humanitarian.info

Christian ruminates on the role of open collaboration in development, although for some reasons he’s picked examples from relief work. Why have collaborative projects set up to respond to disasters proven so popular in recent years? It’s mainly because when there’s a disaster, people want to help – and they don’t want to give money, they want to feel like they’re doing something concrete.  [[Personally I have a problem with that, but that's what we have to work with.]] Richard asks the right question:

Where is the independent evidence that one more life was saved, one more livelihood was created, one more beach was cleaned than would have happened anyway?

The short answer is that the evidence is pretty damn scarce. There are various reasons for that, but the main one is that impact assessment in development is incredibly difficult, and impact assessment in relief nearly impossible. I don’t expect relatively new projects to crack this problem, but unless we make some effort any claims we make about our work fit firmly into the category of anecdote.

The best way to measure the impact of technology initiatives is by proxy – whether those projects are being used, hopefully by beneficiaries but more likely by aid organisations, and whether they’re being used effectively. The answer to the first question is generally “yes”, the answer to the second generally “no” – and there are serious questions to be asked about whether the second answer will ever be “yes”.

To end on a positive note: I think the sort of mapping we’ve seen in Haiti will definitely have a long term impact, but I’m well aware that this is an act of faith on my part.

The Humanitarian Horizons report discusses a range of issues, including demographics, climate change and globalization, and – more importantly – doesn’t suck. There’s a serious lack of vision in most writing on humanitarian issues, and we need more reports like this. (Although it’s not looking as far forward as it hopes – we’re already in the middle of most of the trends it correctly identifies.) One of the key findings from John Borton’s section of the report is that “Humanitarian and development activities will become increasingly conflated”:

In addition to a rapid growth in expenditure levels, the humanitarian system has also seen a remarkable expansion in the range of activities undertaken as part of its operations. Whilst health services, water/sanitation and hygiene promotion, food security, nutrition and food aid, shelter, settlement, and non-food items remain at the core of humanitarian responses, many humanitarian operations now include a wide range of other activities… arguably comprising the traditional development sector… it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish between humanitarian activities and expenditures and development activities and expenditures, given that organizations of all kinds will be active during overlapping phases of the disaster cycle, as priorities shift and resources must be reallocated according to need.

This seems like as good a time as any to lay out my own stall, which is a bit further out than John. My feeling is that the distinction between humanitarian and development activities was never meaningful; and (in particular) that the concept of the relief-development continuum was not just a conceptual exercise but a political project that harmed more people than it helped. The division of UN and NGO activities based on the way in which donors structured funding streams along those lines was a pointless distraction from the reality on the ground.

The worst results of this project can be seen in the aid architecture that we currently have, with examples such as the futile notion of an “Early Recovery” cluster, the perpetuation of parallel funding streams, and self-imposed constraints on M&E in emergencies. Yet it also makes itself felt in the way in which it sanctions political solutions which would be unacceptable in other contexts, such as the maintenance of large-scale IDP/refugee camps which don’t do anybody any favours.

Beneficiaries don’t make a distinction between relief and development – it’s all just getting on with the messy business of living. In the immediate aftermath of a major earthquake or conflict-related displacement, people will certainly see that phase in their lives as an emergency, a temporary state that they are happy to get out of as soon as possible – but beyond that we see that people work hard to stabilise their situation, and not necessarily in ways which fit with our top-down management.

Categories such as “humanitarian” and “development” are socially constructed, and constructed primarily by well-meaning outsiders rather than the people affected by conflict and disaster. If we were really serious about being accountable to beneficiaries, we’d make more effort to look at the world through their eyes. Once we stop using the terms “humanitarian” and “development”, we can begin to understand what life looks like on the other side of the system and maybe think of some new ways to solve old problems.

