Common Services

The scale and complexity of the humanitarian crisis in Sudan requires coordination mechanisms and common services to ensure international humanitarian response can most effectively support national and local partners as well as affected communities.

With millions of people in need, the scale of operations remains large and requires well-qualified national and international partners. Given the multiplicity of responders, international aid agencies have organised themselves along Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) prescribed structures to facilitate interaction with national partners.

The objectives of the coordination and common services sector aims at maintaining a conducive operational environment that permits the principled, timely, quantitatively sufficient, well- targeted and cost-effective provision of humanitarian assistance.

In particular, the sector prioritises the following objectives: 1) strengthening the coordination system; 2) mobilising financial resources; 3) enhancing a system-wide situational awareness; 4) collecting, analysing and disseminating camp profile information. The Coordination and Common Services (CCS) sector is responsible for the development of the Humanitarian Needs Overview, Humanitarian Response Plan and Monitoring Framework, principal components of the Humanitarian Programme Cycle, as well as their revisions when required. The CCS sector also promotes gender and environmental mainstreaming throughout the sector responses.

As a facilitator for humanitarian actors engaged in all other sectoral responses, the CCS sector contributes to all four Strategic Objectives of the Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP).

Besides the sector’s objectives, partners will seek to further enhance their collective efforts on a number of key issues. Better understanding affected people’s vulnerabilities and displacement profiles (duration, aspirations) will be critical to ensure the development of sustainable response plans. This entails not only collecting systematically age and gender disaggregated data wherever new displacement occurs but also information about e.g. displacement duration and specific vulnerabilities.

Strengthening accountability of humanitarian response will also remain high on the agenda of the sector, ensuring response monitoring is regularly undertaken and results communicated to beneficiaries and partners alike.