Enhancing coordinated humanitarian assessments, data quality, sharing and utilization for humanitarian response planning in Afghanistan This proposal is designed to follow up and build on the accumulated field experience and lessons learnt from the first 2 phases of AHF-funded project with regards to: partnership management, standardization of assessment tools, experience of collecting multi-sectorial indicators using Integrated SMART methodology existence of national guidelines for conducting rapid nutrition assessments and presence of trained members of AIM-WG. Since 2014 ACF managed to conduct standardized integrated assessments in 71 districts spreading across 12 provinces of Afghanistan. Beside the nutrition-related indicators, these assessments allowed to collect population-based multi-sector indicators. These assessments served the twofold purpose of informing proposals and new interventions’ design with recent, consistent, and reliable data, thus helping the interventions to be in line with real needs and priorities. The most significant gap in the humanitarian coordination is the lack of a harmonized assessment approach, and the “silo thinking” with regards to data collection and sharing. This contributes to uncoordinated, incomplete or inaccurate cross-cutting data. In the absence of complete data to inform policy-makers, donors, and implementing partners’ decisions, the risk of inappropriate or inefficient allocation of resources is high, and has an impact on the quality and scope of the humanitarian assistance. Moreover, the capacity to rapidly respond to the needs of vulnerable populations is limited, mostly due to challenges common to rapid assessments and to the fact that the tools and methodologies used by different agencies to collect the same information are not standardized. In light of the above, the proposed project aims at providing a solid basis for comprehensive multi-sector programs to be implemented in Afghanistan. ACF considers that this can be done through the regular collection of relevant data that are informative, harmonized, updated, reliable as well as effectively and efficiently disseminated. An important feature is the capacity of multi-sector actors to conduct quality coordinated assessments on a regular basis, while advocating for these findings to be taken into consideration during decision/policy making processes. ACF will focus on dissemination of the surveys’ findings within the concerned actors, as timely information sharing is the main way to enhance coordination and strategic planning of the humanitarian intervention, and avoid overlapping, gaps, and the waste of precious resources.  This project aims at strengthening the coordinated assessments, with the adoption of multi-sector standardized methodologies to collect and analyze indicators from multiple sectors in a timely, accurate and reliable way to inform action and program design at 2 critical levels: at the provincial level, where they will help inform the right combination of responses and  at the national level, where they will highly contribute to the national level HNO’s mapping of vulnerabilities and needs, and costs estimation
Strategically, these integrated assessments are expected to substantially contribute to the Nutrition, WASH, FSAC and Health clusters by providing key information and data that can be used for decision making
ACF will support local BPHS partners in the conduction of 8 Integrated SMART surveys and 5 Rapid SMARTs in 8 priority provinces and 5 emergency affected zones within the next 12 months starting in July 2016. ACF also aims to strengthen the capacity of key stakeholders and implementing partners through on-the-job trainings offered at national and provincial primarily targeting field level staff, while providing direct technical and financial support for the implementation of the integrated surveys/evaluations. ACF also plans to establish a Rapid Nutrition Assessment Team under the patronage of the AIM-WG in the PND of the MoPH, to rapidly mobilize teams for rapid or ad-hoc assessments when and where needed.