Tag Archives: Effectiveness

Critique of Aid

A new humanitarian Ethics? Blog 2

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[Updated 15 Nov 2018 to clarify that The 80,000 Hours is an organization of which there is a Cambridge club.  Apologies.]

The notion that humanitarian action must be ethical and that humanitarian action must be effective make for complicated bedfellows. As my recent paper argues, it seems a common trap for humanitarians work so hard on effective aid that its ethical character gets ignored.  For example, the need to act now now now that justifies, in seeming perpetuity, sidestepping downward accountability to local people.  Further and even more difficult from an ethical standpoint, accountability to the communities where the organization is not present: decision-making as to who will live or die . . .  is an inherently abusive power when it remains unaccountable for its […] determination of who will and (especially) who will not receive aid (p. 28). So it was incredibly refreshing to speak to a group of Cambridge students who have placed this challenge front and center in their lives.

Enter The 80,000 Hours:  Cambridge club!  That number represents the number of hours in a career.  The question the students here ask themselves – how to make those hours count the most for the good.  This is their quest for effective altruism.   They are working through the puzzle of how to be effective, such as by picking the most promising causes and working on the right problems.  They’ve even come up with some criteria to consider in making these career (or volunteering) decisions: “Working on a cause is likely to be high impact to the extent that it is:

  • Great in scale (it affects many people’s lives, by a great amount)
  • Highly neglected (few other people are working on addressing the problem), and
  • Highly solvable (additional resources will do a great deal to address it).”

Of course, being somewhat more jaded than the average member of Generation Z, I force fed them a heaping dose of my Debbie Downer alter ego.  And you know what? Thankfully, I don’t think it made a dent.

Mostly, I tried to convey the profound difficulty in identifying the best way to do things right and, more importantly, the most right things to do.  I spoke a great deal about the narrowness of our inquiry – evidence that might show activity X worked in doing Y, but does not in any way consider the unintended consequences or the opportunity costs.  I spoke about the deep biases in the way that we assess/perceive a given action as effective, and the even deeper bias involved in deciding upon the right thing to do.  I described our from viewing effectiveness through our humanitarian lens, which explains why people in long-term crisis (e.g., the now-worn example of the refugee who has spent her entire lifetime in Dadaab camp) do not feel that aid has done a good job of meeting their needs and yet the agency reports on that aid will show that it was a rousingly effective success.  Targets met.

Their questions showed a personal commitment to thinking about this quest for effective altruism.  One question in particular left me thinking.  A young medical student posed two possible futures for himself.  He could become an emergency doctor à la MSF – head out into the world to treat people in crisis.  But he asked if that was not too selfish, because he could work as plastic surgeon and make lots of money and achieve a greater quantity of good by donating half his earnings to an effective organization.  Which path, he asked.  I didn’t know how to answer (which didn’t stop me) and I still don’t know.

 

The discussion did not hit a dead end.  When pushed, I had to admit that constant critical questioning of our aid actions can be paralyzing, just as Do No Harm was paralyzing.  For me, the way forward is to press ahead, recognizing that harm will be done: an iterative process of taking the best decisions possible (humanity and impartiality at the fore) and then assessing again and again. But this is an iterative process that I found easier to declare than to operationalize.  The excitement to act holds a powerful allure: to act too often, though, without attention to bias, long-term effects, opportunity costs, negative consequences and the like.

To the students at Cambridge I counselled restraint.  Not restraint in pressing forward.  But restraint in the personal investment of humanitarians in their own actions; an investment that soon overtakes their ability or desire to question it much beyond an immediately useful analysis of whether it ‘worked’, whatever that means.

On the late train home to London it dawned on me that the central ethical issue of the evening’s discussion had absolutely nothing to do with the ethics of our humanitarian work today.  The faces of those students are the faces of tomorrow. We talk easily about the ethical responsibility to bequeath future generations, for example, a liveable planet. Do we humanitarians ever talk about our responsibility to the next generation of humanitarians?  To bequeath to them a sector in which the culture has not just rid itself of top-down programming and #Aidtoo violations, but is a culture in which the 80,000 hours are as effective and ethical as they can be because the culture is one of humanitarians asking themselves and acting upon the hard questions?

