so a very very warm welcome to you um thank you very very much for coming we really appreciate it um this is both a bit of a celebration um where we're celebrating the fact that sphere has been around for 25 years we're also going to be reflecting on the last 25 years as well as looking forwards um we're going to be critical um both negatively and positively about sphere that we don't have any Chatham house rules um and we are going to be recording this session and we're going to put it on YouTu
be later um just to let you know um but first of all just to help melt the ice if there is any in the room and if you have a neighbor I see yours doesn't have a Navy neighbor yet but if you have a neighbor um and would like to please turn to your neighbor and just for a couple of minutes share why you've come here why are you in the room what's brought you out of interest in sphere or what's your connection with sphere so just turn to your neighbor for a couple of minutes and just share thank yo
u so much what the is well thank you thank you very much it has fantastic energy thank you thank you can you hear me thanks thank you very much that's uh wonderful um amazing energy thank you and just to let you know which is probably why you're here is that there is Kate afterwards um so please stay around um and continue sharing and meet some other people old faces new faces so please um if you can endure us till uh 12 30 and please join us in a little bit of a celebration so first of all a re
ally um warm welcome and a massive thank you to our panelists and we really appreciate the preparation they've done before coming here and for agreeing to share this morning so on the panel um is Gabrielle kodoy cyrillo Cuba Siddiki Susanna Davis Paula Reed Lynch and Nicholas Stockton and we're really looking forward to hearing what you're going to say later I'm going to start off with a couple of introductory words I'd also like to thank Vanda who's going to be our facilitator for the panel and
we'll have a q a session as well later so yeah if you've got any questions um please hold them for the Q a session okay so the idea of a major step forwards in quality and accountability Improvement in principle humanitarian Aid came out of the refugee camps in Goma just over the border from Rwanda following the horrific genocide in 1994. when we got it all wrong traumatized refugees were badly let down and indeed many Aid workers were also badly affected as they struggled to cope in the afterm
ath of one of Humanity's most terrible chapters I can't imagine the horror Aid agencies are very good at The Who at branding at PR fundraising promoting ourselves and we do so in competition with many others they're all doing and saying roughly the same thing even one wheel on the Dance Floor we are constantly looking around for more dance partners and dreading the music to stop so we talk a big game and we share our best side we're also good at the why we say that the humanitarian Charter the h
umanitarian principles separate us from caregivers because we give Primacy to affected people in a watertight dignified and ethical way what we don't see is that the principles are really hard they are gray they are often pragmatic and means to an end principles rather than absolute moral values and we are not so good at the what the minimum standards state that humanitarian Aid should reach this low bar not the maximum standards not the median standards but the minimum standards and we do this
because we care about people's dignity and their rights however due to many constraints we often fail to match up what people want and need for what we can offer and at its crudest in several contexts we can only offer a potluck supply of items such as cash or Services little Choice often equals little dignity and we struggle to catch the how to crack the how we struggle with communication with Community engagement with expectation management with respect and conveying dignity with building rela
tions building Trust it can be partly taught it's partly character but the rest is constrained by the organization and by the context and the reasons are complex and interconnected I've spoken with several retired Aid workers from the World Bank from the UN from ngos who sometimes often say the same thing that development has failed and read countless articles particularly in the last 10 years that the humanitarian Aid System is broken or broke not broken and yet the wfp's income went up from 9
to 14 billion last year there are still many hundreds of international ngos in the fight for Access and funding across all low-income countries and I saw this like last year in Moldova but the great Ship Sails on because there is no new system to render our existing reality obsolete so the long-term camps of displaced people where hope is often just a smoldering Wick those on the front line of climate change and no way of saving their home their inheritance and those trapped in chronic poverty t
hese are the millions of people who are still not able to sit at the table where decisions about their future are made despite this my belief is that we have to keep going we need to work with what we have because we can't give up and we can't walk away the core humanitarian standard for example is very good it was distilled from a wealth of experience and knowledge and is being put into practice by many International and National agencies around the world it's useful as a voluntary code and als
o as a basis for performance verification which is really important because it's easy to get away with being accountable to the least powerful it's easy to be accountable to those to the managers to the donors um but it's easy to get away with being accountable to the least powerful so because of this we do need a performance verification which is not just a box ticking exercise or lip service and that can enable us to get it right so that we can show we're walking the talk the sphere handbook i
s a must-have resource for thousands of Aid workers and policy makers it's 25 years old the book is often a treasured possession and in fact it's one of the first items to be packed alongside a toothbrush and a phone charger can anyone relate to that putting that handbook into your bag with the toothbrush and phone charger and it's very special book for us for human chains because it is so useful it's the embodiment of many hundreds of experienced and knowledgeable experts who have pulled Blood
Sweat and Tears into Drafting and redrafting each word and each number and it's until it is as good as it can be and this includes the humanitarian Charter as well as the technical chapters and if you wanted someone to sign your copy of the handbook I wonder who you'd get to sign it because it'd be necessary to ask countless authors and contributors and that's why it's so special it's from the many for the many so the strength of sphere and now the many focal points I'm delighted that there are
a few focal points um trainers and trainers of trainers and champions with us today they're ensuring that the Baton is passed On to the Next Generation and in fact this recent photo is taken from very near to where those refugee camps were located in Goma and it says far more than I could ever see my final slide I just want to do a plug now for the humanitarian standards partnership it's a network of 10 standard setting initiatives and sphere hosts this partnership in fact we're hosting a meetin
g this afternoon of the partners there's a website there's an application so do consider downloading if you haven't already the HSP app onto your phone your mobile and going forward we want to drive more collaboration harmonization and simplification thank you very much I'm now going to pass over to Vanda who's going to lead us in the session of panel thank you thank you so much William and just basically built upon what William mentioned in the humanitarian standard partnership just to break in
the eyes is anyone already have the HSP in your mobile phone super thank you very much so for those who still not have it you will have time before the end of the session or before you leave to Geneva to also or this humanitarian Network partnership fee to have it on your mobile phone so when you've been deployed or when you are talking to your partners or when you work in the disaster area you don't need to wear the book as one option but you can also have on your mobile phone thank you very m
