The H2H Network at HNPW 2024

In the tumultuous landscape of a crisis, disinformation and inaccurate information pose significant risks to crisis-affected communities, complicating decision-making processes for humanitarian responders and affected individuals seeking lifesaving assistance. Understanding local media’s role in enabling affected populations to make safe decisions is critical for efficient humanitarian response. It is also essential to understand how local media affects information gathering and analysis for humanitarian actors’ decision-making.

In response to the conflict escalation in Sudan 2023, H2H Members worked to improve the humanitarian response with their expertise on local media’s effect on aid delivery. This panel explored the importance of local media in humanitarian response together with H2H Members specialized in working for healthy information ecosystems to better assist crisis-affected populations.

The panel concluded:

1. The media coverage, the humanitarian response, and advocacy are not at the scale of the tragedy in Sudan.
   
2. There is an urgency to do more for local media to better respond to the needs of the crisis-affected population in Sudan, collectively and politically.
   
3. We have to pay tribute to the determination of local media and journalists to remain: we need to support their existence both financially and technically.

How do we do conflict-sensitive journalism? How are we creating content that leads more towards peace and reconciliation rather than fanning the flames? (…) That's the red flag right now. We work on the humanitarian coverage, but countering the pro war rhetoric to the war is something that should be put as a priority.” - Mosaab Baba, Gisa Group

Most media outlets have had to close down radio stations, newspapers, and TV stations. People are looking for critical life-saving information and communication. We see many examples of this and how delayed information and information that is not of the best quality can affect people.” - Asia Kambal, Internews

The security constraints restrict many people to access, including humanitarian aid workers and journalists. Access is an issue for us, and we're trying to advocate for safe corridors through different channels, forums, and movement restrictions.” - Khadiga Agab, CDAC Network expert

Panellists:

• Khadiga Agab, CDAC Network expert pool member, Sudan
• Asia Kambal, Internews Project Manager Rooted in Trust, Sudan
• Mosaab Baba, Media Development Director at Gisa Group, Sudan

Facilitator:

• Emmanuel Tronc, H2H Head of Outreach and Engagement

Whether facing geographical, logistical, political, or security-related obstacles in overcoming humanitarian challenges in hard-to-reach areas, local actors are indispensable responders. They provide contextual knowledge and cultural support to international organizations. They nevertheless often play a supporting role in gaining access to INGOs and have limited autonomy in terms of strategic operational decisions of their organizations.

In this session, we discussed the challenges and solutions when it comes to bridging gaps to facilitate access to affected populations by supporting local actors. H2H Members shared their experiences with local partnerships, logistics, information management, and innovation to better support humanitarian responders in assisting crisis-affected populations in hard-to-reach areas.

The panel concluded:

1. We need effective collaboration between local actors, humanitarian actors, and state authorities to succeed with humanitarian aid in hard-to-reach areas, specifically focusing on capacity-building.
2. We have to give more autonomy to local organizations and empower them to make their own decisions based on accessible information.
3. We need to bridge the gap between INGOs and LNGOs for a deeper contextual and cultural understanding to reach those most in need. One way to do this is through diaspora communities.

For me, the main challenge is the imbalance created between a big organization’s resources and the local organizations’, that will likely receive a request from a bigger organization, and face the actual challenge or the pathway to get to that place. Insecurity Insight focuses on sharing information to empower local organizations to make their own decisions through consolidated reports. The reports give an overview of areas in terms of security, perception of humanitarians, and other elements that might help to manage decisions through languages and channels that are easily accessible for local organizations.” – Ana Elisa Barbar, Insecurity Insight

We need effective coordination between local actors, humanitarian actors, and state authorities to make sure that aid can be delivered. It’s important to strengthen coordination at all levels of the humanitarian supply chain, from donors to communities. Capacity building for humanitarian actors in that regard is key. We work to strengthen capabilities of local transport operators to ensure the fluidity and the necessary adaptation.” - Cedric Piriou, Handicap International Haïti