• Following my mini-rant about how ReliefWeb hasn’t made the most of the potential of the web, a couple of projects surface which point the way to a better future for the humanitarian community’s hub. The ReliefWeb News Monitor is JRC on the pipes again, with an aggregated feed of news stories that can be sliced for your serving pleasure; more interesting for the aid worker is the Briefing Kit, which gives you the opportunity to build your own document package by country or emergency. One of the primary uses of ReliefWeb is for pre-deployment briefing, so this is a definite value-added service.
• More MapAction… er, action, at an Alertnet-hosted workshop in London on June 4 looking at how the aid community can use maps effectively. I understand from Liesbeth that the event is fully booked, but Mapping for communications, planning and advocacy will be streamed live for those of you who can’t make it. Plus:

We want your questions. Given the rise and rise of mapping technologies, what would you like to know about how NGOs can better use geospatial tools in their work? Use the comments section below, or submit your questions using the Twitter tag #askmaps.

• In the Financial Times: Tainted data hide the cost of Africa’s upheavals. Slightly contrarian article about the use and abuse of statistics in conflict situations. The FT casts its beady eye over IRC’s DRC statistics (which always looked a bit fishy to me) and UN statistics more broadly, and who knew I’d have an ally in the FT regarding funding for government statistics offices?

The first step towards compiling an accurate picture is to make assistance to Africa’s under-funded statistics departments a priority in international aid programmes… Accurate statistics, objectively gathered and responsibly used, are as essential as compassion in tackling Africa’s plight. Tracking its crisis without reliable data is like exploring the continent without a compass.

• Amnesty rolls out the sms bad times: Guatemalan activists receive death threats by text message. Part of the ongoing debate about how technology empowers both sides in a conflict. If there are in fact two sides in any conflict like this, which I somehow doubt. There’s even more complexity at the tail end of the “Twitter Revolution” story – I had so much to write about this nonsense. Now everybody except Evgeny has forgotten it by now (because yes that is how long the web’s attention span lasts), but this article is still worth reading:

So, while the events don’t fit the Western media’s narrative of a city full of protesters converging on Twitter and almost pulling off a revolution, technology did play an indispensable role in telling the story of April 7.

• From the Just Shoot Me files, In Iraq with Web 2.0 luminaries, as if they weren’t already filled with their own self-importance. If you don’t think this entire concept is self-parody, then read this extract and see if you can spot the deliberate mistake:

The idea is to use the brains of this small collective to give ideas to Iraqi government officials, companies and users that will help it rebuild. Iraq is short on the mojo that widespread internet can bring and the fast-track economic jolt that entrepreneurs feed on. Who knows that stuff better than a contingent of internet goombahs heavy on the Google juice and includes the guy who thought up Twitter?

Duncan Green’s post on NGO advocacy makes a case that well-designed advocacy gets results – in this case, reform of the Social Subsidies Agency in Georgia. Yet the case study highlights a difficult question about advocacy in general – how can you tell if your advocacy has had any results, and how can you tell if the results of your advocacy have had the impact that you intended? To summarize the sequence of events as presented by Duncan (and please excuse the extended quote):

Following the ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003 the new government made an attempt at revamping the country’s cumbersome and ineffective social protection scheme, inherited from the Soviet Union. In 2005, it set up the SSA (Social Subsidies Agency) to manage its new social assistance programme…The government and the donors declared victory, but monitoring by Oxfam and a local partner NGO – the Association of Young Economists of Georgia (AYEG) -showed that the system was not working… We held a number of closed door seminars with the representatives of the SSA (without involving the media so as to build trust) and backed them up with lobbying meetings. Nothing happened – we built up good relationships with young and motivated civil servants, but there was no appetite from their bosses for overhauling what was generally portrayed as a success. That all changed with the civil unrest of 2007, a political shock born of public disenchantment with government policy and reforms. The government was desperate to refurbish its image…Step forward a new and sympathetic Minister for Healthcare, with a background of working with NGOs, who gave his political backing…

Now this sounds (to me, at least) like quite a common story. It usually takes an external shock of some kind for any organisation to make radical  changes – in this case, first the Rose Revolution, and then public protests against the path taken since the Revolution. The problem is that this account of events also sounds (again, to me) like a large number of biases stacking up to explain something that was largely out of the two NGOs control. Duncan reports that

… our Georgia team put success down to three factors: the shift in the political environment; the rigorous use of evidence and the cultivation of contacts with a range of decision makers and officials.