uch um secondly who already ever attend a sphere training all right super and who is sphere trainer in this room perfect thank you very much thank you for all your support really really uh appreciate it and final final question before I turn into our discussion um who among all of us in this room commute to continue using sphere and the other humanitarian standard in your work perfect well done so thank you so much my name is also served as a sphere board member and I will be moderating the sess
ion and um as we are celebrating the 25th years of the sphere and there will be a cake later on um in this final discussion um we will reflect upon the past quarter of the sphere existence as what William already mentioned but also we would like to unpack a little bit forecasting the future of the humanitarian standard the big key question what next for the minimum humanitarian standard and so to untick this question we have our wonderful and excellent families to help sharing their View and als
o to trigger the discussion later on when we have our question and answer so let me introduce the panelists first we have Mr Nicholas Stockton one of our spirit founder so we are Keen to hear from him he is co-founded the sphere project in 1997. uh and was the first executive director of the humanitarian account Humanity Hub International which later merged with the people in Aid to become CHS Alliance so thank you welcome sir uh next we have Miss Paola Lynch director for policy and resource pla
nning in the Bureau of population Refugee and migration PRM of the U.S state Department so welcome Paula next we have Miss Susana Davis a senior humanitarian advisor at save the children and currently the global colleague of the child protection minimum standard working group at the alliance for child protection in humanitarian action so welcome Susana the last two finalists is my dear friend Juan is coming from Pakistan miss tuba Siddiki a quality and accountability program coordinator from cws
a the first Regional partners of sphere since 2011 and she herself managing the regional sphere focal point in Asia Pacific and she is one of the sphere focal points so welcome to back thank you very much and last but not least Mr Gabrielle cyrilo a trainer and humanitarian Aid member at the fraternity International humanitarian mission and Gabriel has recent experience of applying sphere in Brazil and he has a YouTube channel and posting all the amazing work that um he do so we also came to hea
r uh what she's going he's going to share with us today so let's get started then I'm going to turn to Nicholas and the same question to all panelists for the first round but you share with us how did you initially engage with sphere and what is your connection uh now so Nicholas offered to you oh okay thank you um it's um it's quite a treat this I've I've waited 25 years to get the chance to speak for five minutes and suddenly I get two lots of five minutes it's pretty wonderful um so I have lo
st lots of sleep wondering what on Earth to say in in this five minutes um and I um yeah I I I'm going to go back a bit um if I can but I want to start off first of all by with a little bit of theory um neoclassical economics has it that the market is regulated by the principle of consumer sovereignty I'm sure you're all familiar with that idea the problem is when the consumer or the principal in this instance has got no money and no power and the provider of the service or the goods has plenty
of money in power there is a serious risk of two fundamental problems the first is always referred to as the risk of moral um uh um moral hazard and the second is the risk of inappropriate choice now moral hazard is essentially the problem of corruption um most of you will probably think of that in terms of financial corruption but of course lots of you also know very well around the issue about the issues of um sexual exploitation and abuse by Aid workers it's another classic example as it were
of the problem of moral hazard inappropriate choice is the when you don't make the decision about who's going to supply you with health care but you just get get what's given to you very often The Giver is completely and utterly incompetent and is not necessarily professionally qualified to do the job they're doing now economists predict that where you have circumstances where where supply and demand in that in in that relationship between um the providers of um uh providers of goods and servic
es where the the receivers of those have no power in the relationship the prediction it's the firm a firm prediction that you will have these problems happening and therefore neoclassical economic economists are sort of willing to admit to the idea that a bit of Regulation might be a good idea otherwise of course we all love free markets because they um deliver enormous benefits to everybody at least that's the theory well as William has already said um a lot of the thinking about sphere started
in 1994 in August um when 1.2 million refugees approximately cross the border from Rwanda in the roughly two days now to meet them um was a young lad called Filippo Grande who at the time was the project officer for unhcr and he took on the responsibility over the next few weeks of in the lead agency model of uh humanitarian coordination of of um essentially leading the response there and he was joined a couple of days later on the plane that I went in with which was carrying Ops van water equi
pment at the time I was the Oxfam emergency's director and he was joined by the representative from from ocher who who who um had been relatively recently set up a a guy that many of you will also know called Charles Petry and he was sent in to help advise on coordination um on top of that and I remember very vividly on the C 14 or whatever it was that we flew in from the UK on um uh there were four or five of us that were sort of supposedly involved in management or technical advice the rest of
it was just full of journalists and press officers and what happened over the next few weeks first of all roughly 60 000 people died under our noses um 30 odd thousand thirty five thousand from cholera um but what was really different about this is that it happened on real-time TV in a way that had never ever happened before it unfolded under our noses but under the noses of journalists and so on and it was relayed globally and often we said at the time that the consequences of this was the sor
t of End of the Age of humanitarian innocence I mean it wasn't the first time that sexual exploitation and abuse took place in a humanitarian operation and it certainly wasn't the first time that incompetent agencies turned up and made a horrible mess of things but it was the first time that 360 agencies turned up in one place and made an absolute and utter shambles under the TV cameras and it destroyed the reputation of the humanitarian system and at the time those of you that will remember it
well the main journalistic byline is what are they doing feeding the killers in the camps and that's what we were found guilty of a few of us came back from that and I've apparently had my five minutes so um I will try very quickly to say a couple more points about this a few of us came back um and uh got uh through the offices of the steering committee for humanitarian response we got the idea that we really ought to do something about laying out some foundations to address these questions of i
ncompetence and moral hazard and that's really where the sphere committee came from sorry the sphere project came from I was its first chair um I co-wrote the uh the original Proposal with Peter Walker who was the policy director at the ifrc at the time and you sort of could say um you'll I'll make you happy if I say this the rest is history um I would have said a bit more but I'm obviously got the time but I I just had one more sentence or two perhaps if I can get away with it it did become app
arent within about three years of the sphere project in being in existence that the compliance verification the quality assurance side of it was not going to get taken forward and I'll never forget Jim Bishop of interaction saying to the board the project management committee meeting when this question was Ray used I think by me he said if it attempts to cross the Atlantic it's going to be dead on arrival and apologies for my terrible American accent the the thing in question was the compliance
verification element so I think it was in 70 now sorry in 98 I went along to a world disasters report launch in London and said is anybody interested in doing the compliance verification thing because sphere clearly is unable to proceed with this and out of that a couple of other organizations said yes let's have a go at this and we got the humanitarian Ombudsman project up and running and that morphed eventually into the humanitarian accountability partnership which has ended up in the csw alli
