Attachments
Guiding principles
Accountability to Affected People (AAP) is an active commitment by aid agencies to use power responsibly to take account of, give account to, and be held to account by the people they seek to assist. Systematic and coordinated community engagement (CE), including two-way communication with people in need, availability and use of feedback channels and participatory approaches, ensures that aid responses and programming are accountable to affected people1. 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 6) 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 action.
AAP and Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (PSEA) are intrinsically linked, since SEA is the most severe abuse of accountability to people in need. Humanitarian, development and peace-building actors in these areas need to work closely together on overlapping interests and activities, to share best practices and learn from each other. At the same time, the two topics must be distinct to promote awareness of PSEA at all levels, from crisis-affected people, to government counterparts where relevant and heads of country teams, and to advocate for required resources for PSEA initiatives. Further, AAP is not only about the appropriate handling and follow up of individual complaints of SEA, it also is about an effective, relevant and accountable response in all sector activities, designed and implemented with people at the centre.
Background
The AAP/PSEA Regional Working Group was formed in 2021. It is a technical coordination group endorsed by the IASC Regional Network of Asia Pacific (on 3 December 2020), with the goal to coordinate and strengthen the collective approaches to CE/AAP and PSEA at the country/response level and to strengthen system-wide accountability across the region. These TORs seek to update the existing ones drafted in 2021 to reflect the broader support of the Working Group to countries in the region that operate without a Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), or in non-Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) setting, in addition to the revised strategy and actions in the workplan for 2022-2023. These Terms of Reference (TORs) should be updated if/when necessary to reflect the current situation in the region and the needs of the Working Group members.