Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability

The Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS) sets out nine commitments that organizations and individuals can use to improve humanitarian response. The commitments promote principled action based on accountability to affected people. Using the verification framework, organizations document and assess their progress in aligning their practices and policies with the CHS. Self-assessments conducted in 2016 reveal the extent to which humanitarian organizations do or do not fulfil the nine commitments. The commitment with the lowest average score is Commitment 5, which calls for communities and people affected by crisis to have access to safe and responsive complaint mechanisms—a necessary component of accountable humanitarian action. Commitment 5’s self-assessment score of 2.1 means that the practices of organizations are occasionally in accordance with the standard recommended by the CHS. Self-reporting shows that organizations are only ‘compliant’ with Commitment 6: humanitarian response is coordinated and complementary. These scores provide insight into the key areas where more efforts are needed to make humanitarian response accountable to communities and people affected by crisis.