Download the invitation to tender Service Level Agreement for maintenance of odihpn.org HPN’s website was redesigned and rebuilt in February 2022. We now require support for maintenance helping with: • Ongoing site maintenance (e.g. installing updates and plug-ins), bug fixes and backups • Cybersecurity and rapid responding to any business-critical issues • Ad hoc development requests Please submit your proposal to hpgadmin@odi.org by the 13th June 2022. The contract is set to commence on the 1st July 2022. As a development organisation, ODI are fully committed to ethical and sustainable procu ..read more

What comes to mind when you think about ‘ethics’? For most people, it’s something like ‘doing what is right’. But does ethical behaviour mean simply doing what you think is right? Is it sufficient to trust your common sense and get on with it? When we ask that question to innovators and social entrepreneurs working on complex social problems, the answer is usually ‘no’. We would agree. Relying on our own judgement when making ethical decisions without wider, robust consideration rarely feels sufficient. We need to be able to reflect upon, deliberate over and discuss ethical decisions with oth ..read more

Localising advocacy on the protection and rights of refugees and the communities that host them is meant to be a key policy priority for international humanitarian actors. Yet in practice, advocacy approaches replace rather than complement the advocacy efforts of people in crisis, and fail to empower local and national actors, leading to siloes. Despite a renewed focus on this topic since the Grand Bargain 2.0’s newly endorsed framework, little attention has so far been paid to translating localisation commitments into practice. ‘Refugee advocacy in Turkey: from local to gl ..read more

This article is dedicated to those change-makers who are working on issues of localisation, anti-racism and de-colonisation – it is not an easy path. It is especially dedicated to Ritah Nansereko, the Executive Director of Africa Women Youth Action for Development (AWYAD) in Uganda, who passed away from COVID-19 recently. Ritah showed leadership and great courage in speaking truth to power. She was a dedicated humanitarian and advocate for localisation and is greatly missed by her family, colleagues and friends. Why is this important and why now? Unprecedented anti-racism protests across the g ..read more

Neutrality is one of the four fundamental humanitarian principles, but remains deeply contested among humanitarians. It’s not too hard to see why – who would want to stay ‘neutral’ in a struggle between injustice and justice? Between dictatorship and democracy? Between racism and anti-racism? Neutrality is being called into question yet again by recent events. First, the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 sparked a movement for change against structural racism within humanitarianism. Many are saying that neutrality should be redefined or dropped altogether, as it privileges foreigners over co ..read more

Oxfam has been on a ten-year journey to transform itself into an organisation more reflective of the world in which it works and more diverse in its leadership. In this article, Oxfam staff and local partners share some of their experiences and thoughts on supporting local humanitarian leadership while opening new affiliates in the Global South.   When Oxfam set out to address imbalances of power and money in its confederation, it reimagined itself. Its traditional configuration involved a small number of interconnected non-governmental organisations (NGOs), known at Oxfam as affilia ..read more

Almost one million people have been displaced to Northeast Syria,+These include internally displaced Syrians, Yezidi refugees from Iraq, and other Syrian, Iraqi, and third-country nationals who previously resided in areas ruled by the Islamic State. most of which are hosted in the Province of Hassaka in camps, urban makeshift settlements, local residents’ homes, and public facilities such as schools. The Turkish military incursion into the area in October 2019 not only worsened access to services and caused further displacement –  it also saw the use of water as a weapon of war. Since com ..read more

A new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on local innovations in response to Covid-19 in low- and middle-income countries, highlighted three real-world examples of achievements from local innovators and change agents in India, Peru, and Kenya. The examples showcase alternative models for innovation by local actors in the absence of funding, design, and project delivery support from high-income countries. At their heart, they all embody the core elements that make local innovations work: hyper-locality, pre-existing networks, needs driven, and an incre ..read more

It’s five years since the New Way of Working helped launch the nexus approach at the May 2016 World Humanitarian Summit. New approaches that promise to radically improve the way aid is delivered (‘integration’, ‘resilience’, etc.) usually have a shelf-life of a few years after which interest wanes as the next fad comes along. Preventing the nexus suffering the same fate requires radical change in the way aid is delivered in crisis countries. In many ways the nexus is just the latest incarnation of efforts, starting in the 1990s, to achieve a more joined-up approach to humanitarian and developm ..read more

For several decades Rohingya in Myanmar have lived in an environment of increasingly severe systematic human rights violations, including the removal of citizenship and restrictions on movements, limited access to education and healthcare, and barriers to marriage, having children and practicing their religion. In August 2017 Myanmar security forces completely or partially destroyed almost 400 Rohingya villages, and killed, injured and sexually assaulted several thousand Rohingya. This violence sparked an exodus of 700,000 refugees from Myanmar to Bangladesh. The long-standing systematic human ..read more