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ALNAP Annual Report 2021-2022

Attachments

Message from the Chair

In many ways, this has been a year of disruption. The protracted effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are exacerbating vulnerabilities and inequalities, and the impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly severe. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to extensive war damages, millions of people being displaced, and the triggering of a global food crisis. For ALNAP, the year has been one of flexing to react to new crises, while supporting our members to take stock after an exceptionally testing period.

The core of humanitarian action is repeatedly challenged in contexts of increasing need and complexity: war is conducted in grave and open violation of international humanitarian law; states treat refugees differently depending on their origin; and the power over humanitarian decisions and allocation of resources remains deeply imbalanced. Consequently, debates on decolonising aid – an issue touching the policy and practice of many ALNAP members – have gathered pace.

As demands and disruption have increased over the past year, ALNAP has sought to adapt. This Annual Report shows a busy agenda of activity and engagement with our members, including a welcome, albeit tentative, return to in-person events alongside our many online outputs.

The 2021 ALNAP Meeting drew together hundreds of members to explore virtually its theme of ‘Learning from disruption’. Many attended our event on Real-Time Learning and Evaluation approaches during COVID-19, held jointly with the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG), and our workshop on the humanitarian-development-peacebuilding (HDP) nexus has prompted calls for further exchanges of learning.

In line with our mandate to make learning as accessible as possible, ALNAP launched the COVID-19 Response Portal – an online space for humanitarians to find evaluations, guidelines and lessons learned for responding to the pandemic – as well as a similar Ukraine Response Portal within weeks of the Russian invasion.
One of ALNAP’s most high-profile and widely promoted publications of the year, ‘ALNAP Lessons Paper: Adapting humanitarian action to climate change’, was published in the lead up to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow.

In 2021, we thanked John Mitchell for his enormous contribution to learning in the humanitarian sector when he stood down as ALNAP Director after 19 years. We welcomed new Director Juliet Parker as ALNAP moved into its 25th anniversary year.
The Secretariat will use this 25th anniversary to focus on learning; reflecting on what we know about humanitarian learning, exploring how and when the sector learns, and when it doesn’t. This will include providing practical resources to strengthen country-level learning and a suite of learning studies to understand how and when learning happens. ALNAP kicked off work in this area with a well-received blog series, ‘Localisation Re-imagined’, spanning late 2021 and early 2022.

This coming September, the 2022 edition of our flagship State of the Humanitarian System (SOHS) report will be launched and promoted globally through a series of diverse discussion events. Supporting locally ed humanitarian action, a priority for the sector not least in light of the decolonising aid debate, will be a major area of attention.
Drawing on and learning from the achievements of the past months,
ALNAP will continue its mission to support learning and system improvement in the humanitarian sector. We hope you will join us.

Johan Schaar
ALNAP Chair