Security risk management and duty of care during COVID-19

Read more at https://phap.org/3jun2020Humanitarian work is in most cases carried out in insecure environments and situations, making it critical for organizations to be able to identify and manage security risks affecting their operations. Although Security Risk Management (SRM) in the humanitarian sector has increasingly gained the attention of policy makers and practitioners, the current COVID-19 crisis highlights challenges in how to apply risk management, including in terms of duty of care. Delivering humanitarian aid under COVID-19 restrictions has also underlined the critical role of local actors and the importance to discuss risk transfer and risk sharing between international, national, and local humanitarian actors.On 3 June, ICVA and PHAP organized the first webinar in the new Learning Stream on Risk Management in Practice, aimed at exploring the current state of risk management in the humanitarian sector. In this webinar, we looked at the key findings from a new briefing paper from ICVA and researchers from the Graduate Institute on security risk management in humanitarian organizations and framed them around the challenges that the current COVID-19 crisis presents to the humanitarian sector. We heard from practitioners and experts about the current SRM challenges and solutions in their organizations, including risk transfer, risk sharing, and challenges related to duty of care.