Standards and Certification - Time for Evidence

It was hard not to feel proud last Friday. Many of us have poured our blood, sweat and tears into forging a Core Humanitarian Standard that could be owned by all, and after more than 2 years and countless meetings, we’d finally arrived to present the results at the launch meeting in Copenhagen. The CHS was launched, as was the end of the SCHR certification project, after an equally lengthy and labor-intensive process.

But as I left the meeting Friday evening, having shared congratulations with many of those who had invested so much time into the process, I knew that this was a beginning, as well as an end. As Nick van Praag of Keystone Accountability said over coffee in Copenhagen, ‘Creating the Standard is one thing, but using it, and determining whether it has the desired results, are something else.’

I’ve been proud to sit on the board of the Sphere Project for a few years now, and it remains the biggest collective success story that the has in the effort to develop standards in the ‘modern era’ of humanitarian assistance. I believe that its success is a result of its approach, namely on the reliance on evidence and the inclusiveness of the dialogue. Sphere has relied on a robust and inclusive dialogue between the world’s leading experts in its fields of enquiry, be they Humanitarian Principles, Food or Health. But the Sphere Project staffs and board have never sought to define standards themselves. Rather, together they’ve tried to make sure that the conversation happened, and that it was grounded in evidence. What mattered was whether it worked for affected populations, or not. It’s the evidence that counts; people and organizations use Sphere because they believe that it works.

But as a Sphere Board member, I’ve also been aware that it’s easier to establish standards and indicators – and evidence – for the technical chapters of WASH, food, health and shelter and NFIs that it is for other areas, and that the Project has struggled to ensure that agencies and aid workers use the Humanitarian Charter, the Code of Conduct and the Core Standards and Protection Principles as much as they have used the technical chapters, just as we all struggle to remind people, time and again, that 15 liters of water per person, per day is not a standard, but an indicator. (The standard is sufficient water for cleaning, cooking, and domestic and personal hygiene. Standards are universal, indicators are not.)

Yet these non-technical issues and principles are also amongst the most essential for us to get right, and what lie in the heart of principled humanitarian action. Since the aftermath of the Rwandan crisis and the subsequent evaluation to more recent large-scale responses in Haiti and elsewhere, we know from countless evaluations that we humanitarians are not living up to our collective responsibility to be accountable to affected populations, and to give them meaningful and substantive roles in the response.

Why is that? It may be that different agencies, with different mandates, will always approach the ‘softer’ issues differently. It may be that they’re simply harder to establish measurable indicators for, that the ‘how’ is always going to be more complex than the ‘what.’ If you haven’t read the MSF UK blog on this subject, I recommend it. The basic point it this: it’s incredibly hard to provide standards on core issues without resorting to meaningless platitudes. And yet despite my agreement with this very sharp and well-written critique, it still begs the question, ‘what then must we do?’ The current standards system is failing us – and affected populations – on the core issues of quality and accountability. We lack a shared frame of reference and language to confront these issues. In this alone the CHS offers to give us a shared language and a set of standards that will belong to all. Don’t criticize the product, get involved in the process. Shared standards on these issues are probably not all that’s needed for us to collectively improve, but I doubt that improvement is possible without them. This is perhaps why the hardest part of the CHS – developing indicators and guidance notes for these standards - is still in front of us.

So now is the time to gather evidence. Now is the time to prove that all those meetings to create the CHS were worth it, and that they will make a difference for disaster and conflict-affected people around the world. We must have the courage and persistence to test that belief, to challenge our assumptions, and to put affected populations and southern agencies in the center of this effort. We must rise above and beyond the ‘verification as usual’ that we aid agencies so often rely on, be it through insider consultants whom we hire to report on our successes and shortcomings, or our own staffs’ efforts at collecting data on their own project outcomes. We’ve got to get evidence on the CHS that enables us to truly see international aid efforts – and the CHS and other standards – through the eyes of people affected by disasters. This evidence will be an invaluable contribution to the World Humanitarian Summit Humanitarian Effectiveness theme. But what will really matter isn’t what happens in Istanbul, it’s what will happen when the next major disaster strikes, and we foreigners and arrive with our logos, our landcruisers, and our standards, and we succeed – or fail – in the eyes of those we’re claiming to help.