Kate Halff
Kate is Deputy Regional Director for Red Cross and Red and Crescent Movement affairs, covering the Middle East and North Africa, at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Prior to joining ICRC, she was the Executive Secretary of the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response (SCHR) an alliance of seven humanitarian NGO networks, the ICRC and the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). From July 2008 to April 2013, she was the Director of the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (NRC/IDMC).
Prior to these positions, Kate worked for over twelve years primarily in East Africa, managing humanitarian responses, as Country Director for Action Contre la Faim (ACF), Oxfam and Save the Children. During that time, she also worked briefly for UN-OCHA and as a management and humanitarian consultant. Kate holds two Master degrees from Paris 3- Sorbonne University in Paris, France, one in International Relations and one in Development studies.
I am President of the BoD since 2020 and a member of the GA and BoD since 2015.
I strongly believe that self-regulation of humanitarian organisations is no longer (if it ever was!) good enough. Third party verification has the potential to bring effective regulation, provided it is grounded in sector-wide agreed quality and accountability criteria. Thanks to the CHS, the first standard to focus on the “how” of humanitarian action, to offer clear easy-to-understand commitments to people affected by crisis and to be verifiable, and to HQAI, this is now possible. HQAI was created to design and deliver third party quality assurance against the CHS, in such a way as to be relevant for organisations working with people affected by crisis.
HQAI is a not-for-profit organisation which sits at the interface of two worlds, the humanitarian and development one and certification and ISO one. In addition, its business model aims for self – sufficiency, funded by its audit services and re-injecting any “profit” into its subsidy fund for small organisations who don’t have access to the resources needed to cover the costs of independent quality assurance.
A valuable innovation
Kate Halff shares her view on HQAI's potential in the humanitarian and development sector