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Quality & accountability

What can be done to reinforce the capacity of individuals and organisations to respond to people’s needs and to conduct programmes responsibly? Guaranteeing the quality, effectiveness and accountability of operations is a constant challenge for organisations who have to adapt their projects to specific and changing contexts, and to evolving needs: as a result, they need to constantly adjust their understanding, develop agile intervention methods, reinforce synergies, identify the effects and impacts of an intervention, etc.

Quality, effectiveness and accountability are central concepts of humanitarian action and development. They raise numerous issues for aid actors: the strategic challenge of helping to improve people’s living conditions in a concrete and realistic way while at the same time strengthening the confidence that donors have in them; the challenge of reducing functional problems and improving the use of resources; and the ethical issue of conducting operations in a responsible way with regard to the population, donors, partners, staff and civil society.

Groupe URD has always been invested in these issues, providing support to individuals and organisations. We developed the Quality COMPAS, the first Quality Assurance method for humanitarian project management, and we co-authored the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability, with SPHERE and the CHS Alliance.

The challenges involved concern aid actors of all kinds (direct operators, evaluators, and financial partners), and all levels: individuals, projects, organisations, the sector, and even society as a whole.

Our activities in this area include analysing and monitoring the needs and trends of the sector, developing innovative new tools, encouraging discussion and learning between peers, helping to carry out changes and accompanying the design and implementation of quality approaches.