Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

In November 2013 I got deployed for 3 months  to Amman  on a consulting assignment to support the setup of UNDP’s Sub-Regional Response Facility for the crisis in Syria. A key role of the Facility is to operationalize the Strategic Plan’s key area of ‘Resilience’ in an environment of crisis by marrying the humanitarian response for Syria with a development response. So far there has been a primarily humanitarian angle to the Syria crisis, with OCHA, UNHCR, WFP and FAO leading the response efforts in the region. UNDP’s interest in this situation is to widen the perspective and highlight that there is a dramatic development cost for Syria’s neighbor countries Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, which deal with the largest refugee movement since the WWII. Given that most refugees are not staying in camps are embedded in host communities with families and friends, the host communities face a heavy strain on local services such as access to housing, water, sanitation, health care, ed...