OCHA's Strategic Plan 2023-2026: Transforming Humanitarian Coordination

Introduction

The international humanitarian system1 faces an exponential rise in humanitarian needs. Between 2011 and 2020, the number of people targeted for assistance rose by 59 million before increasing again by 74 million over the past two years alone.

The operating environment will grow more complex over the coming decade. While climate change, conflict, economic crisis, inequality and pandemics are not new, these drivers of need are intensifying. They are also interacting and compounding in unpredictable ways and growing increasingly irreversible.

A fragmented and competitive geopolitical landscape exacerbates these challenges, weakening multilateral efforts to address them. At the same time, the system is buckling under its resource constraints. By 2026, needs are set to far outpace resources, leaving an inundated humanitarian system struggling to meet a mere fraction of needs.

OCHA’s Strategic Plan 2023-2026 (the Plan) outlines six transformational priorities to address the challenges of this rapidly changing landscape:

• A coherent humanitarian response that is people centred, context specific, contributes to community resilience and promotes concrete protection outcomes

• Systematic and predictable leadership on access

• Durable solutions to protracted internal displacement

• Humanitarian response that is inclusive and leaves no one behind

• Catalytic humanitarian financing that delivers impact in people’s lives

• Strategic analysis of risks and trends to adapt to an evolving landscape

These priorities neither reflect all issues that require improvement nor cover all activities in OCHA’s Strategic Results Framework or annual workplans. Rather, they address the most critical areas where transformation is needed, adaptation is possible and OCHA has a key leadership role. The Plan will be translated into operational practice through implementation plans. Work across OCHA’s five core functions — Coordination, Advocacy and Communications, Humanitarian Financing, Policy and Information Management (see chapter B.II.) — will help to achieve these priorities.

The Plan is an instalment towards where OCHA needs to be in order to respond to challenges, not only over the next four years but over the next decade. The context analysis that follows considers key drivers of need and their implications for humanitarian action beyond 2026. The Plan then focuses on how OCHA will use its mandate and transformational priorities over the next four years to meet those challenges and help achieve the Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A final section reviews the actions needed to ensure that the leadership, partnerships and workforce are in place to enable these transformations.

This document also considers reviews carried out since OCHA’s previous Strategic Plan 2018–2021, such as the 2021 Multilateral Organization Performance Assessment Network, the High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement (2021), the Independent Review of the Implementation of the IASC Protection Policy (2022), and several Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluations and Peer-to-Peer Country Missions. These reviews have shaped the Plan’s vision of an international humanitarian system able to respond to the challenges ahead, and of OCHA’s role in leading and coordinating humanitarian assistance and protection.

1. The international humanitarian system is a short-hand term for a broad network of actors that has evolved to respond to humanitarian crises in the 30 years since the passage of United Nations General Assembly resolution 46/182. OCHA coordinates or coordinates with many of these humanitarian actors, including Inter-Agency Standing Committee members.