The humanitarian sector talks about the importance of local insight, but often lacks a good local network and does not know the culture enough to understand when there is a problem. This is where the diaspora communities are helpful, hailing from these regions themselves, they know the culture and have an effective local network. The diaspora understands both the bureaucratic contexts of the donor countries, the contexts of the international humanitarian standards, and the context in the hard-to-reach area.” - Mohamud Abdi, Tabantaabo Development Organization

Panellists:

• Ana Elisa Barbar, Chair of Executive Board, Insecurity Insight
• Mohamud Abdi, Chief of Economy, Tabantaabo Development Organization
• Cédric Piriou, Programme Director at Haiti Handicap International

Facilitator:

• Anaïde Nahikian, senior researcher at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative

Anticipatory action is widely accepted as a vital strategy for achieving greater impact for communities, more efficient use of aid funding and leveraging the potential of data and new technologies. To deliver on this, it needs to go well-beyond the domain of the largest aid organizations, and become accessible to different kinds and sizes of organizations. This will not only deliver a greater scale of anticipatory action, but importantly, greater creative potential to address complex challenges.

H2H Network has been exploring what needs to happen to democratize anticipatory action - both to increase its uptake as a strategy by more actors, but also to unleash its creative potential for new models of action. With support from USAID, it’s been supporting members who are investing in new ways to access anticipatory action.

In this session, we discussed what is needed to support a better anticipatory action.

The panel concluded:

1. As the Anticipatory Action landscape develops and actors seek to scale the size and range of AA mechanisms, it will be crucial to sustain dialogue across the full range of relevant actors. This will help ensure that mechanisms are effective, efficient, and people-centred, involving the communities they seek to protect.
2. H2H actors, including those currently participating in the H2H Anticipatory Action Accelerator, are driving forward solutions that have a role to play in ensuring that the next phase in Anticipatory Action is demand-driven, rooted in the needs of the people and incorporates local perspectives by ground-truthing data.
3. In an area dominated by a few large organizations, smaller, specialized organizations like H2H Members are well-placed to fill gaps and work across institutional silos. Many challenges – such as balancing openness and responsibility in data management – will require collective solutions and joint learning.

I believe that if we put our heads together more frequently to establish an environment where we really trust each other, we can do a better job at saving resources and the duplication of efforts. Risk assessments are just one example of a more efficient collaborative model. With we, I mean, people from different organizations with different mindsets that potentially have a very different focus when it comes to programming, not only humanitarian programming.” – Markus Enenkel, World Bank

Each of our organizations comes with a unique perspective. When you're looking at anticipatory action, what's challenging is that it covers such a big scope of different types of events and geographic areas. We need the different perspectives and pull our expertise together to see not just what event might happen, but what event also needs preparation for.” - Jessie Pechmann, Humanitarian Open Street Map

We all know that disadvantaged and marginalized population groups are disproportionately at higher risk in any hazardous events, and effective anticipatory action requires their inputs to best identify and monitor and plan for these risks. But data on the languages that these groups use is typically missing from global hazard data.” - Emily Elderfield, CLEAR Global

I think, by asking the affected people what their priorities and challenges are and how we can support that, we can make anticipatory action part of this bigger puzzle with other interventions that can support these priorities." – Elisa Schmidt, Ground Truth Solutions

I think what we as small, nimble H2H organizations are doing is that we are also breaking down some silos that exist within the very structured humanitarian response. By approaching Anticipatory Action a bit from the outside, we're challenging some of the existing working structures and we're cross-fertilizing from different areas." – Christina Wille, Insecurity Insight

Panellists:

• Jessie Pechmann, Humanitarian Open Street Map, Global GIS Manager
• Emily Elderfield, CLEAR Global, Advocacy Officer
• Christina Wille, Insecurity Insight, Director
• Elisa Schmidt, Ground Truth Solutions, Programme Director
• Markus Enenkel, World Bank, Risk Financing Expert

Facilitator:

• Kim Scriven, H2H Network, Executive Director