2015 was marked by a number of major international events: the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, COP21 in Paris, and the Third Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa. Groupe URD was involved in all of these dossiers, working, at the national level, with the French Development Agency, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Environment, at the European level, with DG ECHO and DEVCO, and at the UN level, with OCHA and UNDP, and in preparation for the World Humanitarian Summit.
We also continued to work alongside practitioners via training courses, evaluations and the production of tools and methods. Of particular note was our active participation in the development of the CHS and its tools, based on key aspects of the Quality COMPAS. We are pleased that the CHS has been very favourably received and we will continue to work with our partners to help aid organisations to put it into practice.
In the field, we ended the majority of our activities in Haiti, closing our Observatory after five years of in-depth analysis of a crisis that has provided many lessons for the sector. We have a great deal of affection for this country, and we continued to monitor the situation there, and were present intermittently for a number of short projects. We were able to transfer many of the lessons from the response to the 2010 earthquake to the response to the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. We continued to work in the Sahel, though less than in 2014. Certain projects, such as the evaluations for the WFP, and our studies on the Ebola crisis, nevertheless allowed us to maintain ties with a certain number of countries in the sub-region, and we continued to keep a close watch on this particularly fragile area. We also began several projects related to the Syrian crisis and monitored the refugee crisis in Europe which has raised questions about the capacity and methods of humanitarian organisations and donors…
Our goal is to continue to learn, innovate and improve… With this in mind, we finalized a new five-year strategy in 2015. Designed so that there is continuity with the past, it aims to allow more in-depth analysis and closer ties with the field, and to make the results of our work as practical and useful as possible.