Technical guidance

Contribute to the production and use lessons learned and technical guidance at national and global level

Coordinate production of lesson-learned documents 

Despite the progress made in terms of humanitarian responses standardization and predictability, a large part of it remains context-based, and has not be properly documented yet. Sector capacity building being a cluster core function, it is the responsibility of the WASH coordination team to lead the process in drafting lesson-learned (LL) documents about past or current emergency interventions, to improve future response. LL documents can remain at national level, or fuel GWC global lesson learned process, providing field example and case studies. The production of LL documents is not the sole responsibility of the coordination platform, and partners should be involved.

Use Cluster's technical guidance documents to improve WASH response planning on key areas

Before starting strategic planning process, it is necessary to gather and analyse all available documents relevant to the current crisis and context. Operational and technical guidance documents directed towards partners and coordination platforms are regularly produced by the GWC. They can be used to support the elaboration of WASH Operational Response Plan and Strategic Operating Frameworks. 

• The GWC is leading in the global humanitarian WASH coordination lesson-learned process. Lesson learned documents are produced following key developments in humanitarian actions which are further used to guide future responses.
• The GWC is hosting technical working groups working at global level on specific topics (such as Cash and WASH), and producing guidance documents such as technical policies.

Other sources of information than the GWC include the following:

• The WASH operational website set up by the national Coordination platform can play the role of a document library, although this is complicated to maintain during transition from cluster to sector, so information might be lost.
• Many documents about the country and the context is also usually available at the level of the WASH partners.
• Useful documents can also be attached to the Emergency Preparedness Plan, which is a main source of information for planning the response.
• Previous HNO/HRPs and monitoring reports, which can give you a good estimation of which targets can be realistically set up for the current response.