Saving the World- One Conference at a Time?

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
Barack Obama.

I started my life as aid worker in 1999 on the edges of the Sierra Leonean civil war, in the refugee camps of Guinea, before hitching a ride on a WFP helicopter to land a job with Merlin managing massive health program. It was a mere 14 years ago, but it was an entirely different era in the world of professional humanitarian assistance. I was a biologist by training, a former Peace Corps volunteer with a bit of experience managing basic construction projects, wells and latrines and basic concrete blocks schools, when I took responsibility for 7 international staffs, 24 health clinics and several units of hospital in a civil war paused for a fragile peace. I wouldn’t stand a chance getting that job now. The world of professional humanitarian assistance has undergone a sea change, from being a semi-amateur enterprise of cowboys and missionaries to a sophisticated, increasingly evidence-based profession with an ever more complex set of standards and benchmarks for quality and accountability.

Back then, standards such as Sphere were in their infancy. I still remember a dark blue ring binder that held several individual brochures for the various standards. These were the days when I received a training in something called a ‘logical framework,’ which was then a new and exotic instrument to plan our work. One of my biggest complaints back then was the lack of a proper canon to define the discipline. Whereas my biologist counterparts, be they from Ghana or Canada, could all draw a common frame of reference from a year of chemistry, a year of organic chemistry, a year of cell biology, etc., my aid worker counterparts were just as likely to be poets as they were engineers.

Thankfully, that’s not the case anymore. I feel so privileged to have witnessed this development, and when I teach graduate students now in an advanced education for catastrophe and risk managers, I’m amazed how much has happened in such short time, and that I got the chance to be at the middle of this moment of humanitarian history. Programs like the one I teach didn’t even exist then; now there are dozens of them all around the world. The number of staffs working for humanitarian organisations, as have the number of dollars churning through these organisations, many of whom now represent multi-national non-government corporations, each with a global footprint and the ability to raise funds and deploy assistance anywhere, anytime.

But growth brings problems. An NGO I know of has recently made a corporate partnership with a gold and diamond mining conglomerate whose name used to be synonymous with human rights abuses; this is what they call, ‘public private partnership,’ and it’s supposed to be the wave of the future. And we can be too smart for our own good. Our standards have grown so complex and sophisticated that they may be losing touch with the average aid worker, especially if she’s one who’s just been hired and trained and needs to be deployed to help her countrymen after the sudden onset of a major disaster.

Responding to this last challenge is what the join standards initiative is all about. There’s no doubt that when the feedback from the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwandan Refugees (JEARR) gave their debrief in Copenhagen in 1996, they weren’t imaging the plethora of standards that we have today – at some counts over 50 different initiatives and projects to improve humanitarian accountability and quality. Occam’s razor says that the answer that makes the fewest assumptions should be selected; the simplest solutions are usually the best. In the case of international humanitarian standards, our answers to complicated problems in disaster response also need to be simple as we can make them, without compromising on the quality that disaster-affected people are entitled to.

Having been part of this extraordinary moment in global humanitarian assistance over the past 15 years, it’s clear to me that we’re at major crossroads. Our profession has grown exponentially in its capacity and ability to assist those in need. Yet we’re also confronting the twin challenges of the problems that all this growth has brought, as well as an incredibly complex and changing external environment – due to climate change, urban population dynamics, and globalization, amongst other phenomena – has rendered our current set of tools increasingly inadequate.

Tomorrow we’ll convene a historic meeting, here in Copenhagen, to take up this challenge with some of the world’s humanitarian leaders. Perhaps it’s fitting that we’ll be meeting in the same venue where the shocking conclusions of the JEARR were first shared. Then the message was simple, if unsettling, and the call to action was clear: we had blood on our hands. The system wasn’t performing well enough, and people had died needlessly as a result. We needed to better. The Sphere project, HAP (initially the humanitarian ombudsman project), People In Aid, and ALNAP were created as a result.
Now the call for action is just as clear, but the solutions are not as apparent. We know that the wide range of systems we have developed are functioning well, but for reasons that are unclear, they’re not enough. From the TEC evaluation to the IASC Haiti evaluation, some of the same conclusions are eerie echoes of the JEARR; not enough informing of and working with affected populations and local governments, insufficient quality of response. The Copenhagen meeting tomorrow is one of many important events in our consultation with stakeholders to try to determine how to make our standards better and easier for agencies and individuals to use.

But in some ways, starting with a relatively blank slate, as the creators of Sphere did at the outset, is easier than reforming an existing system that’s functioning well, if in need of improvement. As chair of the Sphere project board, I’m always aware that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. Hundreds of the world’s leading experts on humanitarian assistance have poured tens of thousands of hours into defining the standards, and it’s not something that can be tidied up and improved over the course of a few months, or even a couple years. We have an imperative to improve the system so that the set of standards are easier to use, but an equally compelling imperative not to compromise what’s already been achieved. This is no easy task. In fact, it’s enough to give a board chair sleepless nights. Feelings can also run high in such a process, and conflict amongst the fearful and the hopeful are at some point inevitable.

The price of being an aid worker is a certain amount of cynicism; compromises and pragmatic solutions to ethical dilemmas are fairly routine. Effective response to any human tragedy, at any scale, calls for equal measures of cool-headedness and empathy. When I look out over the meeting attendees tomorrow morning, I know that I’ll be thrilled to be in the presence of such greatness, but also wondering, as I always do, ‘what would a woman in a refugee camp think if she was here? Would we do better to save our high-minded rhetoric and good intentions, and use less money on top level meetings and more on response?’ Are we really ‘saving the world,’ one European conference at a time?

But the fact is, this is how change happens. When thousands of organisations around the world are invested in a given system, adapting that system takes an enormous amount of consultation, both to get buy-in and ownership of the process, but also to ensure that we’re gathering as much information and as many perspectives as possible. Some may come to the table tomorrow with ‘red lines,’ in the mindset of negotiators,, ready to take their hardest stance in order to protect the status quo. Indeed, there is a lot to honor, and ‘killing your darlings’ is not the answer to every problem. We have to be careful to embrace change, but not for the sake of change alone.

Above all, we have to remember why we’ll be gathered in that room, that historic 17th century building overlooking Copenhagen harbor, listening to Under-Secretary General Valerie Amos, and other distinguished and accomplished humanitarians. We are here on behalf of the world’s most vulnerable. We are here because we know that they deserve better, and the evidence has shown, from evaluation after evaluation, that we can perform better, and that standards are not a panacea, but they are an important part of the overall system of consistently achieving quality and accountable response. Now time to negotiate, and to think about us, but to think about them, the ones who won’t be in the room, the millions of refugees, internally displaced, and conflict and disaster affected around the world, and to think openly and creatively about how a more coherent system of standards can better empower agencies and aid workers to fulfill their rights. Because many things are negotiable, but the right to life with dignity is not one of them.