ance and so on um and then this is my last sentence I worked for Archer a few years back now um on a job looking at the implementation of the transformative agenda one of these numerous policy initiatives which lie at the bottom of this compost heap of of policy initiatives that we all managed to completely forget about that particular one my job was to wander around see what's going on see whether there was effectively compliance with principles of accountability to um affected people answer no
t one bit of it not in Haiti not in Sudan not in South Sudan not in Pakistan not in Afghanistan I went through operation after operation after operation looking really carefully and I was horrified it was worse in most cases than it had been in Goma so what went wrong with this okay thank you so much Nicholas and again when we have we can always Fascinate into all of the history but also came to hear from Paula thank you Nicholas for for that offer to use a man for your intervention foreign good
morning thank you very much I'm going to just read my comments and try to get through this in five minutes so that I so I can beat the clock uh the development of the minimum humanitarian standards was originally done in five sectors water and sanitation nutrition food Aid shelter and site planning and Health Services this is the first edition of the sphere handbook and it had cool little separate chapters that you could take out and take with you to the field when you wanted to go to the field
this was the very first one this is the most recent one it fits in your pocket or along with everything and it has everything you don't have to choose which chapter you're going to take uh they they needed to the the standards however as they were being negotiated needed to be agreed by both the subject matter experts and by governments wfp and unhcr had earlier signed their first mou where wfp would take on Refugee feeding in many operations and PRM my Bureau was then responsible for funding s
ome little bits of wfp costs and so I got involved in looking at wfp and unhcr and their partnership and food Aid and nutrition issues it wasn't very difficult then for the bureau to decide that I should be involved in the the development of the minimum standards on nutrition but I want to first talk about the context when Nan bazard first mentioned the idea of working to establish minimum standards for humanitarian assistance here are some of the contexts regarding standards that made it such a
n easy thing to agree to you may recall We Are the World The Anthem that emerged from a famine in 1985 in Africa we the International Community were in the excuse me we're in the habit of doing what we could but without an agreed way to set targets for what actually needed to be done in Somalia in 1991 we had seen actual cases of scurvy you may remember reading history about Sailors on ships hundreds of years ago getting scurvy because they lacked vitamin C this were people who in principle were
surviving on humanitarian assistance but had no access to fresh fruit or vegetables in their diet and scurvy was the result we learned the hard way that a hungry person will not eat everything a hundred hungry person will not just eat anything they we sent sorghum to the Horn of Africa in the early 1990s and that did not solve the problem because people didn't eat it they didn't know what it was or how to fix it pellagra broke out in that decade among Mozambique and refugees in Malawi PRM sent
cash to unhcr specifically to purchase peanuts to provide to refugees in Malawi after the Rwandan Genocide similar to Nick although I was not on the plane I was not out there I recall way too many discussions back in Washington uh in the debate over how much water actually needed to be provided for the tens of thousands of rwandans that had sought refuge in Goma which was then in Zaire now DRC amidst all this though on a positive note the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S had published in 1
992 one of their morbidity and mortality weekly reports on humanitarian emergencies that had listed many of the sectors that sphere later put together Mike Toole and Phil nieberg were among two participants from the CDC in those days when I held the portfolio for food nutrition in PRM I worked I I was asked to work with the nutritionists that were establishing the minimum nutritional standards now I am not a nutritionist I negotiate humanitarian issues with agencies and with other countries but
I can assure you with my broadest most respectful smile that nutritionists are without doubt the most argumentative people on earth on the minimum daily caloric ration there was a ton of discussion and debate one of my favorite nutritionist Advocates to deal with was Rita Bhatia of unhcr we discussed nutrition for hours I learned so much that the 1000 calories per day that you may hear is the minimum standard in order to sustain life well that's true if you're lying in bed doing nothing which is
as you know not the case for any forcibly displaced person ever and I will admit that I finally learned that agreeing on a minimum standard of 2100 calories a day was not the result of diplomatic negotiations but of data and evidence I'll say more about that in my answer to the second question PRM my Bureau and usaid ofta which is now BHA at usaid funded the sphere project from its Inception in 1997 alongside a host of other government donors Echo the Ford Foundation interaction and various ngo
s also contributed and we have continued to fund Sphere for 25 years and are in the middle of a grant that we hope will continue on so am I am I good good okay yeah okay done okay thank you thank you so much apply any minutes left over too yeah and I said that yes then we'll give it on a close thank you so much and also thank you for continue supporting speed and thank you for bringing us and for us to look the first version of the sphere um handbook um into this 25th anniversary really really a
ppreciate it so now I'm going to turn to Susana um share with us because you've been engaged also and then you work in the um uh colleague of the global Coalition on protection minimum standards so Kim to hear your thoughts over to you oh yep thanks very much Banda um so I have the the tall order of coming after Nicholas and Pola which is a bit of a challenge but we'll see how we do um so I'm really pleased to be here representing the child protection minimum standards um and our Global working
group of more than 40 National and international agencies who are regularly working together uh to advance the implementation of the child protection minimum standards to measure their impact and to learn and continue to evolve them over time um and just speaking in that way I think you can see how perhaps the dynamic around minimum humanitarian standards has changed and evolved over time the child protection minimum standards has more than a decades-long history with fear and I learned in prepa
ring for this event that the cpms did not first engage just with sphere in the couple of years leading up to us becoming a sphere companion in back in 2013 not long after our own standards were launched but rather several years earlier when sphere was going through its own revision to strengthen the protection principles within a newer edition of the sphere standards and they reached out to the global Child Protection working group for input on those protection principles and the child protectio
n working group and its many members submitted so much text and feedback on key issues that ought to be considered but spear came back and said you might well consider developing some minimum humanitarian standards of your own and we did not let's do that um as with all minimum humanitarian standards and I quite liked the way that William uh spoke about sphere saying that they are from the many for the many uh this was very much the case for the child protection minimum standards as well which w
ent through I believe at the time it was a two-year development process involving more than 25 countries and thousands of academics practitioners and key stakeholders from around the globe to develop them as a new humanitarian standard standards handbook at the time back in 2012 when we were just launched and not long after we signed our companionship agreement and agreed to collaborate with fear um collaboration with sphere was really essential both to learn from sphere and there were other com