Our Western Identity

The New Humanitarian Basics (blog 2)

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At the core of the humanitarian enterprise lie the twinned tendencies of being highly self-centred and poorly self-aware.  Add to that mix the power of the core aid sector to shape the humanitarian narrative and what you have is the systemic equivalent of nationalism – the difficulty to see the world in any other way.

My paper is one attempt to provoke a degree of self-awareness. However, as my friend ‘Archie’ argues, this proposal for a future humanitarianism looks ugly in places (see my previous blog). Actually, he suggests, it doesn’t even look like humanitarianism, as it would seem to increase the number of people who are suffering.  To some extent, this might be true, especially if measured through the humanitarian lens.

The answer? The sector must learn to embrace certain types of ugly. Why? Because the humanitarian lens is fine for humanitarians, but not for a society that is so much more than the location of a crisis.

DRC provides an example. The UN has declared/signed/affirmed time and again the primacy of the home state in crisis response (see, e.g., the Sendai Framework or conclusions of the World Humanitarian Summit).  The sector has seemingly signed up to that pledge. Until it hasn’t. What happened when the government of DRC boycotted the UN’s major aid conference, upset with the portrayal of its country as a humanitarian basket case? The UN agencies and the INGOs quickly asserted their collective paternalistic right to know better. (And trust me, I see DRC the way the sector sees it). But ‘time to let go’ means time to embrace (in some places) the ugly.  Localization means localization, not localization but only until you disagree with its outcomes or judge yourself better able to do it. In my vision, listening to the Congolese government is not ideal, but it is a less worse option than international governance. Just like accepting the US government’s refusal to accept aid from Cuba in response to Hurricane Katrina.

What is missing from the humanitarian lens? First and foremost is the ethical component of humanitarian action, and the way the humanitarian sector’s framing fails to place value on people struggling to overcome their own problems (i.e., self-determination).  In this regard, the paper points to “a ‘decolonisation’ – a transfer of power not merely from international to local agencies, but also from a ‘global’ to a home society.” (p. 28). Should last century’s political decolonization have been blocked in anticipation of states whose homegrown leaders proved even more brutal or greedily indifferent than the colonial powers? Of course not.  And neither should the presence of bad or incompetent states impede the decolonization of humanitarian action.

Second, humanitarians must stop hiding behind their self-serving conceptualization of effectiveness; removing their blinders to the fact that their effectiveness is just that, a self-serving construct.  As Jeremy Konyndyk describes in his recent analysis of the humanitarian business model, the humanitarian system “shapes interventions to conform to agencies’ mandates regardless of the priorities of crisis-affected populations”. A hammer sees a world of nails, and hence success equals having driven X number of nails into Y pieces of wood.  In short, the metric of humanitarian intentions and success – the moral crusade by which it usurps the power of the state – isn’t just a foreign metric, it is a skewed metric.

Even worse than the slanted view of its own effectiveness is the failure of humanitarian action to calculate the impact of its occupation of the crisis response space.  The humanitarian system does not simply respond, it aggressively preserves its market and the predominance of an emergency response that cannot alleviate structural problems or satisfy the full range of human aspiration.  So, for example, the power of the sector’s advocacy, amplified by a mass communication capacity often greater than the entirety of local civil society, means that “the urgent displaces the important (the systemic or structural) in perpetuity.” (p. 6).

As the sector clamors for the urgent, is there room for a state or a community to say no, to conclude that it might be better to invest in the long-term, not the immediate? Are we willing to allow a state to let children fall ill today because it wants to prioritize building the school system of the future?  Are we at least willing to admit that this is not our decision, given that we do not have skin in the game, except for the powerful skin of self-interest in preserving the supremacy of humanitarian action and our personal sense of contribution?

Lastly, where in our calculations of effectiveness do we consider the opportunity costs? With regard to occupation, if the sector were to stand back, what might evolve in the same space?  Would states step up and take more direct responsibility? As research into the West Africa Ebola outbreak concluded, the “state’s capacity to deal with needs and crises is partly a function of how socially embedded it is in the first place.” Do states in the global south have the same freedom enjoyed by Western nations – the freedom to struggle without being subjected to foreign intervention?

