THE DEVELOPING WORLD
Humanitarian aid’s quality quest
Autumn 2008
The European Consensus on Humanitarian Aid is the EU’s latest strategy to improve the quality of aid. François Grünewald considers what the quest for quality means for humanitarian NGOs as they battle with mounting criticism and ever more complex crises
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How do you set “quality” standards in an area as complex as humanitarian action? It’s not just a bureaucratic question because for aid workers and the people they help the wrong answer may be a matter of life and death. Humanitarian action is a complicated mixture of operations; just as a human being is more than a stomach to fill, a head to shelter or a sick body to cure, so humanitarian action is about more than saving lives. It is also about preserving human dignity, offering protection and trying to restore hope to people who have often lost everything.
Quality humanitarian action must therefore be multi-faceted and requires us to find holistic responses to the many types of distress suffered by people. It also means meeting criteria not only for helping people but also for reducing the negative impacts of our actions.
The European Commission’s humanitarian arm, DG-ECHO, has been in existence for 15 years and has demonstrated that the quality of humanitarian action is determined first and foremost by the quality of the diagnosis of the problem. These analyses are obviously specific to the site and the situation to be addressed, and must assess the humanitarian needs and the capacities available to meet them, and also the constraints and risks to be faced. Quality ultimately relies on the ability of humanitarian organisations to incorporate the results of their analyses into their aid programmes. Above all, quality is about mastering the required disciplines, developing a high level of adaptability and expanding an organisation’s capacity to invent new solutions.
Humanitarian situations are always challenging and often throw up profoundly difficult questions. ECHO, and the many NGOs it supports have had to decide what to do when people say they are hungry but don’t want direct food aid because that puts them in even greater danger. How do you deal with a situation where it is the humanitarian assistance itself that’s the main target of the warring factions? How, too, do you protect hundreds of thousand of people on the move, or respond to a crisis when you cannot get direct access to the victims? And, all too often, how do you balance the need to ensure your own staff isn’t at risk against the demands of your humanitarian mission?
Over time, NGOs have developed their own codes of conducts – collective code of ethics, you might say. But although they may help strengthen our humanitarian spirit and attitudes, they do not necessarily translate into improved operations on the ground. For instance, when NGOs avoid using degrading images of victims for a particular fund-raising campaign, that’s a positive approach even though it will have little impact on the humanitarian action itself. Cases where NGO codes of conduct can have a direct bearing include deciding that the victims of a crisis should receive support right through from early diagnosis of a situation to the final evaluation of the aid operation. The Red Cross and NGO Code of Conduct of 1994 made a lot of sense on this.
European Union regulations are often criticised by the NGOs because frequently they make things more bureaucratic. After the 1999 crisis that toppled the Santer Commission, new financial rules and project procedures became a real nightmare. Yet the last decade has also introduced a culture of evaluation, responsibility and accountability, and the European Consensus on Humanitarian Aid was another step in this direction.
The demand for greater accountability raises other questions, like who should be penalised for faulty humanitarian projects, and on what basis? Should aid agencies be accountable to the donors, or the beneficiaries? Who should represent the aid beneficiaries – individuals or local authorities? And should the donors really be accountable only to the taxpayers?
There are other serious issues about quality that arise chiefly in the field. Experience in Albania, Kosovo, Central America and central and west African states has proved that some “beneficiaries” know all too well how to manipulate aid and the aid agencies. So while the beneficiaries’ improved participation may be a useful methodological tool, as well as a humanitarian goal, the search for “beneficiary voices” should not be seen as the holy grail of aid quality.
Beneficiary participation also has serious pitfalls for some donors. Many of them, especially institutional ones, represent structures that have their own political agendas. This is true of bi-lateral actors, like USAID, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), and France’s AFD. Multilateral agencies, like the World Food Programme, ECHO and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, also have political or institutional agendas. All these donors tend to favour beneficiaries who can help them further their own goods, and sometimes sanction others who are deemed to be pursuing a different agenda. In these cases, the principles of the European Humanitarian Consensus now offer protection, both to European civil society and the people affected by crises.
This is an important safeguard for NGOs. Many of these organisations are under growing pressure, and are subject to more and more frequent criticism. Some have mishandled important crises, including those in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and the 2004 Tsunami. Donor governments and public opinion are therefore worried and are questioning the motivations of humanitarian actors and asking whether they really make a positive contribution. Many donors increasingly prefer to operate through large-scale multilateral channels like the UN so as to minimise transaction costs, even though these routes do not guarantee the most effective and efficient use of financial resources.
The NGOs’ response to these external pressures has been to push the issue of quality, falling back, it would seem, on the old adage that “attack is the best form of defence.” The debate about quality in humanitarian action also reflects anxiety about how complex the world seems suddenly to have become. It is now much harder to deal with crises than people expected after the end of the Cold War. The flourishing business of humanitarian aid, which appears to grow in size with every crisis, also raises questions about professionalism; technical and methodological guides are presently the flavour of the month. At best, the humanitarian industry is aiming to benefit crisis victims by establishing new rules and higher standards, and at worst it is trying to fend off criticism by pretending to take the quality issue seriously.
There is another post-Cold War trend that is worrying NGOs: the integration of everything from political initiatives to humanitarian action under the UN’s hat. NGOs welcome better coordination, but they reject the idea that they should all have to work within a single overall umbrella organisation. Afghanistan, Somalia and now Darfur offer clear examples where an integrated approach was not only ineffectual but also extremely dangerous. The European Union as a political body and the Commission as a donor show signs of being tempted down this integrationist route. The recent Barnier report on EU crisis response capabilities was one step among several in that direction. European NGOs view this trend as a real threat, not from any ideological viewpoint but from a very practical perspective. It is their staff who are on the front line as primary aid deliverers, and they have to count the cost in body bags when trendy but bad policy decisions are taken by politicians sitting in their comfortable offices.
In the midst of these challenges, ECHO is seen as one of the last bastions in the European Commission where the humanitarian principles of independence and impartiality are defended, and where civil society organisations and NGOs are valued as important resources. The fact that these principles were heard loud and clear in the debate on the European Consensus on Humanitarian Aid – and the vital role played by European NGOs was underlined throughout – can be seen as a victory over political correctness for experience and common sense. It’s to be hoped that Europe will preserve its commitment to principled and civilian humanitarian action; it’s certainly the wish of many people engaged in humanitarian civil society, not for themselves but on behalf of countless numbers of suffering people.