Charter4change

DanChurchAid is proud to be one the founding members of the Charter4Change (C4C) movement. DCA and the other founders took the initiative in 2015 as we realised that while local and national partners play a crucial role in much front line humanitarian action, they only received about 0,2 of all direct global humanitarian funding.

Instead of just recommending to donors and other international NGOs what they should do, the C4C signatories themselves moved ahead and signed up to the following eight commitments to be met by May 2018:

1. Increase direct funding to southern-based NGOs for humanitarian action: We commit that at least 20% of our own humanitarian funding will be passed to southern-based NGOs.
2. Reaffirm the Principles of Partnership: We endorse, and have signed on to, the Principles of Partnership, (Equality, Transparency, Results-Oriented Approach, Responsibility and Complementarity).
3. Increase transparency around resource transfers to southern-based national and local NGOs: We commit to document the types of organisation we cooperate with in humanitarian response and to publish these figures (or percentages) in our public accounts.
4. Stop undermining local capacity: We will identify and implement fair compensation for local organisations for the loss of skilled staff if and when we contract a local organisation’s staff.
5. Emphasise the importance of national actors: We undertake to advocate to donors to make working through national actors part of their criteria for assessing framework partners and calls for project proposals.
6. Address subcontracting: Our local and national collaborators are involved in the design of the programmes at the outset and participate in decision-making as equals in influencing programme design and partnership policies.
7. Robust organisational support and capacity strengthening: We will support local actors to become robust organisations that continuously improve their role and share in the overall global humanitarian response. We will publish the percentages of our humanitarian budget, which goes directly to partners for humanitarian capacity building by May 2018.
8. Communication to the media and the public about partners: In any communications to the international and national media and to the public we will promote the role of local actors and acknowledge the work that they carry out, and include them as spokespersons when security considerations permit.

Read more about Charter 4 change here

Leading from the front – progress so far:

By May 2016, 29 international NGO’s had signed up to the C4C commitments and 129 southern-based NGOs had endorsed it. The C4C commitments were highlighted by former UN Secretary General Ban Kin-moon as a key outcome from the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS).

Before and during the WHS, C4C was one important source of inspiration that led 49 donor governments and INGOs/alliances to promise that 25% of their humanitarian funding should go as directly as possible to local and national responders by 2020.

For 2016, DCA estimates that about 30% of our funding went to local and national partners in the countries where crises strike. For the C4C movement as a whole, the funding going to local and national actors is estimated to be about 24% in 2016. Best available data suggest that about 12 % of ALL global humanitarian funding went directly or indirectly (i.e. through one intermediary only) to local and national actors in 2015.

Apart from continuing to support the work of C4C, DCA prioritize work with local and national partners on capacity building. DCA also supports continued research and advocacy by the Local2Global Protection initiative – see more about their research into localisation and global humanitarian funding flows here