WUNRN
Direct Link to Full 44-Page 2014 MSF
Report:
HOW FLAWED ARE CURRENT
AID RESPONSES?
MSF
accuses aid agencies of not doing enough to reach the most vulnerable - Photo: Nigel
Sanders/WFP
By Kristy Siegfried
– 15 July 2014
Many of the issues raised in the report are uncomfortably familiar to anyone
working at the frontlines of emergency responses: funding systems are too slow
and inflexible, negatively impacting response times; small, local NGOs that are
often best placed to respond to emergencies are excluded from the predominantly
Western-based, UN-centred humanitarian system; and emergency response capacity
is not the priority it should be in a humanitarian system that has grown to
take on many other functions.
Bertrand Taith, a cultural historian of humanitarian aid and
director of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University
of Manchester, has suggested that the report is short on evidence and
questioned whether MSF’s “headline grabbing” critique of well-worn concerns was
the best approach “in an era when austerity is deployed throughout the world as
the excuse to restrict aid budgets”.
However, Ed Schenkenberg, chief executive of DARA, an NGO that
evaluates the efficacy of humanitarian responses, countered that while the
methodology behind MSF’s report could have been stronger, “overall, they’re
asking the right questions….
“Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of actors and
a huge effort to professionalize the sector, and when you look at those
developments, I think it is very valid to ask what the outcomes are for people
affected [by humanitarian crises],” he told IRIN.
So what are the key issues that the report raises and how has the aid community
responded to them? IRIN takes a look.
Ever larger budgets have not
led to more effective responses
The report begins with the assertion that “the international humanitarian aid
system has more means and resources at its disposal… than ever before” and
later notes that insufficiency of financing was not identified as a major
constraint in any of the three case studies of emergency responses reviewed for
the report (in South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Jordan), all of
which were described as having major failings.
In an email to IRIN, Greg Barrow, director of the UN World Food Programme’s
London office, responded that while the humanitarian community might have more
resources at its disposal, “the scale, complexity and cost of responding to
humanitarian emergencies is undoubtedly increasing”.
Simultaneous, large-scale displacements in countries including
Wendy Fenton of the Overseas Development Institute’s Humanitarian Policy Group
pointed out that while aid agencies may face funding constraints, “agencies
have choices about how they operate and what they prioritize.” MSF’s main
contention is that they often fail to prioritize emergency response capacity
which the authors describe as the humanitarian system’s “core business”.
Augustin Augier, head of ALIMA, a French NGO that focuses on partnering with
local actors to provide medical care in emergencies, agreed that emergency
responses are not being sufficiently prioritized but blamed the overall
humanitarian system rather than individual agencies.
“The system doesn’t provide enough incentive for local NGOs to develop strong
humanitarian experience,” he told IRIN. “They all want to do development because
you can get longer contracts that allow you to invest in infrastructure. They
all say that from a business perspective, the incentives in the humanitarian
system are not good enough for emergency response.”
From 2009 to 2013, local and national NGOs received 1.6 percent of the total
aid given to NGOs as reported through OCHA's Financial Tracking System. This
represented 0.2 percent of the total international humanitarian response over
the period, according to Development Initiatives research.
Aid agencies are risk-averse
Perhaps the most damning finding in the report is that agencies are shying away
from targeting the most hard-to-reach and therefore vulnerable populations,
such as unregistered urban refugees in
In all three emergencies looked at for the report, write the authors, “a
principal determinant of the level of coverage and effectiveness was the level
of difficulty (and conversely, convenience)”.
The report cites insecurity and logistical challenges as factors that can
restrict access to populations in places such as North Kivu and
“We’re not saying [agencies] should take unnecessary risks, but we do feel that
in some cases, a perceived lack of security becomes a rather defensive
argument,” said Jens Pedersen, a humanitarian affairs adviser with MSF based in
Some aid community insiders have taken offence at the implication, not just in
the title of the report but also in its conclusions, that aid agencies - with
the possible exception of MSF - are largely absent from many of the
hardest-to-reach places.
In a blog entitled Where is everyone? We’re standing right next to you, Bob
Kitchen, director of the International Rescue Committee’s emergency
preparedness and response unit, pointed out that the IRC was among many other
aid groups that “continue to stand and deliver in the face of chaos and
mounting humanitarian needs” in places like Somalia, “a country so violent that
MSF itself has withdrawn”.
Augier of ALIMA noted that operating in the most hard-to-reach places
comes at “a huge cost” that is not taken into sufficient consideration by donors.
“I would not accuse the NGOs but look at the reasons why they can’t go to these
places,” he said.
The UN is at the core of many
of the system’s dysfunctions
The report claims that the triple role of lead UN agencies like UNHCR as
coordinator, implementer and donor in places like
Arianne Rummery, a spokesperson with UNHCR, said the agency would look at MSF’s
criticisms and “see what learning could be drawn from them”. She noted,
however, that “the key findings of the report are over a year old (the
interviews and data and site visits are from 2012 and 2013) and the
considerable time gap between research and publication may not do justice to
the efforts made to address the challenges in the three situations of the
report.”