This cost undermines the development of the social contract, a lengthy process necessarily full of blunders, as was evidenced by the early months of Liberian or Sierra Leonean Ebola response.  But those governments learned and grew enormously over the course of the epidemic, in part because the humanitarian community lacked the power/willingness to take command.  Ebola is not a lone example. As the Economist recently reported, the response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake marked a critical juncture in the development of the trust between the government and civil society with regard to crisis response, a reversal (though as yet incomplete) of the Communist Party’s deep suspicions.

The point is not that humanitarians are wrong to intervene.  It is that humanitarians are wrong to assess their interventions through such narrow framing, one that produces projects which hit targets but ignores too many other benefits and costs.  Of even greater concern is that humanitarians ignore the real challenges, like stopping war or ending severe poverty. “The best thing the aid system can do is step aside and stop confusing the issue with projects that help small groups and divert attention from the central issue.” – Tony Vaux, Trumped-up Aid and the Challenge of Global Poverty.

Critique of Aid

Evidence vs Evidence

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Let’s get one thing out of the way. This is a blog post and a not-so-subtle plug for an upcoming webinar. Check out our panel discussion – it’s part of Humanitarian Evidence Week. We’ll be working counter intuitively, taking a critical look at the call for the greater use of evidence in humanitarian decision-making.

That humanitarians should use evidence to identify the greatest needs of crisis-affected people seems like a pretty good idea.  Similarly, it seems a rather unassailable proposition to use evidence to decide what works and what doesn’t work, or what works more effectively/efficiently.

In the webinar, we aim to discuss the shortcomings and challenges in the way humanitarians use evidence, or the gaps in its quality. Importantly, that discussion will be placed within the humanitarian context.  These are not lab conditions. Uncertainty cannot be eliminated, and will often remain substantial.  The deep political pressures which characterize humanitarian crisis cannot be sidestepped, and often undermine the technocratic establishment of programming.  It is in this complex, dynamic, politicized, inhumane context that humanitarians must take decisions. To seek evidence that provides final answers is often, then, to seek an unattainable perfection.

As a webinar, the critique of sector’s use of evidence will try to remain concrete. Nonetheless, fuzzier questions abound.  Chief among them: Why it is that this sector will spend somewhere around $29B this year on the basis of faith, on the basis of its self-belief that its efforts are necessary, efficient and effective? Put differently, why has it been OK that we simply imagine our goodness? This strikes me as both a cultural issue and a structural one.  Humanitarian action lacks incentives that push in the direction of needing and therefore developing evidence.  Across the entire chain of command, from the field project to the board of directors, and over the past decades, why have so few been insisting upon proof?  My evidence-free answer: Maybe we don’t really want to know.

Looking further at the issue, recent research has shown that the cultural problem is in part a problem of multiple cultures. Practitioners and academics have very different ways of thinking about evidence, about the questions they wish to answer, and hence the nature of the data they need to collect.  Another issue is that all of this ignores the degree to which the localization of humanitarian response requires the localization of our understanding of evidence and its uses.  I don’t hear anybody talking about the risk of exporting our Western ‘scientific method’, let alone our evidence-challenged ways of working.

Finally, in the big picture, this evidence gap is a cousin or perhaps child of our accountability gap.  As such, how likely is it that we can engineer the closing of this gap by external pressure, such as pressure from donors demanding more evidence, or our own internal resolution to emphasize evidence-based programming?  We’ve seen this before.  At least in terms of accountability, two decades of trying to manufacture accountability has not produced much accountability. Our incentives, structure and culture push in a different direction. To make matters worse, one could argue that the big donors are asking for evidence not to know if things work, but to prove to sceptical politicians that things work. In the end, do these combined pressures – set within an aid sector rife with fudged narratives of success – generate evidence that is biased from within? Another evidence-free conclusion: faith and imagination will get us closer to the effective programming than bad evidence.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Let’s Ideate Our Way Out of Here

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Constructive deconstruction. That is the label placed on an intriguing initiative led by HPG/ODI.  How could I even question the value of disassembling the humanitarian system?  I jumped in. The process is based on design theory, a recently-arrived savior of humanitarian action, in case innovative phone apps and cash don’t live up to their advertizing.

