Updates

National Emergency Pooled Fund

March 16, 2023 by Ishita Kashyap Leave a Comment

Join us in supporting the National Emergency Pooled Fund (NEPF), an initiative to strengthen India’s disaster response capacity.

Disasters, whether natural or man-made, can strike at any time and have devastating consequences. The impact of disasters is felt most acutely by the poorest and most vulnerable communities, who are often the least equipped to cope with the aftermath. The NEPF aims to address this challenge by providing a timely and effective response to medium and mega-disasters that overwhelm the capacity of state governments.

At the heart of the NEPF is our innovative LOCAL Platform, which empowers local actors to respond quickly and efficiently to disasters. The LOCAL Platform is a game-changer in the disaster relief and humanitarian aid sector, providing transparency and accountability to donors, empowering local actors, and preventing the misuse of funds and resources.

But we need your support to make this initiative a success. By contributing to the NPF, you will be helping to build a more sustainable, long-term response to disasters and humanitarian crises. Your donation will help us to provide the necessary resources and tools to the LOCAL members, enabling them to respond to disasters swiftly and efficiently.

At HAI, we are committed to strengthening local organisations’ capacities through grassroots action and humanitarian partnerships. Our approach focuses on exchanging skills and sharing knowledge to promote sustainability. The NEPF is just one of the three pillars of our approach, including a national platform for front-line organisations and a national roster for surge support to smaller humanitarian organisations.

We urge you to donate generously to the NEPF and join us in our efforts to strengthen India’s disaster response capacity. Your donation can make a significant difference in saving lives and rebuilding communities affected by disasters. Let’s make a difference and create a more resilient and compassionate India together.

LOCAL COMMUNIQUE

February 17, 2023 by Ishita Kashyap Leave a Comment

Even after more than six years of the World Humanitarian Summit, more achievements have yet to be made under the global frameworks of Grand Bargain and Charter4Change to positively influence local and national actors’ functioning. The localisation discourse has yet to take off in countries like India despite having scores of country offices of the signatories of the two. The new phase of aid colonisation through local fundraising by the country offices has further weakened the local response mechanism. This systematic marginalisation has severe ramifications for the local/national organisations and their nexus approach to seeking durable solutions for the communities they work with. There is a need to advance local humanitarian leadership with a solid collective voice and coordinated engagement by local and national actors. Still, there needs to be a mechanism to build and sustain this. With this realisation, 15 local and national organisations from 10 states of India assembled for a consultation on 7-8 February 2023 in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. They agreed to launch a Local Organisation’s Coalition for Advancing Localisation (LOCAL) platform for a collaborative approach to transform the Indian humanitarian architecture, led by local organisations and frontline actors.

Various consultation sessions were also joined by the BHA of USAID; DG ECHO, Brussels; Vitol Foundation, UK; Spark, the Netherlands; Start Network, UK; International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), UK and Catholic Relief Services, India. Sony Pictures Networks Pvt. Ltd., HCL Foundation and Financial Management Service Foundation ensured in-person participation.

Primarily functioning as a non-financial platform, LOCAL aims to set a new benchmark for sector-wide change and promote cooperative and locallyled humanitarian architecture.

Following are the key outcomes and decisions of the LOCAL consultation:

Identify and address critical challenges to localisation:
Only a few local organisations have direct access to donors, and they too rarely receive adequate operation and overhead costs. This has systematically been causing institutional weakening and marginalisation of the. The first-response mechanism is acknowledged as being timely, cost-efficient and following a nexus approach. The small size of local organisations often adversely affects their fundraising efforts. Therefore, a collaborative
response mechanism was agreed upon through the LOCAL platform, which will also be presented to donors as the first intermediary. The Platform will offer an enabling environment for exchange and learning, actively provide membership services such as high-end training programmes to build resilient, disaster-ready local organisations, and build collective identity and credibility for member organisations.