panion standards at the time as well on their experience of implementing and promoting humanitarian standards how exactly do you do this how do you mobilize the mass of humanitarian actors the number of agencies across the number of of countries to actually work to implement these standards it was key to learn from them on that but also to gain acceptance to gain validity uh in the eyes of governments National partners and Inter International agencies um over time sphere has very much evolved in
to a brand name that helped open doors for the child protection minimum standards and when we said that we were a companion standard to sphere it was a mark of quality and accountability and a mark of how our own standards had been developed um now years later the child protection minimum standards have more than 72 000 users they have been implemented and rolled out in more than 50 countries and translated into 14 languages we are the second most downloaded humanitarian standards handbook after
sphere of course um over time our partnership with sphere has evolved into the establishment of the broader humanitarian standards partnership which you heard William mention and Vanda mentioned and appreciate the the plug for the app so sphere continues to graciously host the humanitarian standards partnership where the child protection minimum standards joins together with eight other minimum standards handbooks we really value the humanitarian standards partnership as a critical learning and
capacity exchange space and a common forum for the promotion of all humanitarian standards minimum humanitarian standards today are a key way that we operationalize our commitment to the rights protection and dignity of affected peoples they are the way that we go from these commitments and these principles which William described as gray to actionable practical steps that humanitarian actors and agencies can take and which can be measured and which we can learn from humanitarian standards cert
ainly need resources and Collective action to be implemented and the humanitarian standards partnership is one forum for advancing such action all humanitarian standards go through similar cycles and have similar operational priorities so through the HSP we're able to continue learning from each other's successes and challenges when it comes to capacity strengthening around the standards institutionalization measurement implementation and of course that all important revision because humanitaria
n standards do not stand still we learn from practice we learn from our colleagues around the globe and we evolve and revise and continue to try to get better so I think I'll I'll try and conclude there as my colleagues have already helpfully uh plugged the humanitarian standards partnership app but just to note that there are quite a variety of collaborations happening through the HSP and it is a forum that we see as with great possibility and great opportunity for further joint upper joint act
ion and collaboration in the future okay thank you very much Susan and really great to hear about you emphasize on the importance of collaboration and harmonizing all the standard because we cannot really work in Silo no we need to collaborate so ladies and gentlemen we already hear from the history we already hear from the donor perspective as well as from the global perspective from Susan so our two speaker will give us more a little bit grounded sharing their experience from Pakistan as well
as Brazil so um I go to you first for your intervention and followed by Gabrielle thank you very much thank you Wanda um the order is getting told let's go here um congratulations first of all congratulations to Sofia on you know the 25th um being uh in the sector for 25 years and doing really well uh I'm just going to start with a bit of history and how we started with uh Sofia in 2005 uh Pakistan had an earthquake uh it was on a vast scale and uh at that time bore spare board um and you know c
wsa we collaborated uh with each other and sphere both sent a very dear Sylvie Robert to Pakistan uh to work with us for three months um and uh you know work with the governments communities and ngos on introducing sphere and how we can um work on the minimum keeping can view the minimum standard from severe um in 2006 we felt the need after the earthquake after three months that we need to learn a bit more on this uh and so we requested we raise fund for it and then we requested Sylvie again to
come back to keep on coming back to Pakistan to give us more information and uh more capacity strengthen our capacity on uh it's Affair as well as quality and accountability over all um after that 2006 in 2006 uh fair for uh cwsa became the Pakistan focal point first Affair country focal point and we started our journey into building capacity of other local organizations on Sofia and quality and accountability uh 2011 uh cwsa became the first Regional partner uh and we look at the Asia Pacific
region we did deployments there we did uh severe toots uh on in Nepal Japan Korea Afghanistan Iran um and we promoted and advocated for sphere um on the regional level um in 2011 we also uh hosted a severe first Fair focal point Forum in uh Thailand uh where the Asian region focal points they came together to again talk and see where the challenges uh where we can learn from each other and that this practice had been going on since then that after two couple of years three years we have this one
Forum in Asia where we come together the focal points and exchange knowledge with each other other uh we actively support Sofia in setting up the country focal points uh in the Asia region we identify we try and identify uh focal points that can you know help uh promote and advocate for severe in the in their own countries and work with local uh organization as well as the National Organization um the fact that the collaboration uh works so well with the fair is uh when we I was talking to beca
use I'm fairly new but uh when I was talking to the organizational management that why how did we start it and why have we gone with uh why this collaboration is so successful um one thing that came from all the management that had been involved with uh collaborating with severe is that um Safir is it has always been in a supporting role and that had led for the local and had led the local organization to understand adapt uh and initiate any uh trainings or events around Sofia at their own pace
there is no imposition uh they you are you have the time you have your own pace that you can uh go forward with and that had led to a very uh supportive and you can say a two-way uh a two-way communication uh between the fair and uh cwsa where they have been able to have so many focal points and a very successful focal point system at the regional level as well as at the country level if I say so myself uh and uh this uh also connects to what uh Giles Dooley if you've been in his session yesterd
ay that localization will only come if we are in a supportive role we can't Empower uh people we can't Empower ngos we can only support them to help them Empower themselves and we feel that uh so it's a fair role had been uh in uh that area where they have been in a supportive role and not in a very imposition uh role from the uh pardon but from the Western uh side of the border so that had been really helpful in you know um pushing us forward and uh working on these um uh thematic areas uh anot
her thing that we do with Sofia is that we talk about it in a very humanitarian uh sector for we'll talk about it for the humanitarian sector but uh we uh as an organization and we do Advocate that it is it can also be seen as something that development sector can adopt uh in various uh ways so uh for our projects for our development projects and for other organizations that we work with and their development projects we do uh contextualize in a sense that uh we help them to contextualize in a s
ense that it can be work can be seen uh and worked with development projects as well so this is what we've been doing currently we are continuing our work as the regional partner and as a country focal point and uh our major uh area had been how to help local organization understand it and adapt it with um translated the uh versions in Urdu as well as we've helped um with another focal point Akbar in Afghanistan we've helped them translate supported them in translating it in Dari as well okay th
at's what we've been doing thank you so much thank you so much and then also for bringing the connection with the localization agenda I know that we already hearing so much but you can also bear with us because we would like to clean and hear from Brazil so a real offer to you and if you have any question please keep with you and then we will open later on for question and answer thank you thank you Uganda thank you everyone good morning thanks for being here thank you for all the speakers for t
