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Overview  

OCHA is fundamentally an information management organization. Our role in the humanitarian system is not to deliver food, shelter, healthcare, or other kinds of direct aid to affected people. Instead, our job is to bring together humanitarian actors to ensure a coherent and coordinated response to emergencies. This task requires our entire organization to engage in gathering, organizing, sharing, analyzing, and communicating information about humanitarian crises.

An OCHA information management officer (IMO) plays a critical role in the enabling our role in the humanitarian system.  As IMOs we need to be aware of core guidance documents.  The challenge is to provide the right information to the right people so better decisions can be made and better outcomes achieved.

Essential Reading for OCHA IMOs

Familiarity with these five pieces of guidance will provide an IMO with a solid foundation of the role of information management in an OCHA office and how IM fits within the larger humanitarian context. Collectively, these documents outline a list of IM responsibilities that individual IMOs and IM teams are responsible for in every OCHA office.

1. Policy Instruction: The Roles and Responsibilities of Country Offices (2010) -If you only read one, read this one!  Although this policy instruction needs to be updated it provides a genuinely useful framework of an OCHA office's five operational priorities (situational awareness, a common approach, a common strategy, monitoring, lessons learned) and the role of IM.  It also includes office size and structure, cost-plans, supervision and internal reporting.

2. IASC: Operational Guidance on Responsibilities of Clusters/Sectors Leads & OCHA in Information Management (2008) - Perhaps the most important IM-focused guidance document, describing the relationship between OCHA and the clusters, as well as many of the individual tasks IMOs are responsible for.

3. IASC: Emergency Response Preparedness (ERP) (2015) - Basic framework for county-level preparedness. 

4. IASC: Humanitarian Programme Cycle (HPC) reference module (2014) - Describes how agencies work together to provide humanitarian relief.

5. IASC: Common Operational Datasets (COD) - Describes the most important baseline datasets with special emphasis on administrative boundaries and baseline population statistics.

6. IMWG Guidance on Common Operational Datasets (CODs) in Emergency Preparedness and Response -
   

Recommended Reading for OCHA IMOs

1. OCHA 2018-21 Strategic Plan - OCHA office and IM units should align their strategy to the OCHA strategy.

2. GA Resolution 46/182 - GA Resolution 46/182 directly established many cornerstones of humanitarian action including DHA, which became OCHA in 1998. 

3. Emergency Response in OCHA_2017.pdf - The policy instruction on response describes how OCHA responds to sudden-onset or rapidly deteriorating crises. It includes a timeline of the first hours, days, weeks and months. More recent than the policy instruction on country offices, so more in-line with HPC 

4. IASC Operational Guidance on Data Responsibility in Humanitarian Action - It is intended to help humanitarian staff, organizations, and their partners practice data responsibility in different response contexts. Partners across the system will implement this Operational Guidance in accordance with their respective mandates and the decisions of their governing bodies.
   

IM Guidance Briefs

Guidance briefs are one-pagers that explain various guidance documents - like cliff notes.

• IMGB 01 - Inter-Cluster Coordination Group (ICCG) TORs

• IMGB 02 - IMWG Guidance on Common Operational Datasets (CODs)

Other

• Video on the history of the humanitarian landscape (1800s to today), by Standby Partnership Training Secretariat, one hour but worth the time

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