Do No Harm 2021

Content

International development cooperation - no matter if humanitarian aid and disaster relief, traditional development cooperation, or conflict transformation and peacebuilding - is not neutral. Aid (what is done and the way it is offered) can cause harm. Or it can strengthen capacities for peace in deeply fragmented societies and in the midst of conflict-affected communities. Planning, monitoring, evaluation, and learning processes must take this into account.

During this online course, participants will be introduced to the Do No Harm approach as the leading tool for the application of conflict sensitivity. Do No Harm enables organizations to avoid causing inadvertent harm through international development cooperation. In the initial stages of the training, we will focus on developing a sound understanding of the situation in which we are active in. In a next step, participants will learn tested ways to unpack an intervention and assess its details against conflict sensitivity criteria. In step three, we will learn how to analyze the interaction between the intervention and the context, especially with the conflict dynamics at play. This will enable participants to develop more conflict sensitive programming alternatives.

Objectives

By the end of the seven weeks online course participants will...

• be familiar with minimum standards of a good conflict analysis as a non-negotiable base for any intervention - especially in conflict contexts.
• be familiar with a variety of context and conflict analysis tools and feel ready to use them confidently in their work.
• be familiar with the seven key steps of the Do No Harm approach, the respective tools and frameworks, and have applied them to a real-life case study.
• will feel confident to apply key principles and new insights from the Do No Harm approach to their work in order to make it more conflict sensitive.
• will be able to combine the Do No Harm approach with other planning, monitoring, evaluation, and learning approaches to develop tailor-made planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning processes according to their own needs.
• have benefited from comparative learning processes through sharing of personal and international experiences and good practices.

Key Concepts

• Do No Harm approach.
• Relationship framework.
• Conflict analysis frameworks and tools.

• Participatory planning, monitoring, evaluation, and learning approaches.