To respond to the ever increasing demand for capacity building, e-learning offers a reliable opportunity to scale-up capacity to provide learning opportunities to a range of humanitarian personnel. RedR India in partnership with the Sphere Project launched an initiative to develop an e-learning tool titled ‘Sphere in Humanitarian Practice’, which is expected to reinforce use of Sphere manual as a decision support tool/system by diverse actors.

This is a unique collaboration where by Northern and Southern organisations are pooling their resources and comparative advantages to produce a well grounded e-learning tool. The output would include an off-line and an online version of ‘Sphere in Humanitarian Practice’, which is expected to meet the capacity building needs of humanitarians in different regions of the world and will be available in three languages: English, French and Spanish. The developed software will be available in the Open Source domain to allow more localisation and translation.

The first module focusing on Shelter, Settlements and Non-Food items will be available very soon for testing. It is expected that the complete tool will be available by the end of 2008.