Welcome to discussion room on "Humanitarian principles, conflict-sensitivity and contribution to peace, inclusion, protection and AAP"
WFP’s response is rooted in the core humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and operational independence. These norms are vital for WFP to effectively reach the individuals and communities it serves and are central to WFP’s operations in all contexts.
Conflict plays a central role in driving hunger and presents both the need to ensure WFP assistance is conflict sensitive and supports peace. WFP’s role in Peacebuilding in Transition Settings (2013) recognized WFP’s role in contributing to peace through its operational presence and range of interventions, laying out key principles to guide WFP’s action. These included, among others, the importance of understanding the context, being responsive to a dynamic environment, ensuring inclusivity and equity and supporting United Nations coherence.
The recently updated and approved protection and accountability policy (2020) supports a people-centered, needs-driven approach that engages with and benefits from the views, preferences, and priorities of affected populations. Through this policy, WFP acknowledges that it is required to prevent and respond to protection risks associated with hunger and WFP programmes in all contexts, and to craft successful protection outcomes for affected populations. Systematic engagement with affected populations, internal and external accountability measures and inclusion means ensuring that affected communities, especially individuals most at risk, have a role in shaping and informing humanitarian and development action.
Please answer the following questions:
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Hi Rachel,
Well done for setting the scene for this challenging and complex subject. Luckily the 2020 protection policy has provided consistent insights based on the evaluation recommendations of the previous policy.
There are a lot of uncertainties around the extent of COVID consequences with the increasing multidimensional poverty in the already fragile environment will push more people in humanitarian crises. In the absence of strong social protection schemes, it will be extremely difficult to focus only on Refugees, IDPs, migrants and leave out the local communities with similar needs.
Humanitarian principles are strong enablers for WFP and partners. Along with the cross-cutting issues, these are linked to human rights, peace and security which are not necessarily the main focus of WFP work as per the recent protection policy.
WFP complies with Humanitarian principles which also need to be understood and accepted by a large multi-stakeholder network including Governments, non-Government organizations and other (non-states armed groups) with limited knowledge of the scope of these issues.
WFP will need to: