Camp Coordination and Camp Management

Acted supports displacement affected populations (Internally Displaced Persons, refugees, and the communities that host them) in a number of ways, including through Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM).CCCM takes a multi-sectoral approach to improve the quality of life and security for people who are displaced, supporting dignified living conditions and protection in line with international standards.

Temporary displacement camps and sites are a last resort. No one chooses to live in these places unless they have no other option. Acted’s work in these sites seeks to improve the very challenging living conditions that people face, by coordinating services to ensure people living in the sites have their basic needs covered and through strong community engagement to understand the site residents’ priorities, and work to implement them. At the same time, Acted works to support conducive conditions for durable solutions to displacement, advocating with relevant governmental and other actors to ensure displaced and host community voices and intentions are heard and acted upon, with the aim of reaching the point that sites no longer require humanitarian assistance.

Camp coordination and camp management

Acted is currently implementing CCCM activities in Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Moldova, Haiti, and Bangladesh, supporting over a million displaced people each year.

Acted implements CCCM activities to ensure displacement affected populations can access assistance in a safe environment, in support of their fundamental human rights.

CCCM teams ensure goods and services reach affected populations avoiding gaps and duplication in assistance through real time information sharing and coordination of stakeholders working in and around the sites.

CCCM activities can broadly be divided into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ activities. Hard activities describe actions that make physical improvements to the site and surrounding areas. Soft activities refer to activities that ensure the site runs well from a social perspective. Many activities entail components of both.

Hard activities might include:

• Site improvements and maintenance to the physical infrastructure of the site (e.g. drainage, small bridges, improvements to accessibility of infrastructure for people with disabilities, flood defences, other DRR related activities etc.) for the communal benefit of affected populations
• Camp set-up and closure activities, including mitigations to environmental harm and sustainable decommissioning of infrastructure after the site closes, but also including a strong component of community engagement to ensure the site functions well for its residents
• Risk mitigation through provision of specific equipment e.g. fire fighting equipment, solar street lighting to reduce GBV risks at night)

Soft activities can include but are not limited to:

• Coordination and information management so all actors working in the camps understand where are the needs and the gaps and to ensure there is no duplications
• Support to community/site governance structures and community participation mechanisms, ensuring they are gender balanced and representative of the communities they support as well as providing any required trainings and support to function efficiently
• Two-way communication – understanding what are the information needs in a site and ensuring people have access to this information, for example about the services that are available, how to benefit from them, and their rights
• Ensuring an accessible Complaints and feedback mechanism which allows camp residents to escalate concerns or issues to camp managers or NGOs, increasing accountability to affected populations while helping to improve living conditions
• Protection mainstreaming including participatory Safety Audits which work with community members to understand the risks faced by different demographics and working to mitigate these risks

The soft component of CCCM is just as important, if not more so, than the hard component, as it has a strong emphasis on participation, accountability and a sense of community among those who have been forced to flee their homes, which in turn can have positive psychosocial impacts as well as physical impacts.

In many contexts, Acted overlays these CCCM activities with sectoral assistance such as WASH and Shelter assistance, to ensure a holistic response to displaced populations, especially in hard to reach or low resource contexts where few other actors can provide these services.

Acted implements these activities in accordance with the HAP certified Minimum Standards for Camp Management as well as Sphere Standards.

Informal sites

Alongside the implementation of traditional activities in formal camps, Acted’s camp coordination and camp management strategy seeks to support people living in different displacement settings, such as makeshift camps, collective shelters or any other informal site, especially in urban areas (such as in Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine and Haiti). Today, more and more displaced people live in urban centers, where they face difficulties in accessing the assistance to which they are entitled. Due to the informal and spontaneous nature of these sites, shelters and services are not planned in advance, making coordination between humanitarian actors particularly difficult, and complicating the transmission of information and assistance to the most vulnerable.

To address these challenges, Acted often works through mobile CCCM teams that identify areas with high numbers of displaced people and spontaneous sites potentially in need of intervention. Here, Acted provides a tailored package of assistance, based on needs identified at the site level, that works to initiate CCCM activities, stabilize the management of the sites, strengthen capacities, and sustainably handover responsibilities to the community themselves or another actor as appropriate, depending on the needs of the response.

Towards local ownership and durable solutions

Because we believe that local and national ownership of emergency preparedness and response is essential to guarantee the effectiveness and sustainability of interventions, our teams work to strengthen the capacities of organizations and local authorities in CCCM and displacement management, with the aim of ensuring the transfer of camp management responsibilities to local actors in the best conditions at the right time.

In parallel with camp maintenance and management activities, CCCM teams work to encourage long-term solutions: for example by understanding the long-term aspirations of displaced people – do they want to integrate into the local area, do they want to eventually return to their area of origin if this becomes a safe option – and advocating with relevant authorities for the achievement of these aspirations in a safe, voluntary and informed way.