Attachments
Background
Globally and through IASC leadership, humanitarian agencies have affirmed their commitment toward ensuring that in every humanitarian operation, agencies will actively prevent and respond to sexual exploitation and abuse by humanitarian personnel and non-agency personnel involved in delivering assistance. Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA) must not be tolerated; they are an unacceptable breach of the fundamental rights of the people we serve, as well as a deep betrayal of our core values.
Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (PSEA) is critical forthe aid agencies in all contexts in which we work – both development and emergency contexts. Effective prevention and response require not only action by individual agencies, but also a coordinated and collaborative approach.
Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP) is an active commitment by humanitarian actors and organisations to use power responsibly to take account of, give account to, and be held to account by the people they seek to assist1 . Systematic and coordinated community engagement ensures humanitarian response is accountable to affected people. In this light, system-wide accountability is essential to meeting organisational and collective commitments as outlined by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), the Grand Bargain Participation Revolution Workstream and the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS). Under these commitments and standards, aid agencies are expected to strengthen coordinated and harmonised community engagement practices for more effective and accountable humanitarian action.
Further, AAP and PSEA are intrinsically linked and must be addressed hand in hand through effective coordination, however, the two should not be conflated. Any act of SEA by those associated with the provision of aid is the most acute possible breach of our accountability to affected people. However, AAP is not only about the appropriate handling and follow up of individual complaints of SEA, but it is about an effective, relevant and accountable response, designed and implemented with people at the centre.
With these backdrops, a joint regional network on Accountability to Affected Populations and Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse is established to respond to the Northern conflict in Tigray and surrounding areas to coordinate and strengthen the collective approaches to community engagement as well as PSEA to ensure system-wide accountability across the region.
Recognizing the linkage between the various cross-cutting issues, the Joint Regional AAP/PSEA Network is established in 2021 to pool resources for collective outcomes across these complementarity priorities.
The aim is to ensure stronger, linked and more harmonized guidance, resources and support; promote and align existing standards and commitments and identify gaps and advocate to fill them.