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This key message is not from the self-study material, but rather from personal experience working as a protection sector coordinator, especially at sub-national level: 'care for the carers'.

As coordinators, our direct constituents are not the affected population but rather those working to serve and protect that population. All humanitarian work is personally and emotionally draining, but protection work can be particularly distressing. I take duty of care seriously as a coordinator, monitoring the well being of my sector members and advocating for the supports they need to avoid burnout or worse and enable them to continue to pursue their work. This can mean arranging their access to psycho-social self-care training, advocating with the NGOs that employ them to fulfill their duty of care obligation, or highlighting the impact of operational conditions to the HCT for their action at higher levels.

Question: What can protection sector coordinators do to make a more 'activist' Protection Cluster, particularly in cases with a passive HCT/UNCT and a national government that is a party to the conflict / not acting in good faith. I am looking for tips and examples of 'managing up' to the HCT, UNCT, HC/RC and engaging segments of the UN outside of the country operation (ex. using the Rights Up Front mechanism or engaging the SC, SRSGs, special envoys, etc.).

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Ala'a
Individual's right to safe and secure housing that protects their privacy is a basic human right and all humanitarian workers should work together and collaborate to help as many individuals claim this right.

Question:
How do we unify the discussions and reach approvals from all parties when the interest of the audience is different?

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Key Message: Protection strategies and coordination structures should always take into account local participation, as different territorial units have particular realities, costumes, authorities and stakeholders, a non local approach might oversee relevant factors and risks that could put at stake the results of the planned activities.
I have been able to confirm this statement while working with different field units along Chilean territory, while in some regions the response must focus on an immediate humanitarian response, in others a long term integration strategy must be applied, thus taking into account the whole cycle on the exercise of human rights of refugees and migrants.

Question: Having reviewed the guides and toolkits available in the Self Study Phase, how can these standards be applied in emergency contexts and with unfunded partner organizations?

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GBV mitigation and response is extremely urgent and necessary especially in humanitarian crises. Working in a protracted crisis such as the R4V in Guyana has given rise to some very important questions. One of these are the issues surrounding coordination mechanisms in hinterland and remote areas where GBV and SRHR services is limited and sometimes non-existent.

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Key Message: Affectations to the rights of housing, land and property, and the security of tenure should always be kept in mind. Urban response and urban solutions to IDPs should take into account those aspects to promote effective local integration.

Question: How to ensure the effective and impartial coordination when there are organizational interests that directly finance these coordination roles?

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Key Message1 : Coordination saves lives
Proper coordination saves lives, significantly reduces suffering and avoids duplication for benefits of all.
Key Message 2: Do no arm principle
sometimes people are in unbelievable distress, but  actions to be taken on their behalf may be more detrimental to them than conditions in which they find themselves. It is necessary to take into account the context, not to ignore this possibility and to stop any action.
Question 1
How do you coordinate or coordinate the response with actors who are reluctant to work with you (despite communicative approaches to pacify the collaboration) and therefore to share information that is useful for your work? In other words, how do you ensure good coordination in a context where the actors do not want to collaborate and know how to be independent because of the many funds at their disposal?

Question 2: Another question that is close to my heart is how to ensure the protection of civilians in a purely dynamic environment where  government is confronted with a terrorist group and does not have control over its territory and is unable to ensure the protection of its citizens. how to do this? the pleas have certainly been made but the recipient of the pleas is itself powerless.

thanks.
NM

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Key message: Protection coordination is all about bringing people together and rallying them behind the common cause of protecting the affected population, while they all have different trajectories of work based on their organizational backgrounds.

Question: How can these different backgrounds be managed best and how can the Sectors'/Clusters' different core functions be best prioritized to ensure an effective strategy that actually enhances the protection of the population?

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                                                                                         Name: Kwihyang                                       

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                                                                                         Name: Kwihyang                                       

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Key Message: Mine Action in Humanitarian Cluster is the primary coordination platform for effective and coherent mine action response in humanitarian crises settings, bringing together NGOs and UN agencies under the shared objective of more predictable and effective humanitarian mine action in emergencies.

Question: How to feed its AoR into the coordination mechanism to mobilize funds when the priority criteria set by the OCHA is fundamentally different from ones of the AoR.

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In terms of protection coordination it is important to prioritize safety, dignity and avoid causing any harm, including providing meaningful access, being accountable and advocating and encouraging participation and empowerment of the beneficiaries.

Question: How do we ensure effective field implementation of GBV activities and how effectively can GBV and protection be integrated among other sectors what are the monitoring mechanisms to ensure integration?

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Key messages: synergies are pivotal to provide quality and efficient support/coordination

Question: how working groups and HCT's advisory's groups can work together without overlapping?

Why Guidelines on the Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities are under MA AoR and not the GPC?

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- Looking through the material it becomes clear that working in a cluster is all about synergies. The cluster is at it's best when united.

- Working for the cluster in an operation proves to be very challenging when trying to come up with a common goal. Mostly because unfortunately many of the people working in cluster setting are double hatting for the cluster and another agency/ actor - this is of course due to funding challenges. and sometimes the lines of conflict of interest become quite blurry because of this. how can we ensure accountability to the cluster and that there is no conflict of interest for those who have the responsibility to work for both the cluster and another actor?