A National Dashboard for Aid Transparency:
To address the trust deficit and an absolute dearth of financial data at the national level, it was agreed upon to set up an Indian version of IATI. To begin with, every member of LOCAL will publish their financial data on the national dashboard to ensure transparency and accountability to donors, communities and other stakeholders. Other organisations will be encouraged to join LOCAL and/or publish their data on the dashboard, which will have curated, contextualised, and simplified data on funding and transaction layers until it reaches the end beneficiaries. The dashboard will show the flow of funds, utilisation of funds in different categories, and overhead funds. The Platform will provide data analytics globally, sectoral information, cost per beneficiary, and geographical spread.

A National Pooled Fund:
Given the lack of direct access to donors, disaster responses often get significantly delayed. As of now, there is yet to be a pooled fund in India to support immediate lifesaving interventions. To address this challenge and to keep humanitarian interventions timely and relevant; it was agreed upon to establish a national pooled fund to initiate a response in 24-36 hours. The pooled fund can offer a space for donors to shift funding to local actors more directly by making a contribution or a pledge to enable effective locally-led responses.

A National Roster:
Most of the LOCAL members are small organisations, therefore, often considered by donors as needing more capacity. To offset this gap, mapping of human resources and sectoral expertise across the LOCAL platform will be done to develop a roster to identify existing capabilities, collaboratively address gaps and provide surge support to LOCAL members leading an emergency response. Gradually, external professionals shall also be invited to join the roster to support the locally-led response mechanism.

Accountability Charter:
The platform will develop an Accountability Charter, which will be binding on each LOCAL member and any new organisations aspiring to join the platform. A donor consultation will also be held to design a Donor Accountability Charter to ensure donor systems are conducive to local actors and locally-led responses.

Promoting Country-Level Accountability of Signatories:
It was agreed to write to the signatories of Grand Bargain, Charter4Change and Pledge4Change, having country offices in India to share an update on their achievements under different frameworks. The LOCAL platform will also support them in better delivery of the commitments.

Wider and Shared Representation:
There are various networks locally, nationally, regionally, and globally but with limited space for local voices. Most of the network memberships come with a cost. It is time and resource-consuming for a resource-poor local organisation to join the networks. A mapping of essential networks was done to share the representation responsibility across LOCAL members as representative of the rest.

A Fully Functional Secretariat to Support LOCAL Members:
Most local actors are resource-poor and need access to overhead costs or institution-building support. That becomes a barrier to working on robust compliance mechanisms, accessing donors, applying for funding opportunities, ensuring effective communications and visibility online to build the organisations’ credibility, and so on. It is almost impossible for each local organisation to recruit the necessary staff to support these functions. To address that, a LOCAL secretariat will be established, recruiting the necessary staff to support LOCAL members to build the systems and infrastructure required.

A National Programme on Safe Migration:
LOCAL members work in marginalised areas, also vulnerable to disasters. Trafficking, including sex trafficking, remains high, increasing during disasters. To address that, a migration tracker shall be developed to track distress migration and cases of sex trafficking to eliminate chances of sex trafficking, reduce instances of distress migration, provide the necessary support to migrants if facing exploitation, and rescue and rehabilitation of trafficked people. This will be an additional programme that LOCAL members with anti-trafficking expertise will lead and streamline across the platform.

7 Commitments Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations

November 9, 2022 by Ishita Kashyap Leave a Comment

7 Commitments Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations

Humanitarian Aid International has been a signatory of the Climate Charter since 9 October 2021 and is actively engaged in almost all global processes of Climate Change. Climate change adaptation is one of the HAI’s mandates; therefore, we are always at the forefront to commit ourselves to make positive changes for climate-affected communities through our best possible interventions.

Commitment 1: Step up our response to growing humanitarian needs and help people adapt to the impacts of the climate and environmental Crises

By 2025, HAI will consider climate and environmental risks in all its programmes based on thorough risk analyses combined with scientific studies and the expertise of the local population. HAI would have strengthened the capacities of the maximum vulnerable communities within its existing programme areas in India to cope with climate-induced extreme weather events and to adapt to them positively.

Commitment 2: Maximize the environmental sustainability of our work and rapidly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions

By 2025, HAI will innovate, integrate & promote activities that significantly reduce CO2 emissions. HAI will work on the premise of CoP principles and IPCC indicators to control the 1.5-degree Celsius temperature. HAI aims to adhere to the “do no harm” principle across its programme areas to maintain and further improve the diversity of ecosystems.

