At the Canadian Humanitarian Conference, the Honourable Christian Paradis, Minister of International Development and La Francophonie, announced a project that aims to enhance Canada's response to humanitarian crises by strengthening collaboration between the humanitarian and private sectors in Canada.
This $125,000 project, in collaboration with the Humanitarian Coalition, will help to define concrete areas for partnership and collaboration between Canadian non-governmental organizations and Canadian corporations to enhance Canada's overall capacity to respond to humanitarian crises. It will explore the significant potential benefits of cross-sector collaboration in the area of humanitarian response. At present, Canadian humanitarian and private sector actors have limited contact with each other and little common understanding of each other's capacities and motivations, which is a barrier to exploring the mutually beneficial partnership opportunities for humanitarian response.
This unique project aims to address these gaps. The project will:
- produce research that supports cross-sectoral collaboration for humanitarian response in Canada to improve access to information about opportunities for collaboration across sectors, as well as processes and challenges in the area of humanitarian response;
- support the organization of meetings and workshops to allow a range of humanitarian and private sector stakeholders to come together to discuss how they might best work together to enhance Canada's response to humanitarian crises;
- develop improved mechanisms to support the development of cross-sectoral partnerships, such as developing and launching a cross-sectoral platform model for humanitarian response; and
- help to plan and negotiate one or two innovative cross-sectoral partnership humanitarian response initiatives.
The Humanitarian Coalition is a network of Canadian non-governmental organizations determined to unite their efforts in cases of humanitarian crises. At present, the Humanitarian Coalition has five members: CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Québec, Plan Canada and Save the Children Canada. The Humanitarian Coalition is a fundraising and coordination body that supports its members' humanitarian efforts and does not directly operate any programs overseas.
The Humanitarian Coalition works to reduce unnecessary competition, inform the public about humanitarian needs, increase the impact of Canadian humanitarian responses and reduce administrative costs. To date, the Humanitarian Coalition has successfully launched 13 separate appeals in response to humanitarian needs worldwide.
Canada wants to harness the expertise, resources and innovation of the private sector to help the world's most vulnerable people. Collaborating with the private sector leads to new ways of thinking, more investment, and more resources to support development and humanitarian assistance efforts. For example, in the area of maternal, newborn and child health, working with the private sector has led to innovations that save lives:
- The Advance Market Commitment, launched by five donor countries, including Canada, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has made it possible for 10 million children in more than 30 developing countries to be immunized against the main cause of pneumonia, which kills more than one million children every year at a long-term price that is 90 percent lower than the cost of the same vaccine in Europe and the United States.
- The Zinc Alliance for Child Health, public-private-civil society partnership between Teck Resources, a Canadian private sector company, the Government of Canada, and the Micronutrient Initiative, a global organization working to address undernutrition, delivers zinc supplements and oral rehydration salts to treat diarrhea, one of the most common killers of children in developing countries.