And in that previous sentence lies a clue to design theory’s promise. As a humanitarian no longer in the field, I am drawn to the ills of the sector before those of the people in CAR or Syria.  I am hardly alone in that regard.  To fix that proximity bias: design theory.  Because one doesn’t design a new sofa with the furniture sector in mind. The trick in design theory is to immerse oneself in the user experience; to empathize with them.  The other trick is to prototype, to churn out new ideas, see how they fare, adapt them, see how they fare…

In one exercise, we were asked to ideate. That involves said churning of ideas without the brakes of affordability, feasibility or desirability. I churned. My small group astutely relegated these ideations to the ‘kill’ pile. The beauty of having my own blog site is being able to re-animate them here, for you, even at the risk of generating the ideation equivalent of false news. (This blog not to be confused with a few of my legitimate ideas). In no particular order:

  • Ban innovation. That seemed like a contrarian place to start.  Remember the kid who couldn’t dribble a basketball, couldn’t shoot it, couldn’t play defense, but spent a spectacular amount of time perfecting his alley-oop slam dunk?  That’s the humanitarian system’s relationship to innovation.  As donors dump money into innovation and we all drink the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid of gadgeting our way out of crisis – as the system devotes ever more resources and effort to innovation – it seems further away from getting the basics right.  Here’s an innovation – deliver emergency aid to people in crisis.  Here’s another innovation – engage in protection work as part of your efforts.  And another — ensure that the needs of people determine what you do.  Get those right and maybe we can start celebrating the latest phone apps.
  • Translate it. Mandatory – in the form of contractual obligations to donors, technical agreements (or regulations) with host governments — translation into local language(s) and community-level dissemination of key documents, including project proposals, budgeting and progress reports.
  • Invoice it. More than once at last month’s DRR conference (see previous post) did we hear that governments refused to invest in disaster risk reduction because that was ‘for the internationals’. Yes, that old issue – aid undermining responsibility and building dependency. But it is not just that we perform/replace the work of governments, armed groups and communities. It gets much worse. Take South Sudan, where an MSF hospital might get burned down and looted a few times over the course of a decade. Or where the government has managed to transform international goodwill, billions of dollars and the joy and hope of millions of South Sudanese into violent catastrophe.  That much destruction and squander takes dedication and it takes talent. It takes intent. So why does MSF rebuild its hospitals?  Why do humanitarians continue to provide healthcare when the government didn’t even try, but instead looted the goods? Why do we feed people who were driven into man-made famine?  Well, because that’s often what humanitarians do. That’s our job. But why don’t we do something more?  I mean, something other than shaking our finger and holding press conferences to declare that we are deeply peeved?  How many hundreds of millions has the international community spent in South Sudan due to the gross negligence and wilful misconduct and criminal behaviour of those in power? I say, send them the invoice. Hire some clever lawyers. Get a judgment. Garnish their wages.  Freeze a few bank accounts.  Invoice it even if you never get a cent back. Invoice it out of principle.
  • Context testing. Everyone working in the aid sector in a foreign country (for longer than six months) must pass a test to show that they have grasped the basic history, geography, culture, economics etc. of that country. They must take an induction course run by a local business or university. They must prove that they are capable not just of being neutral (read: completely disconnected), but of being contextual.

[To be continued in a few days]

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Be Careful What You Ask For

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The discussion of localization is beginning to deepen. Here (summarized) is an opening salvo from Charles Lwanga-Ntale, director of the Kenya Academy Centre:  localization often seems to resemble ‘deconcentration’, a process whereby the systems and structures of the existing humanitarian sector are exported downwards.  Certainly an interesting reflection to lead off a conference entitled “Localization and Contextualization of Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (DRRM) in East Africa”. Hosted by the Humanitarian Leadership Academy and the (Kenyan) National Drought Management Authority, the conference mixed government, NGO and academic communities, and placed a particular focus on regional examples of DRRM at the sub-national level, where counties and districts struggle directly with fires, landslides, refugees and drought.

True enough – localization can be many things to many people. Yet the warning on replication was eclipsed as quickly as it was issued. Localization has momentum and it has an engine – from diverse voices a rather uniform set of calls for more capacity building. A palpable hunger for knowledge and learning peppered our two days of discussions. A desire not only for the processes, tools and know-how of the humanitarian sector but also a deep conviction in the power of capacity building to change the behaviour of communities and people.  Have the past five decades of capacity building not curbed our appetite?