hree Sphere for the opportunity and on behalf of retaining International military missions it's a pleasure to be here to be sharing our experience so magnesium initial engagement with sphere started back in December 2020 when I had my first volunteer experience with fihm in within the Horizon humanitarian mission in up north Brazil it's important to say that by that time fihm was already sphere focal point in Brazil and became a sheer focal point in 2021 in Portugal as well and had already trans
lated this for your handbook into Brazilian European Portuguese before going to haraima it was very important to have an introductory course on these few standards so I got on the field already with the initial experience with it my first role was I was a part of the team of livelihoods and durable Solutions which was great we were working and we're still working with indigenous Venezuelan refugees so was I was in charge of doing correct follow-up of the capacity building courses and making sure
the indigenous Venezuelan people were getting the most of the courses and also uh about the cultural aspect of it so it was very important to sing to practice the core humanitarian standards and to really know what it means to be accountable to indigenous Venezuelan people by that time so it was a very important initial experience for me I didn't know much yet about fear but was it was a process you know by April 2021 I had the opportunity to participate in the first sphere mock I think it was
a preparation for me for the new role that I seen one month later on May 2021 as an assistant coordinator in a board Refugee shelter in the city of pakuraima Brazil and by that time you could see like every day the whole book coming to practice because the daily routine of a refugee shelters to be on the field is not easy a lot of things happen and then you can see protection principles in action the core how many times standards all the technical chapters so it's a real it was a really challeng
ing experience but very important to really apply and see Syrian to practice well by August 2022 I had the first opportunity to come to Europe to be integrated as part of the Portugal humanitarian nation and one month later I became part of the humanitarian capacity building team of fertility and then it was an opportunity to bring all this practical knowledge into uh Theory as well and digging deeper into the sphere handbook and it was like a six month preparation for a one more challenge that
we had so on January 2023 we became part of the Poland humanitarian Mission we are currently there uh working the correco area and on February we had the opportunity to be on the sphere uh standing standards Workshop in Warsaw he was a very great opportunity we're gonna have a next Workshop in May and a TLT in June so fertility International military missions along with sphere save the children humanitarian Leadership Academy has been part of the sphere Eastern Europe programming and it's been v
ery important you know to share our practical knowledge uh into Theory and to bring polish humanitarian agencies and humanitarian Professionals in today's steer knowledge it was a very important and I'm gonna quote one of the participants as speech at the end of the workshop why this handbook was not in my hands and year ago so I really feel uh our role as fertility International mental missions and myself right now part of the humanitarian capacity team to spread the word and share the knowledg
e about sphere so that's what I feel it's our main role and really grateful and happy to be here thank you okay thank you very much Gabriel and also to really bringing Spirit into practice so it's not only about the handbook itself it's not only like a document but it can be really at Value at the field level so um build into what we already hear so far and thank you for all the intervention for the um first round for the panelists I'm going to turn back to Nicholas and then the same um uh what
you call that order um we already heard considering um that the growing in the humanitarian sector a lot of ideas perspective even in this event in the humanitarian natural partnership with there is a lot of push on improve strengthening accountability uh simplification of the standard so Nicholas what do you like to see for the next for the minimum standard but in general but also in sphere in particular so over to user thank you um I I want to go back a little bit um again before I will seek t
o answer the question um but if I go back to my birth uh 70 years ago um there were a lot of organizations here that were sort of existed at that time but they had in some cases slightly different names uh for example um the uh what is now called the British foreign Commonwealth and development office in those days was called rather more simply the colonial office it sort of rebadged itself in 1966 and became the overseas development Administration another rather important British institution wa
s a thing called the school of Oriental studies was founded in 1916 to train British colonial administrators and the core text for that for that training was a book called Community Development in the tropics written by a guy called T Batman um it was all about localization actually um remarkably similar to the sort of stuff that actually appears in various parts of sphere and all sorts of other policy areas we've kind of been here before but the point is that these institutions um Oxfam was the
Oxford committee for famine relief care was the um this is perhaps 40 years back but care was at that point The Cooperative for American relief in Europe post-war so the children fund had been set up actually principally in response to the first world war one of all of this was about more than anything else was realizing how to deal with the costs of imperialism the costs of warfare and doing so through a process of socializing those costs and trying to address the Damage Done by colonialism an
d imperialism through the voluntary efforts often of people that cared about these things and that's why a lot of we a lot of us come from then in 1972 right at the height of the of the Cold War when no one in their right Minds in our business would have gone anywhere near the United Nations or indeed anywhere near any of the uh official bodies if they wanted to be accepted as humanitarians a thing called the steering committee for humanitarian response was set up in Geneva and you know what it
was for it was to coordinate humanitarian response it's exactly what it said on the tin and it did it it spawned a couple of quite effective bodies to focus on particular particular emergencies the Sahel for example um it created a thing called the Euro action uh the end of the first Sudan Civil War there was an organization called the um it was the Accord um the agency for cooperation and research and development for helping reconstruct South Sudan um both of those were came out of the unoffici
al NGO if you like approach to humanitarian coordination schr by the way I'm not going to go through all the members but it was a critical thing that both um the Red Cross movement and the ngos and the major Church bodies were all involved in that um Archer was established in 1991 during that weird period after the end of the Cold War when we all thought or were told that it's the end of History you know it's a monopolar world now no more International conflict is necessary ideology is dead neol
iberalism is one and we all shut our eyes and foolishly swallowed the proposal that ocher should be created and indeed ever since then we've been on this Cavalcade of an Ever deepening politicization so the first thing that sphere needs to do is to think about independence again think about real Independence in the sense of the original notion of that in the Red Cross principles and how to operationalize that again so you can get back again to the places where you want to work and where you can
be trusted again because as you know at the moment you're not that's why you're going to be out of Sudan that's why most of you are out of Afghanistan the second thing is up can I have 30 seconds yes okay right a competent a half uh numerous um journalist if they wanted to get hold of your accounts and the accounts of the United Nations and the Consolidated appeals would very quickly be able to show that when over 50 of the money going into the humanitarian sector is consumed by ourselves by our
