Working Group on NFI practices

Recent Meetings of the GSC NFI WG

• April 2021: Classifying NFIs and Greening the Response
• January 2021: Linkages to Energy and Environmental Sustainability
• October 2020: Markets, Modalities, and Approaches
• August 2020: Fuel for Cooking and Winterization​

About the GSC NFI WG

Meeting household needs is part of the shelter response and in many contexts it constitutes a very important part of this response, particularly in conflict-related emergencies with repeated displacements. These households’ needs are often met through the distribution of NFIs but other methodologies are also being used.

In late 2008, the cluster produced guidance on selecting NFIs for shelter which focusses on how to select and combine NFIs into packages. A number of country-level shelter cluster have had important NFI components and good lessons have been learnt on dealing with NFIs and meeting household needs through fairs, cash, and other tools.

A series of workshops were held first in Nairobi in 2016 and then in Bangkok in 2018 to enable stakeholders to gather together to discuss contextualisation of their responses and to feed into the strategy of the working group. Practitioners in these meetings reflected that in order to do better distributions, the NFI WG could play a central role in better sharing practices from the field which could be contextualised to other responses. 

In 2019 during the GSC meeting, NFI Working Group Members elected to expand on the theme of building capacity to do better distributions. In 2020, the NFI WG conducted a study which highlighted the main topics to be covered in a training curriculum or in checklist features that could be used in responses. Resources are required to take this forward, while some partners have resources that they can feed into an overall training. 

This Working Group will gather and disseminate good practices on NFIs and meeting household needs. More information can be found in this summary.

This group is led by UNHCR and IFRC.