An agreement has been signed between the Humanitarian Leadership Academy (‘The Academy’) and HSBC Bank Middle East Limited (HSBC) to provide staff with the learning needs that will equip them with the required skills to support humanitarian response efforts in their community/region.
Leading international financial institution HSBC and the Academy will collaborate to deliver a Humanitarian Essentials training to HSBC staff across the Middle East and Turkey during 2018.
Welcoming the signing, Ms. Saba Al Mubaslat, the Academy’s CEO, said the agreement will pave the way to increase the impact of private sector organisations and other groups of non-traditional humanitarian volunteers:
“We believe that the Academy is in prime position to localise humanitarian learning and enable communities to be better prepared during crises, through the provision of high-quality and relevant online learning content hosted on the Academy’s award-winning learning platform - Kaya.”
She praised this as an important step towards building long-term, sustainable partnerships between corporate and humanitarian organizations to support response efforts in the region.
The Academy will deliver and roll-out a Humanitarian Essentials for Volunteers learning package tailored for HSBC staff. The learning package will provide an introduction to humanitarian concepts, enabling teams to learn the basics of working effectively and responsibly in humanitarian settings. This will be developed in a modular approach with a combination of online learning content and engagement activities.
Sabrin Rahman, Head of Corporate Sustainability, HSBC stated:
“We are very excited to implement the accelerated humanitarian learning project to showcase the potential for the private sector to engage in humanitarian response efforts in a meaningful and sustainable way. We are committed to leading such innovative partnerships and, inspiring other organisations in the region to consider the valuable role they can play in empowering their staff to prepare for, and respond to, humanitarian crises.”
The Academy is a global learning initiative that facilitates partnerships and collaborative opportunities to enable people to prepare for and respond to crises in their own countries.
For HSBC, sustainability is core to our everyday business. It allows us to support individuals and organisations in achieving their goals by contributing to socio-economic development and environmental protection. Investing in the community, particularly through education, is an important element of HSBC’s sustainability strategy and we place great emphasis on employee volunteering.
In 2016, HSBC committed US$137 million to community investment and our employees gave 255,000 hours of time to volunteer during working hours.
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