humanitarian.info

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. [↩]