Consultants by our uh the costs of running supporting our partners and so on very very little actually Escapes in the form of real value that is received by those people for whom those things are raised this is a room full of people who represent attacks on the humanitarian Global budget Archer I think costs 100 billion a year these days another massive tax on humanitarian uh principles and action my view is this has to end you have to get a more cost-effective humanitarian system to really dem
onstrate that you're worth it hey thank you so much for that note cost Effectiveness uh really really um you know we love your enthusiasm thank you so much Nicholas now I come to Paula the same question about what is uh you see next for the humanitarian standard yeah offer to you Paula okay thank you very much I want to emphasize three elements plus a little bit accountability localization data and evidence and then just a word about cash in cash and voucher assistance I want to give a shout out
first though to the experiences from the ground the discussion on Pakistan uh that tuba shared and and also on Brazil and Eastern Europe and then also last week there was a hnpw session on Nepal and the application of sphere in Nepal I think it's really important to pay attention to how it is applied in the field and and keep that front of mind a key element so let me turn to accountability a key element of the sphere project from the beginning has been an emphasis on accountability the humanit
arian Charter and minimum standard served as a practical framework for accountability as stated in its very first edition and offered a way for disaster affected people to review the provision of assistance we haven't talked a lot about that in the 25 years of sphere but I think the uh the actual addition of minimum standards on participation in 2004 and the incorporation of the core humanitarian standard on quality and accountability in 2018 remains a good and normative foundation for today to
work to provide accountability to affected populations or AAP which uh is gaining a lot more recognition I was quite surprised to see that it was so directly stated in the in the 1998 version um localization with the broad recognition of the critical role played by local and National First Responders the humanitarian Community is working to localize humanitarian response and increase the amount of Aid funding that goes directly to local actors but we need the participation of local organizations
to make sure that the minimum standards reflect their own priorities and that they get the job done local organizations funders and policy makers must also work together to ensure that standards are applied consistently prm's current funding to the sphere project contributes to this effort through support to locally LED adaptation of sphere resources locally LED trainings the establishment of regional and sub-regional networks and the translation of guidance into more national languages transla
tion is really an important part of this turning to data we need to improve our data collection to make it more time really accurate and interoperable among stakeholders we also need to prioritize the integration of the data that we already have into humanitarian response and policy making the sphere indicators and monitoring guidance have moved the humanitarian Community forward on this but we need more and better data on humanitarian Aid Effectiveness and results on migration flows statelessne
ss and fragile markets PRM provides funding to the unhcr World Bank joint data center to improve the availability of data and promote evidence-based policy making on forced displacement so far that has had a good effect on censuses and making sure that census taking is is Broad enough to include displaced populations that's just a development that happened in the last several weeks finally on cash and voucher assistance we know that it is covered in the 28 sphere guidelines I would suggest that
more be done to disseminate and encourage uptake of the minimum standards for cash in a coordinated way while leveraging work already conducted through the Grand bargain cash work stream there have been a number of sessions on Cache this week I haven't been to all of them but I was at the one this morning I think it's really important for us to continue to try to get a grip on how cash changes other things particularly and I'll just say this and then leave it is uh the issue of protection and if
if cash is going out to people in a completely neutral way and unseen is there any impact on the knowledge of people who are there to protect the population is there an absence of of knowledge that they have not that they are God and can do everything but it's important to keep aware of that as we go forward okay thank you so much it's a very valid four points that been shared by Paula so uh Susan came to hear your thoughts over to you thanks Venda um so for for humanitarian standards to contin
ue fulfilling their role I'd like to see three things happening in the near future and I think perhaps to preface in saying that each of these three um I think sphere and the humanitarian standards partnership have a critical role to play certainly as a group that can catalyze action uh but it's a role that really needs to continue to be supported by donors by Our member networks and by Collective action uh with humanitarian actors um from a huge range of contexts so first among my three is grea
ter collaboration across sectors and actors to put children and their protection more firmly at the center of all humanitarian action this is particularly critical because for children often the root causes of risks that they face in humanitarian crises risks to their protection and safety can be detected or sometimes responded to in other sectors the humanitarian standards partnership together with severe has a role to play in promoting this cross-sectoral collaboration through interoperability
of our standards and to strengthen um the centrality of protection and the protection principles which underpin all of our humanitarian standards handbooks just one kind of small recent example of such collaborative action which was born in the HSP are two new learning modules from the child protection minimum standards online e-course which explore Partnerships and Link humanitarian standards handbooks between child protection and education in one and between child protection and Camp manageme
nt actors in another HSP members jointly produced these modules and are promoting them collaboratively at the child protection minimum standards we are investing in a whole range of tools and resources to advance collaboration across sectors for children's protection and well-being aiming to work together in partnership with non-protection sectors but critically we do continue to need resources um support and action and engagement from donors in this area where we often see that the way funding
is distributed and the way our humanitarian response is often organized still does really encourage the silos so for our own efforts to bridge gaps between humanitarian standards there need to be kind of corresponding changes in other elements of the system second I'd like to see greater ownership of humanitarian standards by national and local actors who are critical for standards to be implemented and make an impact um such ownership requires that national and local actors both government and
Civil Society are able to play a leadership role in the implementation and revision of Standards many good examples of this do already exist and I only have to turn to my left to look directly and and reflect on the experience that Chupa was sharing from Pakistan and in the Asia region and a great element of spheres work with country focal points the trial protection minimum standards has had some experience with this as well in directly funding national and local actors to lead country level ac
tivities to roll out and implement the standards but I think more action is certainly needed in this area and collab collaborative work through the humanitarian standards partnership brings the opportunity to pool resources and invest in solutions that increase access to humanitarian standards so more translation as Cola was helpfully pointing out um and also looking at how we continue to make some of these online platforms and apps that we have more known uh and accessible to colleagues at the
country level response third I would say I really believe that as minimum humanitarian standards we need to better come to terms with climate change uh it's been quite a topic of discussion in many sessions here at hnpw this week um and I've been pleased to see a greater attention and greater willingness to engage around this issue but now and for decades to come we know that climate change will continue to cause and exacerbate humanitarian crises it will contribute and is contributing it's not