Commitment 3: Embrace the leadership of local actors and communities

By 2025, HAI will promote climate champions to lead actions at the community level and influence the discourse at the national and global levels. HAI will rely on local and traditional knowledge of climate mitigation and adaptation as effectively as possible and integrate it into its programmes.

Commitment 4: Increase our capacity to understand climate and environmental risks and develop evidence-based solutions

By 2025, the HAI team and national platform members will better understand the drivers of climate and environmental degradation and the measures required to address them.
By 2025, HAI will improve its internal capacity to develop and analyse digital maps of climate hot spots to influence humanitarian, development and climate programmes at a larger scale.

Commitment 5: Work collaboratively across the humanitarian sector and beyond to strengthen climate and environmental action

By 2025, HAI will build alliances and work complimentarily with local and national authorities, researchers, and other environmental experts to strengthen climate-smart approaches in our programmes. HAI would have established an international advisory committee to seek support for improved climate resilience across all programmes. HAI would have helped all its national member organisations to mainstream climate resilience activities and sensitive actions.

Commitment 6:Use our influence to mobilize urgent and more ambitious climate action and environmental protection

By 2025, HAI will leverage and further expand its existing national and international networks, not only to strengthen climate action and environmental protection at the project level but also to influence respective decision-making at the levels of laws and policies by collaborating with both local and national authorities and drawing attention
to at-risk communities.

Commitment 7: Develop targets and measure our progress as we implement our commitments

Against each target, HAI will develop indicators and will rely on community feedback to measure and report progress across all the existing programmes/projects

Suggested recommendations for the WGHR Refugee Thematic Session

September 28, 2022 by Ishita Kashyap Leave a Comment

NEED FOR A NATIONAL REFUGEE LAW AND ASYLUM/REFUGEE INSTITUTIONS

Need for a framework that processes and recognises refugees, enables access to rights and entitlements and provides support while they are in India and if they choose to locally integrate.

Acknowledge the discriminatory treatment between different refugee communities within India and the harm caused by their ad hoc status and ad hoc support.

The refugee discourse in India is primarily confined to the refugees catered by UNHCR or other INGOs. The Pakistani refugees get overlooked. Since the government is sympathetic to them, everyone may assume the situation might be better than the rest. That’s not the case. Pakistani minority refugees received certain rights and entitlements, but this is limited to those who arrived before 2014. There are huge gaps between policy and implementation due to limited access and support. Those coming after 2014 are not eligible for the same entitlements. Many Pakistani refugees had to return to Pakistan because they were not receiving similar support in India.

2. EXPAND THE SCOPE OF EXISTING REFUGEE PROTECTIONS AND ENTITLEMENTS
UNIFORMLY TO ALL REFUGEE COMMUNITIES

Expand protection policies to all refugees in India.

Recognise the harm caused by only relief-centric and ad hoc support resulting in refugees, an already vulnerable community, being pushed into cycles of poverty and dependency due to lack of institutionalised support from the government.

The refugees who come under the mandate of UNHCR in India, are entitled for a refugee card
and other emoluments for sustenance. A similar provision is not available for the religious
minorities from the neighbouring countries despite some policy provisions being introduced.
They are left to fend for themselves or rely on the support from civil society. The government
should consider a financial package for them as well.

3.RECOGNISE THAT NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL, REAFFIRM AND INSTITUTIONALISE
INDIA’S OPEN-DOOR POLICY

Displacement today is a fact of everyday life; forced migration is an inevitable feature of the existing political environment and international system of states.
Due process should be followed for refugee deportations.
Recognise the jus cogens nature of non-refoulment when refugees who are forced to return risk facing persecution and torture

4.NEED FOR A REGIONAL REFUGEE FRAMEWORK

Decolonising the existing refugee framework, focusing on South-South cooperation and
recognising our shared histories.
Framing a regional refugee framework recognising the need for protection of refugees and
also those forcibly displaced due to disasters and climate change in the region.

