ICVA bulletins

Read the highlights on ICVA activities for the month of June 2020!

Read the highlights on ICVA activities for the month of May 2020!

Read the highlights on ICVA activities for the month of April 2020!

Read the highlights on ICVA activities for the month of March 2020!

Read the highlights on ICVA activities for the month of February 2020!

Read the highlights on ICVA activities for the month of January 2020!

Words kill.

Words can be instruments of violence and can be as deadly as a machete, a gun or a bomb.

As Sri Lanka reels from the Easter Sunday bombings, its leaders dispute apparent intelligence failure, assign blame and respond to the violence. The decision to block most social media after the attacks may have been motivated by security concerns, but left a vacuum of information, fueling confusion and giving little reassurance to a population that hoped to have left daily terror in its history.

One step outside of our comfort zone.

It is hard for me to find words to express my feelings after what people are calling “an incredible 2019 ICVA Annual Conference”.

So many people told us about the information they gathered, ideas they exchanged with each other, the sense of connection they shared, during what seemed for many an important moment of the year.
We will soon be posting on our website the report of our Annual Conference and reports of the six strategic side meetings that took place 27 and 28 March 2019 under the theme “Translating Commitments to Action”.

Are we being impactful?

ICVA’s new strategic period is just kicking in. While we are already busy engaging with our members and preparing our upcoming ICVA Annual Conference, “Translating Commitments into Action”, let’s also take a step back and consider our impact.

Impact is about “marked effect or influence”. And this is what ICVA cares about. In order to achieve our mission of influencing humanitarian policy and practice we need to better define, understand and leverage our impact. This is a core element of our new Strategy, which stresses our efforts to measure and report on performance targets, and regularly commission assessments of our work and impact.

Making it happen.

ICVA has crafted a vision and a new Strategy. Our ambitious new Strategy 2019-2021 will help us achieve even greater results as we work with the global and diverse membership. The ICVA Strategy provides a compass for action for the next three years. It defines four focus areas, (forced migration. coordination, financing and navigating change), five ways of working and is supported by four enabling strategies and our Theories of Change.

Let’s be inclusive to be successful.

Inclusivity is a cornerstone of effective and principled humanitarian action.

An independent study on civil society space released in November by ICVA defines the potential role of ICVA in strengthening and supporting a more inclusive and diverse civil society. It also provides a collective perspective of civil society needs, some of which will be addressed in ICVA’s 2019-2021 Strategy kicking off next month. ICVA’s next strategic period will be an opportunity to support emerging practices that contribute to more direct and inclusive resourcing of local civil society.

NGO Fora in Action.

Networks play a major role in influencing particular areas of humanitarian action. ICVA’s efforts to support and broker for national Southern networks are a good example of global network-to-national network collaboration.

The “NGO Fora Programme” led by ICVA supports country level NGO fora, whether of national, international or mixed membership. Customised support, is based on requests from the NGO Fora themselves.

How can we better mitigate and share risk together?

Since the first round of Grand Bargain negotiations in February 2016, NGOs have voiced that the Grand Bargain does not adequately address the issues of risk.

Without addressing the underlying issues, Grand Bargain commitments made to localization, reduced burdensome donor conditions, and other elements cannot be achieved.

In the current context of high scrutiny over fraud, safeguarding and counter-terrorism, the systems have a low tolerance for risk. Donors are under increasing domestic pressure to justify the use of humanitarian funds and, as a consequence, programming becomes more risk-averse and donors’ reporting requirements tend to limit the availability and quality of funding.