2026 Seminars

Humanitarian organisations are designed to respond when crisis strikes. But what happens when the crisis affects the responders themselves?

In protracted and high-risk humanitarian contexts, local humanitarian workers and organisations operate inside the same emergencies to which they are responding. Staff may experience direct security incidents, displacement, psychological pressure or personal emergencies. Organisations may suddenly face damage to premises, interruptions to electricity or communications, loss of critical equipment, security challenges or other disruptions that threaten their ability to continue operating.

Traditional Duty of Care mechanisms do not always respond at the speed, flexibility or level required by locally led organisations. At the same time, interruptions affecting humanitarian teams are not only an internal organisational issue. When responders cannot operate safely and sustainably, communities may lose access to essential humanitarian assistance.

Developed and implemented in Ukraine, the Emergency Fund offers a different approach. It combines Emergency Preparedness, Rapid Response and Sector Resilience, providing tailored support based on the actual risks, capacities and needs of individual organisations rather than applying a uniform package.

The model is locally developed, locally led and centred on the needs of humanitarian workers and organisations operating closest to affected communities. At the same time, it generates unique data insights, practical evidence and structured understanding of Duty of Care needs that can inform wider humanitarian programming, partnerships and financing.

The workshop will go beyond presenting a project. It will ask a broader perspective: What if Duty of Care were treated not simply as an organisational responsibility, but as part of the infrastructure required to sustain humanitarian response and to deliver more with less.

The session will introduce the Emergency Fund through the perspectives of the full humanitarian ecosystem involved in its design, financing, implementation and use, while inviting participants to test its potential applicability beyond Ukraine.

The workshop aims to:

• Demonstrate how a locally led Duty of Care mechanism can combine rapid response, preparedness and measurable [local] humanitarian sector resilience;

• Demonstrate the value of locally generated data and evidence for wider Duty of Care programming;

• Give local humanitarian actors a central voice in defining what effective Duty of Care looks like in practice;

• Examine which elements of the Emergency Fund model could be replicated or adapted to other humanitarian contexts.