Our WHS Commitments: Investing in capacity at all levels

Start Network's Commitment

We commit to investing in both national and international systems to improve preparedness capacities at all levels of the humanitarian system. We will continue working with others to identify core humanitarian skills, including sector specific skills, and to promote related capacity strengthening programmes, accreditation and certification, and platforms for national and international surge capacity.

Meeting our commitment

Start Engage has developed and rolled out best practice capacity development tools and frameworks aimed at individuals, organisations and government/UN agencies.These are flexible enough to be contextualised for differing and complex environments.

These include the SHAPE Framework; the Surge Human Resource Best Practice Guidelines; the revised Core Humanitarian Competencies Framework; Protection Mainstreaming and Evaluation System (ProMMS); and the Minimum Standards for Age and Disability Inclusion in Humanitarian Action.

A UN-led coordination system and an international NGO have now adopted a needs assessment approach developed by a local NGO in DRC, demonstrating locally-led response built on local analytical expertise and knowledge. Where previously local and national NGOs had not been consulted, a Turkish national NGO has contributed to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) protection policy through the Global Protection Cluster.

One multi-country and two local level preparedness systems, to be used by communities, agencies and government institutions for early warning and early action, have been developed. Each of these has embedded community capacity strengthening. These preparedness systems, addressing both natural disasters and conflict settings, link to national disaster risk reduction and management planning.  Although these systems are still in the early phase of implementation, an independent formative evaluation has found that actions being taken through these preparedness systems play a role in predicting and responding to emergencies.

Community Networks: Their strengths are our weaknesses

Keep reading about how we are meeting our other WHS Commitments