Area Based Approach: A multi-sectorial way to work with communities in humanitarian settings

Elena Garagorri Technical Assistance Coordinator

The humanitarian sector is immersed in an era of unprecedented complexity. Conflict, climate-related disasters, protracted crises and growing funding gaps are exposing the limitations of traditional aid models, often characterized by short-term, sector-specific projects delivered in silos, which are today struggling to address the interconnected needs of the communities we serve.

This last decade has seen various reform initiatives, with one constant element recurrently present through the various processes; Local actors and the communities directly affected must be at the center of humanitarian action. This has been approached from various angles. When the Grand Bargain (GB) was launched in 2016, the focus was on efficiency gains in the funding architecture and transferring at least 25% of funds as directly as possible to local actors. The conversation gradually evolved towards the burden of donor requirements on these same local actors, which highlighted the need to train national and local NGOs in all the requirements imposed by the international system. The issue has continued to evolve, with the debate and reflection presently focusing on how to make the communities not only the passive recipients of aid, but increasingly, the center of the needs assessments and program designs in the place they are settled.  

Consensus is growing in the humanitarian community that the status quo of the cluster coordination system must change. The existing architecture, based on sectors and clusters thematics and coordinated with a top-down approach by the international community, needs to get closer to the communities to deliver effective aid that gives protagonism to local actors and invests in resilience building within the communities, moving away from protracted humanitarian action.

In response to that, DG ECHO launched a first study to start working on Area Based Approach in 2024 with the support of a policy consortium of which IECAH is a member, to clarify what the Area-Based Approaches (ABA) concept means and what is needed to implement it, while analyzing DG ECHO’s existing practices on the subject, in terms of both policy and operations.

Area-Based Approach (ABA) puts the population/community living in a specific geographic area with high needs at the center of its approach.

To achieve this holistic approach, this needs analysis links four main elements:

• It moves beyond specific parts of the population (children, elderly, women, etc.) and has a whole-of-population approach.
• It is geographically targeted, focusing on a specific and pre-defined area.
• It assesses all the needs in the area, including the relation between different elements (how access to water links with success of crops, how access to health facilities links with school attendance, for example)
• It focusses on bringing multi-stakeholder, and multi-sector proposals that can be translated into operational decision-making processes because they have the affected community at the center

ABA has the potential to become a crucial shift in the way humanitarian action is defined by strengthening the participation of the community affected both in the assessment of the needs as well as in the response design.

Because this approach learns from and leans on plans and initiatives anchored within the community, it is generally viewed as a step in the direction of increasing local leadership and resilience in these communities.

Whilst DG ECHO is aware of the challenges that lie ahead for the Area Based Approach to truly permeate the humanitarian sector – including transversalities with protection or coordinating with similar initiatives like Area-Based Coordination / Area-Based Programming, among others  – DG ECHO is a top-tier donor of the humanitarian system, and as an intergovernmental organization, it has remarkable capacity to influence and set up new dynamics and policies in this field of work.

IECAH will continue to accompany this relevant initiative in the months to come.  After the 2024 internal report, DG ECHO is presently moving to further develop this concept through internal practical discussions. IECAH is supporting DG ECHO streamline these thematic and operational inputs and will help produce by mid 2026 a set of guidelines and a roadmap to help in the operationalization of ABA, both internally for DG ECHO as well as its partners.