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Published on 1 November 2009

Written by Monica Blagescu, HAP International and Rachel Houghton, ECB Project Team

On 12 October, the ECB Bangladesh Consortium hosted the first joint HAP / Sphere consultation as part of the ongoing revision process for the two Standards. This followed a decision earlier in the year when HAP and The Sphere Project agreed to work together to promote greater practical coherence and address current inconsistencies between their two Standards. This joint consultation is a concrete example of how the ECB project intends to support important sector initiatives and encourage coherence between, and non-duplication of, recognised sector tools and standards.

The purpose of the joint consultation with the ECB Bangladesh Consortium was twofold:

1. To contribute to the HAP Standard review and the Sphere Handbook revision processes through sharing views and experiences from their implementation in Bangladesh.
2. To provide specific suggestions for promoting greater coherence and helping to resolve current inconsistencies between the HAP Standard and Sphere Common Standards.

A total of 25 participants from across 16 different national and international NGOs in Bangladesh attended the day-long event, including all members of the ECB consortium of agencies.

Twelve of the agencies represented at the meeting were either HAP members or implementing partners of HAP member agencies, and have made a commitment to implementing the HAP Principles of Accountability. One of these Principles refers to members setting a framework of accountability, which includes standards, principles, policies and guidelines internal to the organization or collective, such as the Sphere Minimum Standards and the People In Aid Code. In this regard the Bangladesh consultation offered participants a good platform to discuss challenges in developing and implementing an accountability framework that includes not just the HAP Standard Benchmarks but also specifically the Sphere ‘Common Standards’.

To this end, participants discussed what from the Sphere Common Standards could strengthen HAP, and what from HAP could strengthen the Sphere Common Standards. A number of suggestions were made including, for example:

• HAP Benchmark 1 on effective quality management systems could strengthen Sphere Common Standards 1, 7 and 8 in terms of augmenting organizational commitment. Bangladesh participants believe this is currently missing from the Sphere Common Standards.
• Bangladesh participants also believe Common Standard 3 on response activities is not explicit in the HAP Benchmarks, while Common Standards 5 and 6 on monitoring and evaluation could strengthen Benchmark 6 on learning for continuous improvement.

Participants appreciated the opportunity to discuss HAP and Sphere alongside each other and highlighted the importance of improving coherence between standards that guide humanitarian practice. As noted by one participant in the workshop evaluation, HAP and Sphere share similar objectives with regard to accountability to beneficiaries, and the joint consultation was a useful exercise in trying to identify coherence between the two in order to subsequently ascertain any outstanding gaps on the issue of beneficiary accountability. To this end, participants encouraged HAP and The Sphere Project to organise other such joint consultations. While recognising the differences in approach, with the HAP members having made a commitment to external monitoring and compliance verification, Abdul Wahed, Emergency Response & Preparedness Coordinator (ERPC) for CARE Bangladesh, said that:

"As a manager, I would like to see one document instead of two documents. Maybe in the future, the HAP Standard, ECB’s Good Enough Guide, the Sphere Handbook, and the People In Aid Code will all be linked together."

This of course represents only one view: both revision processes are ongoing, and feedback from the ECB Bangladesh Consortium will be taken into consideration along with feedback from other consultation workshops. Moreover, the issue of ‘one document’ is a perennial question and is why the two initiatives are working together to make the two sets of Standards more coherent. Additionally, agencies have tried to bring these documents together in their own accountability frameworks (one of the HAP Standard benchmarks), and ECB’s Good Enough Guide – aimed at humanitarian practitioners, project officers and managers with some experience in the field – draws on the work of field staff, NGOs, and inter-agency initiatives, including The Sphere Project, ALNAP, HAP International, and People In Aid, to provide basic guidelines on how to be accountable to local people and measure programme impact in emergency situations.

Photo: Monica Blagescu, HAP, 2009

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