a tomorrow problem but rather one of today to increase conflict and displacement structural violence and financial hardship while straining the capacities of local systems to respond however many of our minimum humanitarian standards and our humanitarian response model in general are only beginning to consider and adapt to these changes spheres recent production section of a nature-based Solutions unpacked guide is one example of progress the child protection minimum standards and the alliance f
or child protection and humanitarian action have also prioritized climate change and research on the linkages between climate change and children's protection in our current strategy but more work is needed and more significant changes in our humanitarian standards are needed to to achieve and face uh and face this challenge I think I would plug one more time that's mitigating and responding to climate impacts really does require multi-sectoral and collaborative approaches at all at all levels f
rom the child protection minimum standards we hope that the humanitarian standards partnership can continue to be a place that encourages and promotes uh this collaboration while also supporting kind of joint learning on how we adapt our sector-specific mitigation and response strategies okay thank you so much to inform us about the newest publication from sphere and the unpacket of nature-based solution I know we are almost running out of time but we're also Keen to hear from tuber so a tuba of
fered to you and then Gabriel I'll be quick thank you very much um my ass or my uh ideas are like quite uh simpler simple at this point because we know already know that uh spare has started these digital courses uh recently with uh one hour digital courses and we are moving towards digitizes uh digitizing uh capitalized by the covet circumstances so that's good at least in odd part of the region um however uh with digital training uh we would like to say like Susanna has mentioned that language
is one of the barriers for a lot of uh local ngos when they are accessing these minimum standards uh and it it's not just that we translate the book but also the lose an opportunity with uh communicating with other um organizations or through webinars or training when the all these material are only available in English so my um uh my suggestion would be to have it uh translated in as many languages as possible country focal points are already doing so much but it's a voluntary role so we do ne
ed support uh in terms of finances and in terms of you know thinking through uh how to uh go about it so there's one uh as far as the digital trainings are concerned they're great but it does it's not a substitute for a human introduction so uh we're always pushing towards uh especially with local organization because it's not just eight hours of training that you're with them with them but it's after the training happens there's a still a exchange of knowledge uh which is continues so that's im
portant and we must continue it and how in some way if we can join these two together and do start um pushing it pushing universities to adapt uh severe in in their courses uh that would be great we've already started with uh some one or university in Afghanistan in conversation with them and in Pakistan as well but it's a process I know but if uh we can do that I think it's really uh necessary uh for the Next Generation to know more about it because uh we've seen in the past in Pakistan the las
t before 2022 uh big floods the last floods was in 2010 and 11 and between that time period we lost a lot of you know there was a lot of brain drain a lot of people who were familiar with these uh standards and professionally were working on this um so we would like that there has to be a continuous um building of capacity strengthening of capacity and enhancing of capacity thank you thanks I'm sorry to put you on pressure for two minutes so we can able to have at least question from the audienc
e and we'll get that through the panels later on thank you so as a young humanitarian protection year uh to be honest what I see ahead of us is a future somehow of Crisis emergencies ice scarcity scenario you know food scarcity power outages all consequences of armed conflicts of natural disasters and a strong need for humanitarian response for humanitarian Aid and what guide us through this process in order to uphold dignity for the community affected people are the few are the minimum standard
s the minimum humanitarian standards so I'll just quick and complementing the other speakers my colleagues to the broad definition of it and if Universal and qualitative you must have a strong uh Stronger geographical expansion not only for sphere but also for the other humanitarian standards partnership this year has done a lot over the last 25 years is currently present in more than uh in the five continents six nine focal points 49 members over 100 thread trainers but it has room for more in
regions like Africa Middle East Central America it has run for way more also common language so it's not only about translation as tuba was saying but the way we write it how accessible is it to people to actually uh have like the handbook in their backpack as William was saying with the toothbrush and a phone charge so we have to do more into the common language as well involvement with other sectors of society here we're talking about public sector we bring the case of Ecuador Institute analyz
ing institutionalizing sphere standards into its uh ndma authorities which has been great also involvement with University as tuba was saying careers like Nursery environmental engineering social service Services he strengthened their curriculum through the sphere standards so that young people it's important to say that through throughout its 25 Affiliates fraternity International military missions has trained since 2020 over 1 500 people ready to act in Christ's emergency scenarios throughout
Brazil and Latin America so we were talking about young people uh it is important this kind of Engagement if we're talking about quality already finishing my speech and we're talking about quality and accountability a great example we bring is the CHS revision writing Group which has been very great and fihm has been part of it and the capacity building as a capacity building now uh volunteer for fihm is important as tuba was saying to go beyond the training itself to you know uh get to know mor
e about other e-learning strategies follow-ups the mentorship approach so all of that is very important because at the end of the day it's all about dignity to uphold Community affected people dignity so that's what we should always stand for and never forget about it thank you so much for reminding us on that and also the engagement of the ndma is very important ladies and gentlemen we already hear so much where we reach um explanation field perspective from the panelists uh we have five minute
s at least for a question and answer because before we have the cake uh because this is an anniversary so we would like to hear from you so if anybody have a question a comment need to be precise on your question or comment uh yes sir and then please also introduce yourself thank you very much hi everyone this is Raju thapa from Nepal and we have been transiting sphere standards since 2004. and we have translated for companion standard of spirit standard that is education Standard Market recover
y economic analysis and inclusion and we have conducted the international training and prepared etiquette human resource in Nepal and we also in this series of program to collect feedback from more than three thousand stakeholders on upcoming new CHS revision revision and provided comprehensive feedback to the CSS Alliance already last year we sensitized around 19 500 local government government official on a sphere standard uh through government lead training program we also contributed contrib
uted we also contributed to distribute over 3000 sphere handbook to 753 local governments of Nepal uh in order to grab the attention of the community people we developed some Innovative tools like folk songs Street drama a storytelling these tools you know were powerful to grab the attention of the local people and I think our recent localization effort can be considered as a massive localization effort in the history of square standard because within a year we reached more than nine in 19500 lo
