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Humanitarian actors play an important role in disaster response in Bangladesh. As such, their decisions and actions can have a profound effect on the daily lives of disaster affected people. However, the accountability framework being used by different humanitarian agencies are different and to some extent inadequate to hold humanitarian agencies accountable to the affected people in rapid response. Affected people lack an effective voice in the decision-making process of the humanitarian agencies. Hence, new tools and mechanisms are needed at the local and national level to make the humanitarian actors more accountable to affected people and communities.

As Western donors and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), we most often have disproportionate power in relation to local and national organisations.

This guidance, developed by humanitarian consultant Clea Kahn, aims to give humanitarian actors a guidance for developing their accountability mechanisms in the context of mixed migration, with a focus on complaints and feedback mechanisms. Excellent guidance already exists on how to implement feedback and complaint mechanisms in humanitarian contexts, and this is not intended to replace or duplicate those. It should be read as a supplement, to provide additional reflection for humanitarian actors working in migration contexts.

Disaster risk financing is an innovative approach for timely and predictable crisis management. With decisions about how a crisis will be monitored, funded and acted on taken in advance, there are new opportunities and challenges around ensuring accountability to affected populations (AAP).  

In June 2023 the Start Fund commissioned an annual external evaluation to examine accountability to affected populations (AAP) in Start Fund projects and processes. The evaluation aimed to assess the extent to which accountability principles and good practices can be incorporated into all stages of the Start Fund alert cycle, specifically considering challenges of the short timeframes of 72 hours between alert raising and project selection and 45 to 60 days for project implementation.

This grant sought to enable the creation of new methodologies to measure the success and impact of humanitarian interventions. The Community-Led Approaches to Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) Research Grant was created in March 2022, with support from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and the IKEA Foundation. This grant formed part of the Start Network’s push for a locally led humanitarian system and to meet the participation revolution commitment in the Grand Bargain, which seeks to promote the link between effective participation and the quality and effectiveness of humanitarian response.