Our teams are back from Uganda, after an intense week of the closure of the Innovation Norway funded project with IOM WASH. Addressing e-waste of solar products in humanitarian settings and its pilot in Bidi Bidi, Uganda. Our CEO presented why we need to start from the start, when we are serious about addressing our waste streams in humanitarian operations. Making sound and informed procurement decisions, taking repairability as a key requirement saves mountains of unrepairable equipment, ewaste, down stream. The quality of batteries and their toxicity levels matter, all can be addressed and feature as key requirement at the moment we buy them as Humanitarians. She also hosted a keynote speech, a firechat, asking the more difficult questions what globally needs to be addressed. Yes procurement might not be the most sexy subject for most in our sector, big words as Localization and Grand Bargain, Green deal and greening are. But did you know that 2/3 of our humanitarian budgets are spend on procurement activities (Moshtari et al. 2021) It's our largest budget component, and responsible for all we bring in. We better start greening our sector by greening our procurement, with operational requirements and translating those in technical specifications to green. Our colleague, Yumiko joined by explaining how the framework of operationalizing the three UN Sustainable Development Indicators into five operational criteria for a more circular requirements and specifications had been build. Supporting participants and future projects to green and support how to get things done, tomorrow, not later, since we all saw from the UN Climate Report that came out last week, "that it's now or never". We would like to thank all partners in this project, the host IOM (especially the amazing coordinator of this project, Gemma), the implementing partner Mercy Corps, and all the NGOs we spoke in Kampala following the event.
Our teams are back from Uganda, after an intense week of the closure of the Innovation Norway funded project with IOM WASH. Addressing e-waste of solar products in humanitarian settings and its pilot in Bidi Bidi, Uganda.
Our CEO presented why we need to start from the start, when we are serious about addressing our waste streams in humanitarian operations. Making sound and informed procurement decisions, taking repairability as a key requirement saves mountains of unrepairable equipment, ewaste, down stream. The quality of batteries and their toxicity levels matter, all can be addressed and feature as key requirement at the moment we buy them as Humanitarians. She also hosted a keynote speech, a firechat, asking the more difficult questions what globally needs to be addressed. Yes procurement might not be the most sexy subject for most in our sector, big words as Localization and Grand Bargain, Green deal and greening are. But did you know that 2/3 of our humanitarian budgets are spend on procurement activities (Moshtari et al. 2021) It’s our largest budget component, and responsible for all we bring in. We better start greening our sector by greening our procurement, with operational requirements and translating those in technical specifications to green.
Our colleague, Yumiko joined by explaining how the framework of operationalizing the three UN Sustainable Development Indicators into five operational criteria for a more circular requirements and specifications had been build. Supporting participants and future projects to green and support how to get things done, tomorrow, not later, since we all saw from the UN Climate Report that came out last week, “that it’s now or never”.
We would like to thank all partners in this project, the host IOM (especially the amazing coordinator of this project, Gemma), the implementing partner Mercy Corps, and all the NGOs we spoke in Kampala following the event.