cal governments official we sensitize them and I think we need to create a community of practice to discuss and share our relation alone and good practices so that all the focal points can be benefited because we have been doing many outstanding thing in our area and we are very familiar with virtual platform we can utilize that platform to share and learn our good practices okay okay let's be creative uh and try to find Innovative way through a sensitize community rather than focusing on qualit
y book our standards should be simple and easy to understand by every single member of the community and last but not least disaster prone and published populist country like India should be engaged to cover mass population this is my this is our recommendation thank you all right thank you so much it's kind of more on the comments thank you very much and appreciate all the work amazing work in Nepal any yeah and we will come back to the finalists yes uh good morning my name is Anna fari and I w
ork for start Network um and I wanted to ask a question about if you're planning to include into the standard anything about anticipatory action and if this is a plan already for for the committee okay thank you madam yeah thank you my name is sidby Roberts I'm a consultant independent consultant Nick um I'm a little bit surprised here I mean I've lived with fear and I love Spear and we've done so much since the end of the 90s and what I'm hearing is not going in the right direction at all Nick
I don't think we can get independent again from the project perspective and what I would like to ask all of us to think of is when you say what next it's the first time or one of the first times I'm not hearing about an exit strategy I'm hearing about growing and getting more power and I'm really really happy to see that we have tuba from CWS Asia we have Gabrielle we have the colleagues from Nepal and they are only quoting how they use this and how they want to be involved in consultations so m
y question is when will we be truly accountable and shift the power and stop what we are doing Paola please continue funding yes but look at eyes in the hubs in the regions and I'd like to recall one thing I was contracted for 18 months to close the Reach Out projects in 2004. it's it was a training project on Refugee protection we were given 18 months to think about how we would close and ensure that it would be mainstreamed which was the objective of sphere from the beginning no mainstream and
so it is used it makes a change and then this is fine so thank you for the blue binder and the good reminder on this oh um thank you very much okay thank you very much we have a two question and I will turn out to all the panelists and then if you can able to also end up with your final key takeaways because we are at the end of the session and thank you for the question maybe I start with the sun you're already ready to speak yeah uh I don't I don't know if I'm fully ready to speak but I'll I'
ll certainly give it my go um I think first uh responding to the colleague who's asking about an exit strategy I find it a really perplexing question in any other sector in any other fields um do you think that they don't have standards that there are isn't technical guidance that people that people use or regulations that regulate Industries humanitarian standards are just that and I would hardly say that humanitarian standards are owned by um International and Western agencies certainly the de
velopment process of sphere and of the child protection minimum standards and of the other standards in the humanitarian standards partnership has been hugely participatory and they are tools that have been developed um William doesn't mind me repeatedly quoting him uh for from the many for the many um so I think talking about and an exit strategy for the existence of humanitarian standards wouldn't uh wouldn't be something that I would prioritize certainly greater localization absolutely certai
nly more models like the one that sphere is using with funding country focal points and supporting country focal points and Regional focal points from national and local organizations to take the charge and and work on both institutionalization and um and capacity strengthening of national and local actors but I think humanitarian standards are are a core our core part of how we are held accountable um and I would like to see them become more operationalized to to hold the humanitarian sector ac
countable um I think um I I know I don't have a lot of time and I'd like rather to to see that time to to other colleagues um rather than going into the the list of key actions that I had hoped to promote in my last minute but I would just say that I I think it's very important to underline from this panel that minimum humanitarian standards have positively changed the humanitarian landscape since the sphere handbook first edition was published 25 years ago and I hope they will continue to do so
okay thank you so much we will only have like one more response and then can I attend to Paula before I will need to give William for close to session yeah over okay thank you very much I think uh rather than give what I thought I would give as the last minute I'll just reinforce some of the things that I've heard other people say that I think were really useful today one is that Spirit should remain independent and it should remain attentive to the things that come with Independence another is
greater collaboration across sectors I think that's really important I think that gets us into trouble a lot uh we need greater ownership by national and local actors that's what I tried to say in my second uh question answer and clearly we need more translation more online platforms more uh more training at the local level and climate change is something that is so big it's going to be very difficult to figure out how to boil that down it's probably going to be something that gets integrated i
nto each of the sectors rather than uh rather than say this here's the sector of climate change but that's going to have to be done too I think the emphasis on on Dignity is really crucial that goes along with localization it goes along with not thinking that you have the answer because you have the standard and therefore you know exactly what to do in this small community it means that you know what's needed and then you have to figure out how to make it contextually relevant with dignity for t
he community that you're dealing with so that's okay thank you so much on the question on the start Network we will answer later on from this but thank you so much for all the your passion in hearing of the perspective from the panelists and also some of the question uh if you you know that we have a sphere good as well in this event if you would like to continue engage with us and have more experience to share and then question feel free to reach out to us and meet us at the sphere wood and so
I would like to and thank you for all the panelists for all your great perspective and and Views and I would like to turn offer to William for the closing remarks thank you very much yeah thank you thank you yeah thank you Nicholas for coming I know you this is a very busy time of your life but thank you for coming and sharing we've really valued it and Paula the support from the US government has been invaluable more than you can possibly know and thank you for continuing it um I'd like to at t
he moment now just to thank the sphere team the Secretariat so Roma Amanda anina Fred philistian Tristan please stand up please stand up and and those who have worked this year I know there's a few people here who have used to work for sphere including Tony at the back but those who worked for sphere please also stand up as well thank you so much for your work performance okay so your DP Network um ID thank you for being here um Maher thank you for being here please stand up and also so if you'r
e a federal point and if you're a trainer please stand up it's wonderful to see you thank you and yes from Bangladesh it's wonderful to see you thank you so much um for our supporters our partners including CHS Alliance but ifrc schr Etc and our members we want to thank you as well for your continued support So if you are one of those people who supports fear please stand up oh and finally to our governing board you give your time you give your expertise you give your service and to Rita thank y
ou so much for all your hard work this last year I know it's been difficult at times but thank you so much Rita is now who is our president Rita is now going to cut the cake so so let's give a round of applause to Rita first and then let's let's join Rita as she cuts the cake thank you
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