pilot country regions in a range of different ways, is beginning to galvanize programming around a more comprehensive understanding of community priorities and their own capabilities rather than external assessments of need.
  • Area-based coordination fosters more inclusive coordination by involving a broad range of actors in platforms convened at the local level and facilitating improvements in coherence across responses.
  • New models of funding organized by community priorities, with community oversight on funding review panels, is realizing the long-held humanitarian promise to localize funding to actors from those communities that we serve.

This status update showcases the emerging trends and innovations of the Flagship Initiative and gives some indication of its expected impact. It also highlights how the approach is evolving, the challenges encountered, and some lessons. Perhaps most importantly, it indicates how this initiative is changing the way humanitarian actors engage crisis-affected communities, centre them in humanitarian decision-making, foster resilience, and, ultimately, improve lives.