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Yemen

Enhancing Informed Engagement With Conflict Affected Communities in Yemen

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INTRODUCTION

Engaging with communities is an intrinsic element of a humanitarian response. However, the degree to which the engagement takes place in the spectrum between acknowledging their presence as recipient of assistance and tangibly making them an integral part of the programme cycle is an ongoing challenge that humanitarian agencies face in each crisis.

Programmatic priorities and the necessity to deliver humanitarian assistance are also factors that influence the level at which agencies engage with communities and priority assigned to it. These challenges surface particularly in emergencies with high and often evolving needs. In many contexts actors overlook, step over or race through community engagement efforts in order to rapidly respond to the needs of the affected population, organizational priorities and donor requirements; often times presupposing that community engagement unconsciously occurs while the humanitarian activities are undertaken or rationalize it as an overburdening task that takes too much time if it is to be effectively carried out. These factors and thought processes have a risk of detrimentally affecting community engagement and the overall positive impact of humanitarian assistance. They can also impact negatively on community acceptance, humanitarian access, the effectiveness and efficiency of the response, the duration and cost of the response, and most importantly they render the response less accountable to the communities.

The factors that affect community engagement are core elements of a humanitarian response and not mutually exclusive from community engagement. Programmatic priorities, responding to needs, accountability to donors and affected populations, an effective response and engagement with communities are all complementary in nature. The difficulty lays in ensuring their complementarity rather than prioritizing one over the other. This understanding has led the humanitarian community to develop and commit to system wide standards [e.g. Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS) and the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Commitments on Accountability to Affected Populations (CAAP) among others] that incorporate essential elements of community engagement aimed specifically at ensuring an accountable humanitarian response that is people-centred.

In an effort to contribute to the work currently undertaken by the Community Engagement Working Group (CE-WG) in Yemen towards “Systematically including participation of, and accountability to, affected people across all elements of the response” (IASC Yemen L3 Benchmark 10.1) and incorporating the recommendations from the “Analysis of Humanitarian Capacity to Improve System-wide Accountability” report publish by OCHA in November 2015, this paper will build on Oxfam’s Study on Understanding Affected Communities to provide recommendations for the humanitarian community in Yemen on how to better incorporate community engagement as per our commitments to them under the CAAP and CHS.

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