I’m not advocating that the global south build a wall (although that argument holds surprising merit), but something needs to keep all these consultants, UN careerists and INGOs busy.  The call seems to aim at training from the very INGOs and agencies that shaped local NGOs into mere implementing partners, and undermined their capacity as autonomous civil society actors. Beyond that, the headlong rush into capacity building raises Trojan Horse concerns. What comes with the sector rebuilding its systems, as Lwanga-Ntale phrased it, “further down the road”?

This much is true. The core of the humanitarian sector – the UN agencies and INGOs elsewhere referred to by many (e.g., me) as an “oligopoly” or “cartel” – has developed an immense amount of experience, know-how and (sadly less publicised) comprehension of what doesn’t work. At the same time, my less optimistic appraisal is that very little about humanitarian action warrants the dash towards replication. It’s not like we are passing on a bandolier full of silver bullets. And that is the good stuff.  What about the bad stuff, which often comes along with the good stuff? Or the bad stuff that we mistakenly think is good stuff?

Take for example the seemingly innocuous technology of the logical framework.  Or the constitution of a humanitarian action upon the foundation of projects. These are exactly the sort of capacity building initiatives the system loves to export. Yet aside from their bureaucratic appeal, they come riddled with proven deficiencies: reducing humanitarian work to tick-box processes and quantifiable targets, output without outcome, short-termism, top-downism, risk aversion, fear of failure, etc.  In the end, a sector full of successful’ projects that leave behind such staggering unmet needs that we needed a Grand Bargain full of transformative ambitions.  Local actors using contextualized logframes? Is that really as far as our ambition travels?

I note that those at the forefront of development thinking (and even a few donors) have embraced the need for Doing Development Differently, exactly by unlogframing it. As agencies scramble to maintain relevance and contracts by delivering capacity building, are we replicating an obsolete and ineffective technology simply because it is so ingrained in our thinking; in how we practice aid?  Isn’t that one of the problems we hope localization and contextualization will solve?

Even beyond the issue of effectiveness, here’s question getting too much focus: What value do does the system want or expect the north to transfer to the south?  Opportunity cost asks a second question: Does that value outweigh a flood of workshops and ‘best practices’ that will bury the south’s opportunity and right to author value for itself? To author a new rather than receiving an old value?

Capacity building strikes me as expedient, but not particularly ambitious. I would think development requires more of localization and contextualization. First and foremost, the space for local actors to respond to problems in their way, and to struggle in the creative process at the same time.  This involves going through frustrations and failures in proximity to communities, to arrive at successes through effort, invention and ownership, not effort, mimicry and dependence. This also involves less of an employment scheme for the existing aristocracy.

Crucially, it is through this struggle that NGOs in the north have built not only their practices, but their institutions as well.  It may be a crap slogan for fast food, but Burger King gets it right, as does Zen Buddhism.  Be your way. Endpoints are less important than pathways. For example, what is the cost of local institutions not developing organically but instead having their financial plumbing supercharged by the global north just so that they can be declared eligible to receive direct grants? Why not change those eligibility standards? This is exactly the sort of mimicry that we should block; a mimicry whereby we reproduce a humanitarian system in which subservience to its business objectives evolved as the dominant structure of the agency, while the operational response to the needs of people became at best secondary, at worst a simple input to a financial transaction.

This call is not for reinventing the wheel. This call is for reinventing the imperfect devices of humanitarian action, because local organizations with a relationship to the community and deep knowledge of the context might just invent something entirely glorious.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

The Localization Surge

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MSF used to run an ad: “The world is our emergency room.”  Snappy, no?  Raises an eyebrow or two if wiped over a photograph, say, of dusty civilians shouldering a wounded neighbour, or starving children swallowed by their swaddling.   It also raises an important challenge to the implementation of the “localization” agenda.  By definition, responding to crisis – to extraordinary levels of need – requires some form of surge, a capacity to scale up aid operations in response to crisis.  The UN- and Western NGO-led humanitarian system already struggles in this regard (see, e.g., MSF’s “Where is Everyone”). Local organizations might struggle further. In how many nations could even the combined NGO community open and maintain 19 surgical theatres, as MSF did within weeks of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, or mount 53 million Euros of operations in about 4.5 months?

The general view seems to be that local organizations can surge, but to a lesser degree.  As Schenkenberg’s study explains, local NGOs often have a very limited ability to scale up. He goes on to describe the causes, such as difficulties in attracting/receiving funds or the unhelpful reality that in an emergency, newly arriving international agencies will often Hoover up staff from the local NGOs. Management capacity for rapid growth poses another stumbling block. While the World Humanitarian Summit’s Grand Bargain and the general strengthening of local NGOs may address some of these issues, they do little to address constraints in the model itself.

Within most Western societies the response to crisis rests upon our fortune, upon the wealth necessary to pay armies of soldiers or battalions of firefighters to sit on their ass – dead capacity that comes to life when the siren sounds. The aid sector can ill afford this model (although they increasingly pay armies of people to do little more than sit on their asses, that is a different blog).  Essentially, surge capacity in the major international NGOs exists because the world is their emergency room, meaning they are able to maintain surge capacity by distributing it globally, and then redistributing it when an emergency arises.

I suppose this marks an economy of scale. That same model works poorly on a national or provincial scale. There may be exceptions – Eastern DRC? South Sudan? – that could support such excess resources, but it is difficult to imagine many.  Note that this economy of the global scale plays a similar role when it comes to expertise.  Major international agencies can maintain in-house expertise along a wide variety of themes – nutrition, shelter, water, sanitation, etc. – because at the global level, there will always be enough business somewhere to keep such expertise busy (to justify the expenditure). Again, national NGOs do not have this economy of scale (or simultaneous diversity of crisis types/themes).

The point is that local NGOs cannot be expected to become local versions of the large international NGOs. No duh, right? And yet the bigger point is that they will nonetheless be judged for it. Rather mercilessly, I fear. They will be judged as deficient because they cannot surge. Deficient because they lack sufficient in-house expertise.  Let’s be clear. These are exactly the sort of weaknesses that the existing system will capitalize upon to claw back its pre-Grand Bargain dominion. Beyond the issue of power and control, these perceived deficiencies generate a truth in which local responders remain dependent on the existing international system for surge, one more nail in the coffin of second-class citizenship.

If we start now, can we work our way out of this?  Can we can imagine some form of standing capacity at the national level? Perhaps we should be investing now in developing/testing a number of approaches to national-level rapid response mobilization. Let’s embrace strategies based on dispersed teams/networks rather than centralized agencies. Perhaps we can imagine local chapters of an organization such as Human Surge? Or maybe we can just begin a conversation, and see where it leads.

Critique of Aid, Politics

A Political Economy of Aid Reform?

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The IRC has recently released a study of reports on studies of the Ebola crisis. Their conclusion is that these reports ‘offer valuable solutions, but they also perpetuate problems by ignoring fundamental realities.’  That is because these reports ‘reflect a persistent weakness of the global conversation about health systems: the erasing of politics.’  And now, for a bit of shameless self-promotion, IRC singled out our ODI report for not falling into this trap, for correctly saying ‘what most reports, and indeed most health systems efforts, failed to recognize: that any effort to improve health systems can only succeed if it is based on an understanding of the politics involved.’

What does the Ebola response tell us about the World Humanitarian Summit?

The fast-approaching World Humanitarian Summit holds the promise of a better humanitarianism, meaning it also holds the risk of repeating the same mistakes that have doomed so many of our good intentions in the past. Of course, there are multiple mistakes that undermine implementation of the humanitarian imperative. Shortcomings and gaps as well. Not multiple, but thousands.  But in some ways, there is only one mistake that needs fixing. We need to replace talking about what we should do with talking about how to do it. And in particular, how to do it given the incentives, architecture, political dynamics and culture which govern the ecosystem of humanitarian aid.

Thus far, and the Ban Ki Moon’s recently released report reinforces this weakness, the Summit process has traded more heavily in attractive ideas than in an analysis of how history might avoid repeating itself.  New and intriguing recommendations surface, and yet they resemble the sector’s standard recommendations, conclusions and lessons learned in the degree that their feasibility is wishful. As the UNSG admits, the measures he proposes are not new, a “testament to the failure to learn from the past and to embrace necessity and change more forcefully.”  (UNSG ¶170).  It does not help that the UN’s #1 humanitarian, ERC Stephen O’Brien, has proclaimed that the system is ‘broke’ but ‘is not broken.’

