Africa Compendium

Africa Regional Director

From the Africa Regional Director

The African region has made steady progress in humanitarian action despite disasters and conflicts which continue to have a negative impact on the path of African development. The IFRC Africa Regional Office with its Cluster Support Teams and Country Offices have continuously supported the overall development of a resilient African continent through its 49 National Red Cross Red Crescent Societies. By leveraging our collective capacity and relying on shared accountability with National Societies, the IFRC secretariat in Africa will continue to augment and expand the scope of support it provides, accelerate capacity building of its members, and enhance services for vulnerable communities.

As per Strategy 2020, over the years, while IFRC has been instrumental in providing support and building capacity of its members through various National Society Development Initiatives, it has also strengthened its own capability to provide effective and accountable support services. To this end IFRC along with its membership has developed various policies, strategies, frameworks, plan of actions, guidelines, manuals and tools both in the global and regional levels. Addressing the urgent need that has been expressed in the African region, the IFRC Regional Office undertook an initiative to map and develop a compendium of all these documents so that they could be made available to all new and existing leaders in African National Societies as well as program managers. This will ensure a proper dissemination of documents produced by the Federation at all levels of the National Society starting with the Leadership.

I strongly believe that this African Regional Compendium is a good start in terms of having a knowledge bank of all important documents that support our work in humanitarian action. We have collected and collated the most important documents (primarily of the last five years) so that our members, staff and volunteers can easily locate and find these documents and consult them. We have followed the newly established IFRC wide nomenclature system of documents and put them under these categories (please see enclosed Summary of IFRC Policy and Positioning Documents and Systems). We have further split the compendium into two sections: Global Documents and Regional Documents. Each section has documents under Governance and Management. For example under the Governance section we have also included information on the 32nd Red Cross Red Crescent International Conference, the Council of Delegates and IFRC General Assembly. There is also information about the African Pledges made in the International Conference under the Regional Governance section. In the Management section we have put the documents under the different departments following the same nomenclature system. We have also included a section on external documents which have an influence on our humanitarian work. Please have a look at the flowchart which explains clearly how to navigate within the Compendium.

I sincerely hope that you will enjoy reading the Compendium and also use it for your work and contribute by providing any new relevant documents that you see should be part of it in the future. Our Regional Policy, Knowledge and Strategy Department will be the focal point to keep this Compendium up to date and live.

Fatoumata Nafo-Traore
Director, IFRC Africa Region