In November 2022, the then Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC), Martin Griffiths proposed an “initiative to pilot a people-centred, agile, locally-driven response in a number of countries” to the Interagency Standing Committee (IASC) Principals. Subsequently, the Flagship Initiative (FI) was launched in early 2023 (with a three year duration), as a humanitarian change process initially based around four country pilots (Niger, South Sudan, Philippines and Colombia) and now some extension countries (Ukraine, Somalia).
In many ways, it is in response to the protracted and frequent nature of crises. Needs are outpacing resources and the humanitarian operating environment struggles to shift from emergency response to enabling crisis-affected populations to build long-term resilience. The ambition of the FI is, therefore, to empower country Resident Coordinator (RC)/ Humanitarian Coordinator (HC) leadership (supported by OCHA) to develop original, context specific coordination and response solutions that are:
- clearly centred around and accountable to affected people.
- driven by and responsive to their priority needs and protection risks.
- built upon affected populations’ capacities and representation.
- lean and tailored to the context.
It will do this by generating a visible operational shift towards stronger community engagement and a people-centred response, including piloting new context-specific coordination, financing and planning structures that are based on affected peoples’ needs and capacities, rather than being sector/supply driven.
To learn from this process, the FI has a monitoring, learning and evaluation component which is split across a core team in OCHA centrally, and a contracted-out small central unit of academics and practitioners, hosted by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, as well as country-based research leads (supported by national junior researchers) in each of the four Flagship pilot countries. The learning and evaluation component is highly adaptive, combining developmental and formative evaluation.
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