How do we change our stripes? By ending the gravy train of funding for technical evaluations, dismissing rather than embracing so-called ‘lessons learned’ approaches (see here for one of my previous blogs on lessons identified but not learned), and basing analysis on a thorough political economy of the given situation.  In other words, at the system level and at the organization or project level, stop promoting reforms based on an overly simplistic understanding of the problem. Top aid thinkers Ben Ramalingam and John Mitchell explain it a lot better than I could:

Two broad sets of reasons for this lack of change are widely cited. One is that there are many drivers of change for the sector, of which the reform agenda is only one. Reforms, moreover, are seldom, if ever, the most prominent of the internal drivers. Others include organisational interests, professional norms, donor interests and so on. These serve to reinforce the status quo of the sector. … The second set of reasons relates to the reform efforts themselves. Seldom have change and reform efforts attempted to change the fundamental rules and incentives that underpin humanitarian aid effectiveness.

The paramount question is whether we will do better in the future by examining how and why we failed in the past, replacing the question of what do we want to achieve.  In this regard, the Ebola outbreak and response signaled (once again) the need for a more transformative agenda, one that avoids wishfully imagining the dawn of a new age where global public good trumps political self-interest, and instead addresses both the shortcomings of humanitarian action as well as their underlying causes.

Critique of Aid, Health

Ebola: Lessons not learned

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[Thanks to Aid Leap for publishing this on their website. Check it out here, along with lots of excellent thinking on aid.]

Tomorrow will mark 42 days since the last new case of Ebola in Sierra Leone, meaning the country will join Liberia in being declared Ebola-free. That brings the world one step closer to a victory over Ebola the killer.

But Ebola has another identity – messenger. We listened. It told us that many aspects of the international aid system are not fit for purpose. Many – too many – of the problems the outbreak revealed are depressingly familiar to us.

Pre-Ebola health systems in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia were quickly overwhelmed and lacked even basic capacity to cope with the outbreak. The World Health Organisation (WHO) failed to recognise the epidemic and lead the response, and international action was late. Early messaging around the disease was ineffective and counterproductive. There was a profound lack of community engagement, particularly early on. Trained personnel were scarce, humanitarian logistics capacity was insufficient and UN coordination and leadership were poor.

The lessons learned should also come as no surprise: rebuild health systems and invest in a ‘Marshall Plan’ for development; make the WHO a truly robust transnational health agency and improve early warning systems; release funds earlier and make contracts more flexible; highlight what communities can do, and engage with them earlier. Except these lessons learned haven’t really been learned at all: they are lessonsidentified repeatedly over the past decades, but not learned. 

Why is the system almost perfectly impervious to certain lessons despite everyone’s good intentions? The short answer: these lessons are too simplistic. They pretend that the problem is an oversight, a mistake to be corrected, when in fact the system is working as it is ‘designed’ to work.  The long answer: what is it about the politics, architecture and culture driving the aid system that stops these lessons from becoming reality?

Take a simple idea, like reconstituting the WHO as an intragovernmental agency with a robust mandate to safeguard global public health, and the power to stop an outbreak like Ebola. Sounds great, but not new. So it also sounds like wishful thinking. It does not address the inherent tension between sovereignty and transnational institutions.

Think of it this way: the more robust an institution, the more of a threat it poses to the individual states that are its members, and hence the greater incentive for those states to set limits to its power. WHO was ‘designed’ not to ruffle feathers.

A robust WHO? Can you imagine the WHO ordering the US or UK governments to end counterproductive measures such as quarantining returned Ebola health workers or banning airline flights to stricken countries? It will never happen.

Here is the true lesson to be learned: at a time of public fear and insecurity, it would be political suicide for any government to allow such external interference. The problem isn’t the institution, it only looks like it is; the problem is the governments that comprise it. That is not to say that WHO cannot and should not be improved. It is to say that the solution proposed cannot address the fundamental problem.

Or take a complex idea, such as community engagement. Our Ebola research found that the ‘early stages of the surge did not prioritise such engagement or capitalise on affected communities as a resource’, a serious omission that ultimately contributed to the spread of the disease, and hence a key lesson learned (see e.g., this Oxfam article).