5.NEED TO RECOGNISE AND SUPPORT REFUGEE-LED ORGANISATIONS

Allow their registration and functioning as RLOs as CSOs/NGOs since they are from and closest to the affected community.

6.NEED FOR A TRILATERAL COOPERATION BETWEEN GOVERNMENT, UNHCR AND CSO

Need for trilateral cooperation between the Government, UNHCR and Civil Society
Organizations working directly with refugee communities irrespective of mandates to coordinate and exchange capacities, expertise and resources to serve refugee communities in India better.

Using Cash Transfer as an Innovative Approach in COVID-19 Humanitarian Response

July 27, 2020 by Sudhanshu Singh

At Humanitarian Aid International we are pledged to help people facing a crisis in life; something that we are doing for many years. Our professional team consists of humanitarian and development experts, and our 24/7 active volunteers, whom we consider the backbone of this organization.

HAI’s motto is to help the people affected by a natural calamity like earthquake, flood, pandemic, etc. We are pleased to do anything to help the people in need as well as those on the call of duty.

Helping the People Trapped in Distress

The global COVID 19 pandemic has upended many lives in India. Though, COVID affected all of us, those on the edge were the 140 millions Indian employed in the informal sectors. These were farm laborers, rickshaw pullers, vegetable and fruit vendors, brick kiln workers, daily wage labours, auto drivers, roadside vendors and others. With the imposition of countywide lockdown they faced serious livelihood crisis. Thousands were stranded on roads after losing their job and livelihood. With all their savings gone and no sign of relief, thousands began their on foot journey for their homes. Men, women, children walked hundreds of kilometers on foot, often sleeping hungry on roadside.

Feed The Daily Wagers During Coronavirus Lockdown — HAI feeding the daily wage earners during the COVID19 lockdown

HAI has helped thousands of such families and daily wage earners, throughout the country, facing life and death situation in wake of the pandemic. We have provided food to the hungry, distributed PPE kits to the healthcare workers; helped municipal bodies in sanitization and in identifying people in need, etc. We reinstate our commitment to helping the people in distress and also the agencies working for them.

All through the pandemic we have attended thousands of distress calls in several states. Sometimes, the person making the request even asked to pay the rent for his/her family’s accommodation. True to our commitment of helping them, we have even transferred rent directly in the house owner’s account.

The restrictions of lockdown relaxed almost completely, life is returning to normalcy. But even today millions of workers are still not able to secure means of livelihood and are forced to sleep hungry under open sky.

Helping Swiftly and Smartly

Hai Volunteers At Pak Hindu Refugee Camp — HAI volunteer helping people with ration and other essential goods

When our volunteers receive a request they verify beneficiary details that is, number of family members, financial condition, employment and all. Once the details are verified, the beneficiaries are asked to go to a ration shop that accepts digital payment. Our designated team member coordinates the transfer of ration to the beneficiary and the payment of shop’s bill by HAI.

Also, to make the transactions transparent and to ensure that every single penny is justly used, we transact through virtual platforms Paytm, Google Pay, Phone Pay, etc.

Donate for the Cause

Every day, as we move on to help new poor families, feed them and help them pay their rents, we thank our donors from the bottom of our hearts for making it all possible. Not only HAI family but also the beneficiaries are obliged to the common people donating for this noble cause.

This, in turn, puts an obligation back on us to make sure that every single rupee you donate is used only for the cause. We understand the value of your hard earned money and for this we have tried to make transactions completely digitalized, making it more transparent right from the donor to the beneficiary level.

Donate to HAI’s Humanitarian Campaigns

Our Future Goals

We at Humanitarian Aid International have always felt the need to provide a permanent solution to the problems of people affected by a calamity. We feel that helping them by providing food and shelter, though noble, is only a temporary solution.

In the future, we aspire to help people with finding permanent employment and means of livelihood and making them stand up on their feet once again after the ordeal.

We also aim for helping out millions of migrant workers who are left jobless after the pandemic. We seek to coordinate with the local government agencies in generating and jobs locally to help the migrant workers.

Please click here to access the full report.