Fenton of ODI agreed that some positive steps have been taken since the
report’s research was conducted. “There have been developments since these were
done, although many problems are being replicated in places like
“A system as big as the UN takes a long time to turn around.”
Funding systems are too slow
and cumbersome to respond to emergencies
"Emergency response requires flexible, rapidly
disbursable and unearmarked funding to be effective"
“Emergency response requires flexible, rapidly disbursable and
unearmarked funding to be effective,” notes the report, adding that current
emergency funding mechanisms fail to provide this, often taking as long as
three months to reach the field.
Augier confirmed that three months was typical for the majority of donor
funding which is disbursed through UN agencies. “We lose a lot of time because
of this,” he said, adding that donors were partly to blame for channelling the
majority of humanitarian funding through the UN rather than to individual NGOs.
Outside the UN system is the START Network, a consortium of 19 major NGOs which
share a dedicated pot of emergency funding (the Start Fund),
donated by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). The
Fund, launched in April 2014, aims to address gaps in fast responses to
rapid-onset crises as well as responses to small and medium-scale emergencies
that often receive little funding.
“The Start Network is an important and interesting development because until
this came about and some donors decided to invest in it, there was no
alternative to the UN in terms of managing large amounts of pooled funding,”
said Fenton.
The Network also seeks to address another of the criticisms raised by the MSF
report - that small, local NGOs are often sidelined in emergency responses by
the big, international agencies. One of the aims of the Start Network is to
grow the capacity of these local actors and involve them more in
decision-making.
Moving the debate forward
The report does not end with a long list of recommendations and MSF has made it
clear that it is intended as a trigger for critical discussions in the aid
community rather than as an attempt to provide any easy answers. Whatever the
views about how MSF has presented some of its findings, there appears to be
widespread agreement that there is a need for such discussions, particularly at
a time when so many pressing emergencies require urgent humanitarian responses.
Who will take responsibility for moving the debate forward is less clear.
Schenkenberg of DARA argued that, having raised these critical issues, MSF has
a responsibility to “invest in a process that would give organizations the time
to engage more deeply”. But both he and Augier also called on UN agencies to
participate in more open discussions of their shortcomings.
“I think more or less everybody agrees that we should do more and we should do
better, but the solutions can only come from the people who have the power to
implement them and that’s the UN and the big donors,” said Augier.
Further debate is likely to take place as aid agencies prepare for the World
Humanitarian Summit, due to take place in
“I think what MSF has done is put some old issues back on the table to
highlight the need to try to address them, maybe at the World Humanitarian
Summit,” said Fenton.
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http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/blog/2014/07/where-is-everyone?ecid=em_LKET_0714
Are humanitarian agencies
avoiding difficult interventions? Jane Cocking, Oxfam's Humanitarian Director,
challenges a recent MSF report's negative portrayal of the
humanitarian system.
She points out that, over the
last seven years, Oxfam has actually doubled the number of people it can help
in a crisis and how more people can receive the help they so desperately need.
Humanitarian crises are
chaotic, messy and dirty - the lives of communities and individuals fall apart
before their eyes.
This statement may be obvious,
but it is an important one in any discussion of how those who offer help in
these circumstances are performing. The MSF report, Where is Everyone? launched on 7th
July, takes a welcome look at how international agencies responded to three
recent crises. It concludes that what
the humanitarian sector needs is more leadership, investment and better
targeted help. However, I feel that the report is long on
questions, but short on answers.
There is certainly some truth
in many of the observations made in the report, but they need to be seen with
less hubris.
Did people in these crises
receive the quality and quantity of assistance they had a right to expect?
Definitely not. Is more basic expertise needed in humanitarian response?
Certainly yes. Are humanitarian agencies better or worse more or less risk
averse than they were a number of years ago? To this final question, there is
no simple answer.
We
have to empower... organisations... on the groundHowever, the key questions to which the answers are missing is
"what happens next?" and "what must happen?"
The report takes as its core
the "international
humanitarian system" of UN agencies, International NGOs
and the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement. While the capacity of this system has
grown steadily, the number of people every year in need of humanitarian
assistance has grown exponentially. Over the last couple of years the gap between what people in crises
need and what international donors are willing to fund has
widened more than at any time since 2000.
When asked who helped them
first and best, most people caught up in a crisis cite neighbours and local
bodies, not the international community. If the world is to keep pace with an
ever-increasing number of crises then we
have to empower, support and grow those organisations and individuals on the
ground closest to where crises happen.
Over the past seven years Oxfam GB has more than doubled the
number of people in crises who we helpThis
endeavour is fraught with difficulties. Can
local agencies be neutral in conflict? How does a small NGO fund a standing
response capacity? How does it scale up quickly and efficiently?
Not all of these questions are answerable right now, but it is only through
embracing this challenge that those who remain unreached by humanitarian
assistance will stand a chance of receiving what they need.
Over the past seven years
Oxfam GB has more than doubled the number of people in crises who we help to
around six million
a year. We have done this mainly through growing our support to local partner
agencies in Asia and
Latin America. This means we can reinvest in our own skills in
places like the Central
African Republic and South
Sudan, where local capacity is likely to remain weak. We are
not alone, many others work in this way. The question is will MSF join us? I
hope the answer to this question is a resounding "YES!"
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