The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) - which is the main forum for coordination, policy development and decision-making between key UN and non-UN humanitarian partners - and UNITAR’s Public Finance and Trade Programme successfully launched the new e-Learning course on information management in humanitarian crises on 26 April 2011. This course, which will end on 17 June 2011, aims at strengthening the information management skills of humanitarian coordination professionals of partner agencies both at headquarters and in the field.
The course has been designed by IASC and UNITAR to address the specific training needs of the humanitarian coordination community. It combines self-study, mentored online discussions, and self-assessments with the aim of providing participants high quality training and networking in a flexible and cost-effective way. To ensure the best possible outreach, the course is delivered through UNITAR’s new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) which is available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week from any personal computer, even with a low-bandwidth Internet connection.
Fifty-seven humanitarian coordination professionals from UN and non-UN agencies are currently participating in the course under the mentorship of 11 information management experts from International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Save the Children, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) and World Health Organization (WHO). The diversity of participants and mentors renders very lively and insightful online discussions on a weekly basis. This week for example, participants discussed some of the key issues of analysis in the humanitarian context including the information manager’s role and the forms of analysis used in various humanitarian operations to support coordination and decision-making.
It is hoped that this course will improve the participant’s knowledge of how information management can enhance humanitarian action, thereby contributing to improved decision-making in the inter-agency humanitarian response context.
For more information about the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), please visit: http://www.humanitarianinfo.org/iasc
For more information about UNITAR e-Learning courses in the areas of public finance and trade, please visit: http://www.unitar.org/pft/event.