ISO 31000 Revision for Humanitarian and Development

Since 2009 ISO 31000:2009 has been the defacto global standard for the majority of professional Risk Management practitioners, across all sectors, worldwide. In the humanitarian and development sectors, uptake of and adherence to industry standard Risk Management theory and practice has been held back by two issues:

• Resistance to change. Not an uncommon phenomena in publicly funded, or not for profit outfits, and
• A perception the standard only applies to ‘professional’, for profit businesses and not for NGOs and development organisations in complex environments.

[Nothing could be further from the truth, but we will get to that later.] There is not much we can do about the former. However the time is right for those interested in impacting on the perception of risk management internal to the sector, and the framing of the standard to include the demands of Humanitarian and Development organisations. So, here is a shout-out to all the typists out there willing and able to kick in and advocate for the sector via contributing the update of the standard.

The original call for public submissions went out a while ago, and we still have until late April to get our suggestions in. You can see the original post [courtesy of Alex Dali] and call for submissions on LinkedIn here.

RM4HD will be making its own submission and posting it in due course.

To contribute, here is the link

The draft guidelines can be found here.

Please do click on the link, add your comments, and for those in the sector now is our chance to include Risk Management for organisations:

• Usually Headquartered in ‘safe’ countries,
• Spend donor money, and do not make a profit,
• Are staffed largely by idealists, and
• Operate in areas where their home countries say people should not go, and hence invalidate the standard travel and work insurances, hazards are high, response capacity is low, and the pressure to perform is extreme.

The last chance to influence global Risk Management standards was over 8 years ago. Do not wait till next time.

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