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:

  1. What do you think are the critical long term and future shifts that are transforming how WFP upholds humanitarian principles, contributes to peace and ensures a people-centered approach, protection and accountability?
  2. In that future, what should WFP do differently or better in regard to these cross-cutting fields of work?

 

 

Comments (4)

Rachel Goldwyn
Rachel Goldwyn Moderator

Greetings! welcome to the discussion forum on "Humanitarian principles, conflict-sensitivity and contribution to peace, inclusion, protection and AAP"

Sandra Luvisutto, Peter Allen, Jacqueline Cavalcante and I are your moderators, and are looking forward to a stimulating discussion with you all. Please do share your comments and reactions to the two questions posed above:

  1. What do you think are the critical long term and future shifts that are transforming how WFP upholds humanitarian principles, contributes to peace and ensures a people-centered approach, protection and accountability?
  2. In that future, what should WFP do differently or better in regard to these cross-cutting fields of work?

Thank you for your time and insights!

Rachel 

Edouard Nizeyimana
Edouard Nizeyimana

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:

  • Be strongly equipped to attend and have a voice in high level global challenges debate (conflicts, fragilities and vulnerabilities)
  • Engage Governments and its stakeholders to raise the discourse of the issues as they become critically important
  • Partner, Educate/build capacity, engage and ensure accountability (build robust data generation/analysis tools to raise the flag and report back through periodic and consistent mechanisms)
Peter Allen
Peter Allen Moderator

Hi Edouard,
Thank you very much for kicking off the discussion on this complex subject, and for your insights regarding the protection policy, humanitarian principles, and impact of covid vis-à-vis social protection systems. Along with Rachel and colleagues I am supporting the as a discussion room moderator- glad to meet you. 

In one of your insights you raise that WFP will need to be strongly equipped in the arena of global challenge debates- are there any specific fora/dialogues/events that you had in mind here?

You also raise that (as noted in the policy), peace and security are not necessarily the main focus of our work. At the same time, WFP's efforts to promote peace have been recently recognized through the Nobel Prize. It would be great to hear any thoughts on what our level of ambition should be regarding contributing to peace in the contexts where we work. 

We welcome WFP colleagues to join the conversation and provide their thoughts on the topic- and overarching questions-  thank you!

Edouard Nizeyimana
Edouard Nizeyimana

 

Hi Peter,

 

Thanks for the strong points above.

There are a lots of fora/dialogues/events from Security council to regional communities talks (through High level political forum/HLPF, G7, G20, G77, CoP, WEF and one time summit like FSS, conference on biodiversity, ocean summit & blue food, Transport and energy, nutrition for growth..(and these require a lot of capacities and visibility)..we need to know the directions of the trends if we want to invest in HDP... There is no doubt that WFP contribution is crucial and we know that the big majority of hungry people are in conflicts zones. This calls for anticipation to address the causes of  crises which may be sudden triggers of conflicts or structural poverty dimensions. I am of the view that some of therse strategies in HDP nexus require strong coalitions.


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