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DO NO HARM APPROACH

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INTRODUCTION

This programme has been a leader in conflict sensitive tools and techniques since the mid-1990s. The aim of the programme is to develop practical methods for addressing the impacts of assistance on a conflict of context, and to help practitioners consider the unintended negative impacts of their well-intended work. The Programme’s keystone tool, the Do No Harm Framework for Analysing the Impact of Aid on Conflict, is a leading methodology for conflict sensitivity. It has been widely incorporated by aid organisations working in the fields of development, humanitarian response, and peace-building. (Source: Peace & Collaborative Development Network)

FUNDAMENTAL LESSONS OF THE DO NO HARM APPROACH

It is possible and useful to apply Do No Harm in conflict prone, active conflict and post conflict situations. And, in doing so it promotes you to identify conflict exacerbating impacts of assistance much sooner than is typical without the analysis. It heightens our awareness of inter-group relations in project sites and enables us to play a conscious role in helping people come together.  It can reveal the interconnections among programming decisions such as where to work, with whom, how to set the criteria for assistance recipients, who to hire locally and how to relate to local authorities as well as much more. Do No Harm approach can provide a common reference point for considering the impacts of our assistance on conflict that brings  new cohesiveness to staff interactions and to our work with local counterparts.

The most important single finding of the Do No Harm approach is that it can enable us to identify programming options when things are going badly. In projects where the negative impacts have appear to be inevitable and unavoidable, Do No Harm can provide a tool to find better ways and programming options to provide assistance to minimize these.

DO NO HARM MATRIX

Through the whole run of the project implementation, Do No Harm approach will regularly used to assess the risks that may concern to the implementation of the project’s specific components, including the sub-grants, as well as to its overall progress towards the intended and unintended outcome and impact.

Using the Do No Harm matrix as risk assessment tool, and trough dividers and connectors exercise the following resource transfer trends especially will be under regular monitoring of the project management.

  • Legitimisation Effect: meaning that the project benefits are made available only to organisations and individuals that clearly act in line with its theory of change and value system.
  • Distribution Effect: meaning that the project inputs are equally shared amongst the targeted project beneficiaries based on real and justified needs and output capacities, the PWI TGT and LCP SGT components especially considered.
  • Substitution Effect: meaning that the efforts within the project and supplementing it are coordinated between all the involved levels (local, national, European) thus avoiding contravention of mandates.
  • Market Effect: meaning that the YMCA Europe will continue to monitor and assist the development of the CRCs established during RfR phase 1 (2007 – 2010) in Armenia and Georgia in order to further strengthen their economic and programmatic sustainability and thus keeping the overall RfR impact orientation persistent.
  • Derivation Effect: meaning that appropriate criteria and monitoring instruments will be in place to avoid any misuse of the project funding, the PWI TGT and LCP SGT sub-contracts especially considered.

 

A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE SEVEN STEPS

The Seven Steps of Do No Harm is an Analytical Framework, but this framework is not prescriptive. It is a descriptive tool that identifies the categories of information that have been found through experience to be important for understanding how assistance affects conflict, organises these categories in a visual layout that highlights their actual and potential relationships and helps us predict the impacts of different programming decisions.

  1. Understanding the Context of Conflict;
  2. Analysing Dividers and Tensions;
  3. Analysing Connectors and Local Capacities for Peace;
  4. Analysing the Assistance Programme;
  5. Analysing the Assistance Programme’s impact on Dividers and Connectors;
  6. Considering (and Generating) Programming Options;
  7. Test Programming Options and Re-design Project;