Twenty NGOs and umbrella agencies around the world piloted the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards between 2000 and 2002. They represent a broad cross-section of agencies: national and international, northern and southern, large and small.

These organisations systematically introduced Sphere into policies for disaster response, mainstreaming the Minimum Standards into tools and procedures and conducting internal training programmes in applying Sphere.

Below you will find three reports drawing lessons from this programme.

Lessons Learned Reports

After more than two years piloting the use of the Sphere Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in twenty different organisations worldwide, it is time to reflect and take stock of progress in order to set the direction for the institutionalisation of Sphere in the future.

The findings represented here are based on a series of visits to 102 pilot agency field offices in Central America, East Africa and South Asia conducted in late 2001, together with the views of participants who attended Sphere training workshops over the last two years.

The next steps are largely proposals and decisions made by pilot agency representatives during a meeting in Geneva in May 2002, which aimed to evaluate the piloting process.

Lessons learned into practice:
A meeting of pilot agency representatives in Cairo 26-28 February 2001

The Cairo meeting was the first opportunity for all Sphere pilot agencies to discuss Sphere together and to exchange experiences. The purpose was to debate the lessons learned by pilot agencies during 2000 and consider how these lessons could be translated into practice.

Lessons learned from the first year of piloting have been consolidated in this report, October 2000.

Sphere pilot agencies have been tasked with implementing the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards, learning from the experience and helping to identify pathways for their effective application in humanitarian practice in the future. The challenge is not only to identify what has been effective in implementation, but also to identify how to take this learning forward and feed it back into practice.