Now clearly the shift in the political environment was a major factor, but the other two factors? The case looks much weaker. Duncan has described  the government as “desperate”, and I doubt that the rigor of the evidence that was presented to them was as critical as the fact that they were being offered a ready-made reform package that they could sell to the public. The “cultivation of contacts” were undoubtedly useful, but the key figure appears to have been a new Minister with an NGO background. This is crucial, because somebody from an NGO background is likely to have an automatic bias towards proposals from NGO (and the sort of approachs that NGOs propose). The Georgia team’s appraisal of what made change possible definitely has some merit – but it also looks like a way of retrospectively justifying personal and professional investment in an extremely worthwhile and challenging project.

Now I have no opinions on the actual reform proposals that Oxfam and AYEG put forward – certainly the brief description in Duncan’s article sounds good, but then the original concept of the SSA sounds pretty good as well. I have no reason to think that this reform has done anything except improve the welfare of the people the SSA is intended to support – but I also think that we need to examine the potential biases that lead us to assume that Change Y is the result of Action X, particularly in macro environments which are extremely complex.

This holds true for any area of aid work – how justified are our claims that our work helps people?

A while ago, I predicted that – absent significant reform, particularly around accountability – the humanitarian community would be overtaken by events and rendered increasingly irrelevant. One area where this seemed inevitable was fundraising with the general public – if we continue to treat people like clueless chumps in our fundraising, then as their access to information increases and they realise the gap between what we tell them and what actually happens, their resentment will increase and their donations will dwindle.

There are exceptions, of course – faith-based charities will probably be able to rely on continued inputs from people for whom charity is a requirement of their religion – yet even those purses are squeezed by the wider economic environment. That’s what we’re seeing now, as yesterday’s article in Third Sector outlines:

The weak pound is forcing international aid agencies to make redundancies and reductions to overseas programmes… spokeswoman for ActionAid said it had reduced funding to some of its overseas programmes by between 20 and 30 per cent…Martin Birch, finance director at Christian Aid, said the charity was not making cuts to programmes but was expecting to take £2m from its reserves over the coming year to tackle the problem. The fall in the value of the pound has cost Oxfam £7.8m in the past year, the charity said. It is axing about 40 jobs because of the downturn.

At the same time, access to information is also starting to change beneficiary expectations. We’ve heard a lot about how mobile phones level out the market in developing countries, enabling farmers to make price comparisons when it comes to selling their crops, or fishermen a clearer picture of weather forecasts, and so on and so forth. From the economic perspective of somebody affected by disaster, aid organisations are a market like any other, and we can expect to see more disruption to our operations caused by mobile phones in particular – swarming patterns around aid distributions, for example – but also in a rise in problems around e.g. security of beneficiary information on databases.

The third area where technology is having an impact is in linking donors and beneficiaries on a personal level. Organisations like Kiva aren’t presenting a radically new model per se – it’s a combination of the sponsorship programmes that a lot of charities used to run¹ with micro-finance. For the record I really like Kiva, but there’s no doubt that in a disaster it would struggle to survive. We might see more resilient, disaster-oriented versions in the future, but I doubt it.

Given these three technology-driven trends, what can aid agencies do? Obviously they need to be smarter in how they use technology (becauseheythat’swhatthisblogisaboutright?) but really they just need to be smarter. There needs to be a radical restructuring of the entire sector, not just in the face of growing criticisms of aid at the macro level² but at the roots of the entire humanitarian effort. It should be clear to us by now – after years of poor evaluations and failed projects – that serving the beneficiaries and educating the public require a different approach to the one we have now, one that starts with openness:

A public entity (a non-governmental organisation) using public funds (either via a government institutin or from the general public) to carry out public service (providing relief to communities) should make all its data publicly available, with the only possible exceptions made for privacy or security issues.

The recent ICVA annual conference took as its starting point the depressing premise that, despite the four previous conferences discussing reform, little actual reform seems to have taken place. Our resistance to reform has developed partly from our lack of transparency and accountability, but that era is coming to an end. Change or die, folks.

1. Before they realised those sponsorship programmes were basically a lie with marginal impact, but that’s another story. [↩]
2. Stand up, Dambisa Moyo with Dead Aid and  Jonathan Glennie – the latter on a Development Drums podcast here. [↩]