The High Water Mark

The High Water Mark

Dear Khadija,

I hope that things are getting better in Damascus. I am sorry to hear about the loss of your nephew. Our thoughts are with you and the people of Syria every day, and we hope that one day soon the bombs will stop falling.

Greetings from all of us here in Geneva. I’m here at this big meeting to address the problems of our humanitarian aid industry, where we’ve got too many quality standards that are too confusing for many to put into practice, and where there are simply not enough quality certification systems to ensure that the organisations that claim to follow the standards ensure that it actually happens. The fact is, we’ve got a soup of standards. And the certification systems are not perfect, but they’re pretty OK, if only the big organisations would also sign up to them. But it’s still an important set of challenges to look at.

I was most inspired by the passionate and provocative comments from a woman in the back of the room. You would like her – she reminds me of you. She said that really, it’s all still about money, and keeping the current system in place. We the international aid agencies still look at ‘consulting’ with the people affected by disasters, and soliciting their feedback, rather than actually sharing more of the money and power with locals.

Her comments got me thinking. I still believe that better standards and certification systems are a step in the right direction for the big international aid organisations, and an important goal worthy of our time and effort. But I can’t help but feeling that she’s right; we’re missing the point.

I keep thinking about a project that I saw in Myanmar after cyclone Nargis, where the aid agency gave a big pile of money – about $6,000 – to each of the affected villages, without any conditions, and allowed the community itself to decide how to spend the money for its own relief.

I keep thinking about the amount of funding that went from diaspora communities directly to the disaster affected people in Somalia and Haiti – and even to your family, in Syria – and how much more important this kind of help is than the international aid organisations’ shiny projects.

It seems like the growth of information and communications technology, including mobile phones, is only going to support this kind of assistance to grow, and we the NGO crusaders should think more about this kind of assistance, and how we can build our programs to support it, rather than coordinating with it as an afterthought.

In some way, Khadija, it feels like we’re still stuck in 1995, reacting to the results our latest evaluation of our own US and European-funded operations, conducted by US and European-funded consultants, hired by European and US donors. In 1995 we set up standards and certification systems as the answers to the challenges, and we’re now saying better standards and certification are still the answers, though the challenges and environment have changed so much. The diaspora and the money they send home, the internet and mobile phones allowing information transfer on an unprecedented scale, and more initiative and self-help groups taking action have a massive impact overall.

I keep thinking about an organisation in Somalia that used these tools to transfer 30 million USD into al Shabab controlled areas in Somalia in 2010, only to discover that they were less than 10 percent of what the diaspora was transferring using those same channels. Perhaps that’s the real story. The 500 crazy, unprofessional organisations that showed up in Haiti are everyone’s idea of how it shouldn’t look, but independent groups, be they self-help or from foreigners, are in their essence a tremendous resource that we need to get better at harnessing, and that only appear to be growing around the world. If it’s either them or Halliburton to rescue me after a flood or an earthquake, I’d prefer a self-help group.

It still feels oddly like we’re looking at a pyramid, with power and money at the top, where the international organisations are coordinating a system which grows ever bigger and more complex, with vast masses of disaster affected populations at the bottom, and local humanitarian organisations somewhere in between. To say that the affected populations are ‘powerless’ would certainly be wrong, but it looks like the internationals still have most of the money, set the rules, maintain the monopoly on legitimacy in the public eye, and dominate the western news footage.

I keep thinking about that community in the delta of Myanmar. The work that a friend did there later showed that for most of the communities the international assistance was not the majority of the response, which instead came mostly from their own neighbors’ rather than the internationals. He always said that if the relief effort was a buffet, we always saw our own contribution as a big roast chicken, when really all that we brought was a salad…

Alongside all of these growing self-help initiatives and information and communications-technology-driven efforts, there are more international aid workers and aid agencies on the planet than ever before. I can’t help but speculate whether these two trends – one expanding at an explosive pace while the other reaches an all-time high – can possible co-exist. I wonder if the international aid machine as we know it is in fact a dinosaur, and the rise of disaster management degrees in western universities and the armies of aid workers around the world are in fact the signs that the industry has reached its high water mark. This is perhaps what it looks like right before the whole thing crashes and we find a better way of addressing these problems. I have to be honest that I hope that this is the case.

Don’t get me wrong. I really do believe that everyone here at this meeting is trying hard to meet a goal that they honestly believe in. They’re smart people, and they really are fighting with all their hearts for justice. And I really do think that our systems and procedures for humanitarian standards and certification need to get better. It’s a goal worth fighting for, and I’m going to go home from this meeting and keep working on this with anyone I can find.

It’s just that I think that perhaps just looking at how to improve the systems isn’t enough. I keep thinking that the woman in the back of the room was right, that what we really need is to turn the whole pyramid upside down and make what the fancy Europeans would call a paradigm shift. We the foreigners need to divest more authority, decision making power and financial responsibility to the disaster affected population itself. We well-meaning internationals need to let go and empower the affected populations to take charge, and stop trying to ‘check in’ with feedback and complaints and monitoring, making continual adjustments in our attempts to better meet their needs. No one can argue with more effectiveness and efficiency. But until we turn the whole system upside down, we’ll never work ourselves out of a job. And isn’t that really the point of it all?

I keep thinking about you and your family in Syria, where we the international agencies who claim to fight on your behalf for peace and justice still can’t do enough, either to help you with relief, security and protection, or to support you in your efforts to help yourselves and your neighbors.

Wish you were here,

Erik