Page 19 - DHCI Magazine

Tapping into more resources
One of the recommendations in the UN
report “Too important to fail” is to widen the network of contributors to anyone who can contribute in any way to humanitarian aid. This broadening is deemed necessary because the resources - from ideas to people and resources - from the trusted sources are simply not enough. It is therefore urgent to tap into new resources. This calls for an open mindset when it comes to seeking collaborations,
in other words: open innovation. Suzanne Laszlo: ‘In this respect, the coalition has taught us to think and work differently. Less of a narrow focus, working with more parties, less of a rush to the transactional, but instead looking for real solutions. The DCHI team has developed methodologies that have already helped many partners in the transformation needed for this. The developed platform also ensures that parties are efficiently brought together who would otherwise not necessarily find each other quickly. This open network function is really crucial.’
Vast ecosystem
The input to the coalition from the municipality of The Hague, the city of peace, justice, and security, is the local ecosystem
of many hundreds, if not thousands, of (inter)national institutions, NGOs and their service providers, knowledge institutes, and established and innovative companies that can be of significance to the relief sector. Wim Jansen, the Hague Director of International Affairs, is a DCHI board member on behalf
of the municipality. ‘I think that the core lesson of DCHI is that you have to involve other parties and that you can’t innovate in
a secluded space,’ he says. ‘It’s a question of networking. At the same time, we have also seen how difficult it is. It is easy to put down basic principles on paper, but organisations have their own business models and ways
of organising. They do not always stimulate
Dutch Coalition for Humanitarian Innovation
innovation, so imagine how hard it is to get them on to a completely different track! I think we’ve all learned a lot from that and we’ve become better at thinking about what’s needed for that.’ “Leading by example” does help, Wim believes: ‘The collaboration in recent years between DCHI partners and Impact Fest and Impact City - which includes start-ups that really want to make the world a little better - is a good example of this.’
Allowing coincidence to play a role
The Ministry of Defence is represented on the DCHI Board in the person of Commander of
the Royal Netherlands Army Martin Wijnen. ‘In almost all of our missions in the field
of stabilisation, crisis management, and promoting the rule of law, we encountered many of the NGOs that are now part of the coalition. At some point, the question arose whether we could perhaps also meet in the Netherlands. We soon came to the conclusion that we have a lot to offer to each other.’ There is plenty of overlap, Martin believes: ‘If we set up a forward base somewhere, we will need
all sorts of things in a short period of time: water, energy, communication, sewerage, accommodation. These are all things that
‘With more and more crises and proportionately less money, humanitarian organisations and we ourselves are seriously faced with a challenge: how are we going to deal with this and how are we going to set things in motion?’
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