What is it about?
National governments are responsible to ensure a well-coordinated, strategic, adequate, coherent and effective response to humanitarian crisis occurring in their country. In some contexts, when government’s capacity to coordinate the response following humanitarian principles is overwhelmed or limited, Humanitarian Clusters may be activated. But as highlighted by the IASC in 2012, humanitarian clusters are by essence temporary, and are responsible The WASH coordination platform must participate in the strengthening of the local humanitarian WASH systems to support disaster resilience and a more localized humanitarian response
The 2012 Transformative Agenda highlighted the temporary essence of the humanitarian clusters, and the responsibility for clusters to build the capacity of the national government to progressively take a leading role on response coordination, with a final objective of cluster deactivation and transition from cluster to sector once adequate capacity has been reached. Four years year later, this agenda was pushed forward through by the launch of the Grand Bargain initiative: the largest donors and humanitarian agencies made several commitments to better localize the humanitarian coordination and to strengthen the role of local government and civil society actors in implementing and monitoring humanitarian WASH response. when the context allows it, the strenghtening of government's capacity to coordinate the response is one of the responsibilities of the WASH coordination platform and should be embedded into in its work planThe Gran Bargain also called for an increased used of market-based programming in the response, especially regarding the use of Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA), which should be considered for the WASH response when relevant and appropriate. The Gran Bargain also calls for more collaboration with development partners to improve the humanitarian development nexus, ensuring on one side that WASH development programs improve disaster resilience and preparedness, and on the other side WASH humanitarian response supports the continuity of the development agenda.