Less than 2 percent of all humanitarian funding goes directly to local NGOs, despite them taking the lion’s share of the risk and are often being better placed to deliver, according to aid insiders.
Stephen, O’Brien, the head of UN humanitarian affairs, told a conference in Switzerland that aid delivered by local agencies was often faster, cheaper and more “culturally appropriate.”
“In Syria, the Arab Red Crescent risked their lives every day to help,” O’Brien said. “In west Africa during the Ebola outbreak, community leaders succeeded where international actors had failed to persuade local communities to change traditional burial practices and help to end the transmission of the disease.”
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This exposure meant that about 90 percent of humanitarian workers who died last year were local staff, he said.
TALK, NO ACTION
But despite years of discussion about the issue, almost all aid funding continues to flow to the large international agencies; a situation that is increasingly embarrassing for the sector.
“It’s been going on for decades,” says one insider. “They talk and talk but nothing ever changes.”
Figures for how much funding goes directly to local NGOs are hard to find, but the World Disasters Report puts it at 1.6 percent.
Degan Ali, the head of Adeso Africa , argued for a target of 20 percent by 2020.
“Local NGOs are taking the risks, are the first responders, are the innovators. But we are persistently sidelined; in Nepal, in the Philippines and in a grotesque way in Haiti,” Ali told the Guardian, referring to the locations of natural disasters in recent years.
Most accounts of international intervention in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 acknowledge that the big organizations marginalized local NGOs and even stole their staff.
“Without money, without funding, we are so constricted,” Ali said. “We are told persistently that the main issue is risk aversion, accountability, corruption. But you can’t do risk management without funding.”
She said one large UN agency would only pay overheads to international NGOs. “How can we build and grow without proper financial support?”
Another campaigner from the global south said: “Please don’t keep telling us that we need to build capacity; it’s insulting and patronizing. It’s an old-fashioned, colonial viewpoint. These organizations are run by people with two PhDs, they are not stupid. Just assume that the capacity is there and fund us properly.”
TOP-DOWN FAILURE
International NGOs point out, however, that they already fund local NGOs, and worry that Ali’s proposal marks an artificial line between north and south.
“What we need now is a global approach,” said Sean Lowrie of the Start Network, which brings together international and national NGOs for humanitarian response. Its members include Save the Children, Oxfam and Christian Aid.
He said the current model was not working.
“We’re still working in an old-fashioned, centralized, top-down system which believes in the fallacy of control. We’re stuck and we’re not talking about the real issue, which are incentives, behavior and governance. What we need is a whole new eco-system of smart humanitarianism, which responds to what is needed, which is flexible and diversified, and which is financed in new, smart ways.”
The humanitarian sector took a hard look at itself in Geneva this week, and the picture was not quite the heroic, saintly image it would prefer to see. After unprecedented levels of demand, with the number of people needing humanitarian assistance doubling in the last decade , the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, called last year for a review of the entire sector and led a large consultation with more than 23,000 humanitarian workers around the world. Next spring, at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, they will agree, everyone hopes, concrete and long-lasting improvements for a system at full stretch.
MONEY PROBLEMS
Money, as usual, is the biggest problem. Humanitarian aid depends on regular appeals to donors rather than a steady funding stream, but the intense and demanding conflict work of the last five years has meant the gap between appeals and actual funding has widened.
O’Brien’s predecessor, Jan Eliasson, told the conference that when he was in the job a few years ago they usually managed a 60 percent to 70 percent fulfillment rate.
“That would be pretty fantastic for you, Stephen,” he said to his successor, whose rate is closer to 30 percent to 40 percent.
There are also growing demands for accountability and transparency from both ends of the system. Faced with ever greater requests for money, donors want to know exactly where their money is going. At the same time there is a growing movement to give more accountability and discretion to the people at the receiving end of aid.
“At the moment it’s very template driven,” said Manu Gupta, co-founder of the National Alliance for Disaster Risk Reduction in India.
“International agents go in and don’t take into consideration the context, the culture. There’s no space for communities to express what they actually need and want,” Gupta said.
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