Deadline: 07-Aug-20
Elrha has announced the Innovation Challenge for “supporting the Humanitarian Community to Explore How Inclusive Preparedness can Enable Inclusive Humanitarian Response”.
The ambition for this Challenge is to support the humanitarian community to explore and better understand how inclusive preparedness enables inclusive humanitarian response by gathering experiences and perspectives from people with disabilities and older people.
To decide the focus for this Challenge, they worked with the research team leading the Gap Analysis, as well as the Technical Working Group (TWG) to determine what the main focus should be. Inclusive preparedness emerged as an important and neglected area of humanitarian action.
To refine the focus of the Challenge, they held further consultations with TWG members and with a reference group that included people with disabilities and people with humanitarian experience. This allowed them to develop the thinking around the evidence gap for inclusive preparedness and what they want to achieve through this Challenge.
Elrha wants this Challenge to generate a strong baseline of understanding on how inclusive preparedness enables inclusive response before they consider supporting innovation in this area.
The Problem
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction states that civil protection, humanitarian and preparedness actors, particularly governments, have a responsibility to ensure that disaster risk reduction and preparedness programmes are inclusive of persons with disabilities and older people. Preparedness measures are shown time and again to be more cost effective and to save more lives than reactive response measures. Nevertheless, the majority of humanitarian aid continues to be directed towards response, with the proportion allocated to disaster prevention and preparedness making up only 5% of total spending.
Preparedness consists of a range of activities and it can be difficult to fund adequately because it sits between the traditionally separate spheres of ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’ work. Preparedness can be understood as “the knowledge and capacities developed by governments, response and recovery organisations, communities and individuals to effectively anticipate, respond to and recover from the impacts of likely, imminent or current disasters.” For this Challenge, they are interested in preparedness for responding to disasters, rather than recovery or longer-term resilience building.
This Challenge aims to fund innovative projects that:
- Use research methods that are highly participatory and inclusive to generate new and deeper understanding of how people with disabilities and older people are included in humanitarian preparedness, what barriers they face and how this impacts their inclusion in humanitarian response. Assessing the extent to which inclusive preparedness enables inclusive humanitarian response will also require creative research approaches.
- Review, synthesise and analyse available evidence to understand the effectiveness and limitations of existing inclusive preparedness approaches in a given context.
- Build on the participatory research and evidence review to produce recommendations and opportunities for innovation for a range of relevant stakeholders such as humanitarian organisations, government agencies or OPAs and/or ODP and have a strong strategy for ensuring their uptake.
- Have strong, meaningful partnerships between representative organisations (OPDs and OPAs) and humanitarian actors. The involvement of OPDs and OPAs is key to enabling inclusion and they often have valuable expertise for the humanitarian community.
- Focus on a specific humanitarian setting. Preparedness and response will be directly shaped by the local geography, type of humanitarian crisis, and important contextual factors such as social norms, religion, demographics and political situation.
Funding Information
- Elrha have a total budget of 300,000 GBP available for this Challenge.
- From this, they envisage funding a selection of projects with varying budgets, generally between 50,000 and 75,000 GBP.
- Each project is expected to last between 12 and 20 months. All project-related activities must complete by 30 September 2022.
Eligiblity Criteria
To be eligible to apply for the Challenge, your application must meet the following requirements:
- The lead applicant organisation must be a legally registered entity (ie, civil society organisation – including representative organisations, international non-governmental organisation, national non-governmental organisation, academic/research institution, government, private company, Red Cross/ Red Crescent movement, United Nations agency or programme). Applicants are expected to provide relevant evidence (eg, registration document) at the EoI stage.
- Your project must be at the Problem Recognition stage of humanitarian innovation and you must be committed to disseminating your findings, including with communities affected by crises.
- Your application must consist of a partnership with at least one operational humanitarian organisation and at least one OPA or OPD working in the place of implementation (either can be the lead applicant). You are not expected to have confirmed partnerships in place for the EoI stage, but will be expected to provide evidence to demonstrate partnerships by the Full Proposal stage, such as a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) or similar.
- Your project must recognise that disability and older age intersect and focus on increasing the meaningful participation of both older people and people with disabilities. They recognise that older people and people with disabilities are diverse and may experience distinct barriers to inclusion, but are also confident that exploring and innovating to overcome barriers faced by both people with disabilities and by older people can be beneficial in driving more inclusive practice for a diverse range of people across humanitarian response.
- Your project must focus on a specific humanitarian setting. They are open to projects in all humanitarian settings and phases of response; they are particularly interested in contexts with cyclical crises (eg, drought- and flood-prone areas, areas affected by cyclones, cyclical conflict) where preparedness plays a key role.
For more information, visit https://www.elrha.org/funding-opportunity/innovation-challenge-inclusive-preparedness/