Brief: Urban Response Practitioner Workshop - Meeting Needs in a Context of Protracted Urban Displacement in the Horn and East Africa

Publication language
English
Pages
12pp
Date published
01 May 2016
Type
Conference, training & meeting documents
Keywords
Development & humanitarian aid, Forced displacement and migration, Urban
Countries
Kenya
Organisations
International Institute for Environment and Development

In May 2016, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) hosted a practitioner workshop entitled “Meeting Needs in a Context of Urban Displacement in the Horn and East Africa” in Nairobi, Kenya. The workshop is part of IRC’s Urban Crises Program, which is divided into two components: learning and advocacy. The goal of the Urban Crises Program is to generate practical evidence as to what constitutes effective urban
humanitarian response for both beneficiaries and the places in which they live, and to use this evidence to improve humanitarian urban programming and advocate for innovative and sustainable approaches to urban response within the international community.

To this end, the aim of the workshop was to bring together humanitarian (both international and local), international development, and local municipal actors currently responding to crises affecting HEA’s urban areas. As many publications written about the topic of urban humanitarian response highlight the need for non-governmental and public sector actors to collaborate, this workshop sought to gain insight from these various perspectives in order to determine the challenges, opportunities, and potential solutions to meeting needs in a context of urban displacement. With this in mind, the workshop’s organizers encouraged each invitee from an international nongovernmental organization (INGO) to invite a local municipal or national actor with whom they may or may not coordinate with on the ground. This allowed a forum where actors working in the same country but representing different perspectives engaged with one another over the two-day period. Workshop participants are listed in the Annex.

This brief is meant to provide an overview of the key points generally agreed upon during the workshop. The following recommendations are meant as a general overview and are the sole opinion of the Urban Crises Program project team and the
IRC.