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Bangladesh

Terms of Reference: Accountability to Affected Populations Working Group (AAP WG) - Bangladesh

Attachments

I. Purpose and Roles

Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP) stands as a critical commitment embraced by humanitarian practitioners and organizations, emphasizing ethical conduct, responsibility, and respect towards the com-munities they serve. This approach, in alignment with the Core Humanitarian Standards (CHS), Grand Bargain 2.0 commitments, and the IASC commitment on Accountability to Affected Populations, recognizes the inherent dignity, expertise, and capabilities of those impacted and mandates humanitarian agencies to actively involve and listen to affected community’s perspectives in all stages of programming. In line with this principle, the national Accountability to Affected Populations Working Group (AAP WG) in Bangladesh has emerged as a reinvigorated iteration of the former Communication with Communities Working Group (CwC WG).

The AAP WG in Bangladesh as a platform under the Inter-cluster Coordination Group (ICCG), brings together diverse stakeholders from the humanitarian sector, relevant government entities, NGOs, INGOs, RCRC, UN agencies and relevant networks/platforms. The WG aims to ensure collective accountability and foster robust community engagement across humanitarian response activities in Bangladesh. The WG also aims at integration and mainstreaming of gender, age, disability and inclusion of other marginalised community into the AAP system.

The primary purpose of the AAP WG is to provide technical and coordination support to the ICCG and HAG to ensure AAP is promoted, prioritised, and integrated within the national humanitarian operations management cycle including assessment, planning, design, monitoring and evaluation stages. The WG works with and coordinates among the humanitarian agencies and actors to deliver AAP commitments, enhance capacity at agency and practitioner level and act as an AAP relevant information sharing platform. The WG will aim effective knowledge management, analysis of relevant data and generate insights in order to assist the ICCG and the Humanitarian Advisory Group (HAG) in evidence-based decision making. An-other core purpose of the WG is to work closely with the ICCG, clusters, working groups, humanitarian agencies and other actors to ensure the voices, needs and priorities of the affected community are sought, heard and acted upon in all stages of the humanitarian programming.