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Fanta  - “Changing the funding landscape”  

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Fanta  - “Changing the funding landscape”  

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Key message

Gender Based Violence remains one of the priority protection risks reported in humanitarian situations but the least funded. Such funding landscape creates a challenge to prevent, mitigate and ensure availability of GBV response services proportional to the need.

My question

What is it that we need to do differently as part of our coordination function to ensure that the funding requirement is allocated by donors to address the protection needs of affected population and to ensure availability of services that are proportional to the need?

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Gender Based Violence remains one of the priority protection risks reported in humanitarian situations but the least funded. Such funding landscape creates a challenge to prevent, mitigate and ensure availability of GBV response services proportional to the need

What is it that we need to do differently as part of our coordination function to ensure that the funding requirement is allocated by donors to address the protection needs of affected population and to ensure availability of services proportional to the need?

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Protection Coordination is indeed an extraordinary strong mechanism for pooling different synergies towards enhancing enjoyment of rights by various vulnerable categories in affected communities.

Questions wavering in my head include what techniques to use to get the affected populations provide effective feedback; how to have the affected genuinely and actively engaged without them seeking  flimsy gains; how protection cluster and the different AoRs work in good harmony and respect to attain great results.

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Coordination should channel and enhance the efforts of all cluster member organizations, including national and local actors. An inclusive approach will be a capacity building and sustainability factor for sectoral interventions.

My question: The centrality of protection must go beyond the words. How can we ensure the effectiveness of cross-cutting protection with other sectors such as nutrition, education and Wash?

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I increasingly realize that the concept of the accountability to affected people is particularly instrumental for the work of the GPC, SGBV SC, CP SC, MA, etc and should be part of the coordination work. Voices of affected people and communities including survivors of GBV, and other vulnerable women, girls, boys and men should be heard and influencing decisions we, humanitarians make in our daily work, including in coordinating protection activities. I am confident we, as the collectivity, representing the GPC can do so much for advocating for increased inclusion of affected people into the humanitarian work and strengthening their capacity to understand and advise on those processes.

My question for the session will also relate to the AAP, the possibility f developing common tools and sincronizing strategies for ensuring adherence to the AAP standards in coordinating protection in complex emergencies.

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The first thought coming from the self-learning part is validation that: Protection is everything. If we neglect protection, we do not do good.
I was reading up the material provided in the self-study phase and used the opportunity to:
- discover wonderful logic, set up a personal database with great sources for future referrences and, organise my thoughts by it, and
- reflect on my own work: how much do I myself apply and align to the principles, standards and guidances?

Though I work in the protection and GBV AoR for almost a decade (in different roles), I am again reminded that there is so much to learn. For example, the HLP - it is so well structured and organized, with practically ready-for-use GBV risk mitigation tools! This discovery confirmed my suspicion that all the knowledge is there, and in addition to knowing how to ask the questions, we need to know where to address them.

There is one question I did not manage to find an answer to in the resources shared, and I hope this course will help me with that given that it may facilitate humanitarian access in the context that I work in. The question is: While the HC is the one to activate the clusters based, among other things, conclusion that the government is not able to provide the support that clusters step in for, who is to decide that they (the government) cannot do it? Do we wait for the invitation of the government to support, because otherwise we break the international law...and if the ''good'' governance is absent, that invitation is likely never to come. At the time, in my context, authorities often claim leading role in coordination of the AoR and I hope the answer will improve my ability to explain the impact of such claims from their end.

Finaly, thank you for this opportunity to learn, ask and connect!

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Key message:
We need to have a dialog with other sectors in order to come up with productive services. In the structure of coordination there is a lot of internal dialog about procedures rather than the activities themselves. For instance services for disabilities are known to be under the general protection sector but the medical part is coordinated by the health sector. This interest in categorization of the services made the response moderate and sometimes poor in both sectors.

Question:
How can we avail a larger space for Mine action coordination in the countries that has this sector? Two major components are often tackled by other sectors such as Education sector for mine Risk Education and Health sector for mine Victim assistance

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1. Wondewosen..
2.  Message_ Coordination is the spinal cord for providing comprehensive protection services to people in need.
3. questions_ What are the most effective strategies to operate in conflict areas to safeguard those who need it?

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Key Message: Lead and oversee the coordination of Child Protection response in the state to mobilize the resource  and avoid duplication.
My question: is how to strengthen state level coordination systems and structures by identifying and mapping child protection service providers and establishing site-based coordination mechanisms or focal points, as necessary during in humanitarian emergency situations.

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Key Messages: Active listening helps in solving children’s distress and problems especially during emergencies

Question? How do we effectively coordinate well between inter-clusters and provide comprehensive support and response

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Key message: IF we want to protect children, we need to be well trained, well organized, well understood, well equipped and well resourced.

My question:  Experienced and good practices from other operations, to develop and implement a comprehensive joint strategy Between VBG and  CP Aor to ensure the coordination of response and harmonized approaches to prevent and response to VBG against children.

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key message the do no harm  principle  especially in active and protracted conflict situation is  the essence of our activities from planning to evaluation and needs to guide all our actions and activities.

My question will be how to coordinate well to have a common comprehensive response  inter clusters where  the do no harm principle is respected and where one cluster’s activity does not lead to a harmful result on the beneficiaries or on other sector’s activity and results ,