How the Humanitarian Department resources emergencies
Oxfam's Humanitarian Department takes a number of steps to ensure that we are able to resource our emergency responses.
Step 1: The Humanitarian Department receives a request from the regions for a Humanitarian Professional, which it will aim to meet within three working days.
Step 2: Our Humanitarian Support Personnel (HSPs) are our primary emergency resource and our first point of call for resourcing emergencies.
Step 3: Should our HSPs be unavailable, the Humanitarian Department use their registers to respond to the request.
What are the Humanitarian Department registers?
The registers are a database of candidates in seven technical areas:
- Public Health Engineers
- Public Health Promoters
- Emergency Food Security and Livelihoods Specialists
- Programme Managers
- Human Resources Specialists
- Finance Specialists
- Logistics
Each register member has been interviewed and reference checked by their respective Technical team and has agreed that should a suitable short-term deployment arise, they will work for Oxfam on a fixed term basis at short notice.
When a suitable emergency deployment arises, we use this database to cross check criteria, such as availability, languages and other skills held by these candidates to select the correct candidate for each role.
How do we resource the registers?
Previous Oxfam GB staff:
These people will have worked for us on short term assignments in the past, may be currently working for us now or may be people that have been working for Oxfam in another capacity and wish to join our registers.
Professionals without Oxfam GB experience:
Each register holds a reasonable number of candidates that meet our minimum skills and criteria but who do not yet have Oxfam experience.
Please note: We are not currently looking to increase the size of our registers at the present time, but we do run register recruitments when this is the case. Applicants can look out for these which are always advertised in the jobs section of the website.
Oxfam International registers
The five Oxfam International affililates who respond to humanitarian issues have a working agreement to share resources between the affiliates. Requests for support and access to these resources come via the Humanitarian Department HR Advisors. This allows us to expand our pool of resources from a wider global pool.
