Last week ODI/HPG launched a new (and excellent) report on what we can learn from the response to DRC Ebola outbreak #10. Having led HPG’s 2015 review of the Ebola response in West Africa, I was asked to contribute to the discussion. Twice. That led to a joint blog with Kerrie Holloway, one of the authors of the new report. To nobody’s surprise the authors found issues such as community engagement and embedding the international response in the context of the outbreak remain points of weakness.
This led to my solo blog post, where I ask whether or not it is time to shoot the messenger. Meaning, whether or not in addition to our finger-pointing at operational agencies and donors, it is we who deliver evaluations and reviews turn to accept some responsibility for sectoral intransigence and bad practice. Why do evaluation and review miss the forest for the trees, or dive into program performance with politics and systemic dysfunction being placed oh-so-conventiently outside the scope? What is the cost of this misdirection?
It’s past time the sector pays more attention to the messenger. The opening of the blog…
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As the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) launches its new research on the 2018–2020 Ebola outbreak in the DRC, global news of new outbreaks in the Republic of Guinea and again in DRC gives pause to reflect. By way of grasping for a silver lining, this frequency offers the opportunity to improve global health and humanitarian operational responses by learning from them. A second opportunity is to improve by learning from how we learn.
Our sector publishes no shortage of evaluations, reviews and reports that traffic in ‘lessons learned’. Yet contrary to the cosy idea of having learned lessons, this new HPG report from Crawford, Holloway, et al highlights a repetition of shortcomings, such as the quintessential agency turf battle that manifests in debates over how the crisis was framed and thus responded to (in this case whether Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) was primarily a vertical health crisis or had fused with and fuelled the longstanding conflict and multi-dimensional political and economic crisis in Nord Kivu); and the failed imperative for such extraordinary expenditure (in this case, an estimated $1 billion) to leave behind permanent infrastructure and capacity. These issues are anything but unfamiliar. They were unambiguously signposted by many reports on the 2014-16 outbreak in West Africa, including a previous HPG study (which I led), and in the evaluation reports of too many crises before that…
[To continue (to get to the fun part), here’s the link.]