Attachments
CONTEXT & RATIONALE
Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP) has been recognised as a strategic priority in South Sudan to ensure an accountable and rights-based approach to response planning and to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of aid. This was demonstrated through the development and endorsement of the Humanitarian Country Team’s (HCT) Strategy on AAP in 2021, which aims to support the operationalisation of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Commitments on AAP and Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse at the response-level in South Sudan. It is further underpinned by the Grand Bargain, which calls for the systematic participation of affected populations in decision-making that affects them.
Conflict sensitivity is fundamentally linked to the humanitarian principle of “do no harm”. It is widely recognised that humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding activities cannot be separated from the context of peace and conflict in which they are implemented, and that conflict sensitivity increases the likelihood of sustaining peace. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development recommends proactive mitigation of risks to and from agencies’ presence and strategy in fragile states, while the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding and the 2016 Sustainable Development Goals require international actors to directly and deliberately address drivers of conflict through their programming in fragile contexts.
To meaningfully realise these commitments and principles, the humanitarian response must systematically gather, analyse, and respond to the perceptions of diverse groups of affected populations. This is necessary to ensure that the humanitarian response aligns with their evolving priorities and perceptions regarding humanitarian assistance. This brief is based on AAP, protection, and conflict sensitivity data from the 2022 Inter-Sectoral Needs Assessment (ISNA) and the 2021 Food Security and Nutrition Monitoring Systems Plus (FSNMS+), both of which were developed in collaboration with relevant clusters.
This brief is an update to a REACH brief published in June 2022. It seeks to inform an evidence-based approach to response planning that is community-centred, accountable, and conflict sensitive, and to support the operationalisation of the HCT’s AAP Strategy.