CHS Alliance verification national impact story

Increasing trust and satisfaction through applying the CHS in Yemen

by Abdullah Al Kaff, Partnership Officer, CHS Alliance member Building Foundation for Development, Yemen

Building Foundation for Development (BFD) is a not-for-profit, non-governmental, Yemeni, and community-based development & humanitarian organization. At the beginning of 2020, we started working with European donors and OCHA’s Yemen humanitarian fund. These donors were heavily focused on implementing the commitments of the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality & Accountability (CHS) throughout the humanitarian projects being implemented in Yemen at the time.

Due to this encouragement from donors, we learned about the CHS and the difference it could make for the people we work with and for. This greatly motivated us to join fellow organizations who were using the CHS to improve the quality of the aid they delivered to those in Yemen who were living through both war and natural disasters.

Once we became familiar with the CHS, we joined CHS Alliance and immediately started to complete a validated CHS self-assessment. The self-assessment process really helped us to identify gaps in how well we were implementing the CHS. With support from the Alliance, we developed an action plan for how to close these gaps and get on the right track to better meet all Nine Commitments of the CHS.

Since then, we at BFD have been following our action plan and are applying the CHS throughout our project lifecycles. We have also contracted third-party companies to help our partners to implement CHS Commitments in their own work too.

Applying the CHS through a verification also has hugely contributed to raising the ceiling of funds for BFD. For instance, after we were evaluated as applying the CHS well during a project in Marib, the donor provided us with triple the previous grant amount for the next part. We also noticed other stakeholders had high levels of confidence in our work, which helped us to access more people who needed our support and facilitated us putting in place new project procedures.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the cooperation of CHS Alliance members and their speed in providing us with advice and support greatly helped with making changes to better meet the CHS Commitments. It also made us appreciate being a part of this network.

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