Groupe URD 2017 Annual Report: Learning and Innovating to Improve Crisis Response

2017 was another busy year when the team travelled from Nepal to Colombia, via the Sahel, the Lake Chad region, the periphery of the Syrian crisis, and the Myanmar conflict. As part of the preparations for ALNAP’s latest State of the Humanitarian System report, we were given the responsibility of listening to beneficiaries and local actors in 15 countries affected by crises, and particularly Lebanon, Kenya, Yemen, Mali and Bangladesh, with a view to producing 5 case studies. It was also a year of working on sensitive issues: donors’ funding allocation criteria and processes; the use of military and civil defence assets in natural disasters and health crises; and the evaluation of the cholera response in Yemen are only a few of the issues that were covered. Having previously run Observatories in Afghanistan, Chad and Haiti, we began preparing the launch of two new initiatives in 2018 to provide agile management support to numerous operators: in Mali, as part of a programme by the European Commission, and in the Lake Chad region, in partnership with ACF and CARE, with funding from the French Development Agency and the European Union. We also commissioned an evaluation of the Sigmah project in order to learn lessons from the ten years it has been running, and explore possible ways to consolidate what has been achieved during this collective adventure and make it sustainable in the future.