Tearfund Quality Standards
The following Quality Standards summarise all the relevant external and internal standards, codes, guidelines and principles that are committed to by Tearfund in the way emergency responses are to be undertaken at the community level. Their purpose is to increase the quality, effectiveness and impact of our emergency responses.
- Values: We are committed to outworking our core values through our staff, in relationships with project participants and all those with whom we interact.
- Impartiality: We are committed to impartiality. The assistance provided is intended for the most vulnerable. Project participants are selected on the basis of need alone, regardless of their race, religion or nationality.
- Accountability: We are committed to transparency, participation, feedback and learning with our project participants.
- Disaster Risk: We are committed to reducing the risk of future disaster by strengthening local capacity and reducing future vulnerability to disaster hazards as well as meeting short-term needs.
- Technical Quality: We are committed to the high technical quality of our projects and to ensuring that they reflect communities’ own relief and recovery priorities.
- Children: We are committed to ensuring that programmes are child-sensitive by incorporating child development and child protection in their design, planning and implementation.
- Gender: We are committed to transforming communities through restored relationships between men, women, boys and girls and ensuring equitable value, participation and decision-making by all.
- HIV: We are committed to addressing the HIV pandemic and people’s vulnerabilities to HIV.
- Conflict: We are committed to designing activities that are sensitive to situations of conflict and the protection needs of project participants, and that contribute to building their capacities for peace.
- Environment: We are committed to protecting the environment through sustainable resource management.
- Sustainability: We are committed to seeing that projects have a lasting benefit, being built on local ownership and using local skills and resources, as appropriate to the situation.
- Advocacy: We are committed to influencing the key policy issues that make people vulnerable to disaster.
International Codes and Commitments
Tearfund’s operations are designed and run according to internationally recognised standards, respecting and promoting the enforcement of humanitarian principles, standards and codes. Our Quality Standards are informed by the following international codes and commitments:
Consistent with our commitment to Accountability, Tearfund is a member of the
Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) and has achieved certification for compliance with the HAP 2007 Standard in Humanitarian Accountability and Quality Management, 18 June 2008.
Tearfund is signatory of the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief. This code includes commitments to accountability and participation, strengthening local capacity and reducing vulnerability to future disaster, as well as meeting short term needs, and commitments to impartiality, stating that: “Aid is given regardless of the race, creed, or nationality of the recipients and without adverse distinction of any kind. Aid priorities are calculated on the basis of need alone”.
We are committed to the high technical quality of our projects as laid out in the
Sphere Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response. This sets out what people affected by disasters have a right to expect from humanitarian assistance, with the aim to improve the quality of assistance provided and to enhance the accountability of the humanitarian system in disaster response.
Tearfund is a member of the Keeping Children Safe Coalition, setting the international standard for child protection. Tearfund also adheres to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Tearfund is a signatory to the Statement of Commitment on Eliminating Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by UN and non UN Personnel and deplores all forms of exploitation, coercion and abuse.
Our commitment to addressing HIV is guided by the
Code of Good Practice for NGOs Responding to HIV. The code was developed in 2004 by NGOs, for NGOs, to help guide their work by providing a framework to which we can commit and be held accountable. Drawing on 20 years of knowledge and experience, the Code sets out key principles, practice and evidence base required for successful responses to HIV. Signatories of the Code are required to adhere to the following principles:
- Advocate for the meaningful involvement of people living with HIV and affected communities in all aspects of the HIV response
- Promote and protect human rights in our work
- Apply public health principles within our work
- Address the causes of vulnerability to HIV infection the impacts of HIV
- Our programmes are informed by evidence in order to respond to the needs of those most vulnerable
Tearfund is guided by both the UNHCR Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in all its emergency responses.
Tearfund’s standards in employment practice and management are verified compliant with the
People in Aid Code of Best Practice in the management and support of Aid Personnel, an internationally recognised management tool that helps agencies enhance the quality of their human resources management.
Other affiliations
Tearfund has a Framework Partnership Agreement with the EC Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO) and is registered as a International Private Voluntary Organisation with USAID. Other institutional donors include: Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (BPRM); Department for International Development (DFID); Dutch Government; EuropeAid; Irish Aid, States of Guernsey Overseas Aid; States of Jersey Overseas Aid; various UN agencies; and the World Bank. For more on our institutional donors, click here.
Tearfund is a member of the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella organisation which unites the leading independent humanitarian agencies in the UK in their efforts to maximise income through cost effective media based appeals to finance humanitarian relief for major disasters overseas
Tearfund participates in over 150 national and international networks and alliances, including: British Overseas NGOs in Development (BOND); Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC); European Union – Christian Organisations in Relief and Development (EU-CORD); Micah Network; and Integral Alliance.