Digital Opportunity, Solutions and Challenges: Implications of the digital era for humanitarian partnerships and programming
Background and concept note
Increasing humanitarian needs and resource constraints are providing the imperative to use digital technology to achieve cost-effectiveness, greater transparency, and better outreach in providing support to those people who are left behind. With digital, the delivery of humanitarian assistance is being reinvented.
As WFP and NGO partners grapple with the use of digital technology in humanitarian assistance, new challenges and risks, including the protection of data and privacy, become pressing concerns.
It is a well-known fact that developments in digital technology outpace global norms and governance frameworks that guide the use of that technology. Data could impact the principles and ways of humanitarian action.
Objective
The Annual Partnership Consultation session is a forum to discuss both the opportunities that the digital era provides for and the risks it poses to humanitarian action. It is hoped that through this session WFP and NGO CEOs will arrive at renewed ambition to invest time, staff and resources to specific skills, expertise, capabilities and business practices. With the right collaborations they can seize digital opportunities while reflecting on solutions to missed opportunities and risks.
Part 1: The Digital Opportunity
Is there a digital opportunity that can benefit those left further behind? Does that mean doing the same things we have always done but now using a phone or an app instead of Excel — or does that mean that there are now new opportunities to deliver new and different value to beneficiaries if we take advantage of the digital opportunity? Are there key fundamentals that need to be in place? Is there a critical path that can be followed, in order to sieze the opportunity? What does this mean for the application of humanitarian assistance?
Part 2: Challenges, Risk and Solutions
What challenges or risks can we address together in order to seize the opportunity: policy/regulatory, technical, or behavioural? How are these already being concretely addressed in a way that might show the way, at country and global levels?