Disturbingly, this is a lesson with a long history. Here, for example, is what the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) found in evaluating the international response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The relevance, virtually word for word, to the situation in West Africa speaks for itself:

The international humanitarian community – with the exception of the organisations already established in Haiti for some time – did not adequately engage with national organizations, civil society, and local authorities. These critically-important partners were therefore not included in strategizing on the response operation, and international actors could not benefit from their extensive capacities, local knowledge, and cultural understanding … This is not a new observation. Exclusion of parts of the population in one way or another from relief activities is mentioned in numerous reports and evaluations.

Why is this lesson so often repeated and so often not learned? Does the answer lie in an aid culture where ‘taking the time to stop and think – to comprehend via dialogue, engagement and sociological research – runs counter to the humanitarian impulse to act’? Our report also discusses a greater concern: the degree to which people in West Africa were treated ‘as a problem – a security risk, culture-bound, unscientific – to be overcome’. 

The ‘oversight’ is hardly an oversight: people in stricken communities ‘were stereotyped as irrational, fearful, violent and primitive; too ignorant to change; victims of their own culture, in need of saving by outsiders’. Perhaps that clash of cultures highlights why we should not expect community engagement to spontaneously break out simply because the problem has been recognised.

Powerful forces work against aid actors engaging with the community during an emergency, leaving us with a lesson that has not been learned even after years of anguished ‘never again’ promises to do better.

Lessons learned are where our analysis of the power dynamics and culture of the international aid system should begin, not where it ends.

Critique of Aid

Humanitarian Effectiveness (2)

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My previous post on this topic prompted a slight twitter buzz, with Patricia McIlreavy astutely pointing out that the aid ‘oligarchy’ isn’t just the big INGOs, but donors and the UN as well.  Dead right on that one.  They all employ wield effectiveness in an exercise of power.

Effectiveness seems to be part of a powerplay within the oligarchy as well. By way of broad generalization, the question of effectiveness functions as a spotlight, used by people in desk chairs to examine the work of people with mud on their boots.  Sounds good, right?  What about the reverse?  When can Mud-on-Boots cast the same light on the work of Deskchair? More importantly, why doesn’t the functioning of the aid system drive Deskchairs to cast the same scrutiny on the mountain of Deskchair work in the system?

It should. The aid system comprises immense resources and people – energy and ‘action’ – at the level above the field project.  Having just sat through one, how do we assess the effectiveness of a conference on effectiveness? Better yet, what has been the collective effectiveness of years of debates, research, publications, workshops, tools, guidelines and previous conferences on effectiveness?  In other words, why don’t those of us thinking about effectiveness shine the light on our own work?

At great effort and cost, the aid system produces a spectacular amount of material designed to improve the effectiveness of aid. How does that translate into lives saved, or suffering alleviated? Might it even work as an impediment? I remember a medical coordinator in MSF telling me that in the span of six months in South Sudan she received over 600 recommendations from headquarters.  No doubt lots of good advice, but what is the combined impact on stressed out and under-resourced field teams? Trying to regulate or rationalize this onslaught of advice leads to discord at HQ, with staff feeling disenfranchised from the operational mission. Put differently, each and every one of those 600+ recommendations represented the aspiration and drive of somebody at HQ seeking their ‘fix’ of field involvement, their dose of ‘making a difference’.  That’s not speculation. That was my fix too.

[Spoiler alert. This post should end right here. The next bit is a real downer. I blame the start of a cold, wet final weekend to England’s so-called summer.]

Shining the spotlight of effectiveness on this work can be disconcerting. Much of my considerable HQ product seems rather obviously designed to have allowed me to be part of the crisis response based on a blind faith in its actual impact.  This is a faith requiring permanent contortion, to avoid noticing the ten degrees of removal between my efforts in London and saving a life in the field.

It looks like this:

Start with a new / improved [fill in the blank: protocols/tools/reports/guidelines/strategies/etc].

  1. Did overworked field teams even read it?
  2. If they read it, did it change practice?
  3. If it changed practice, was it in a positive direction? Was the new thing better than the old thing? No shortage of examples where idealized efforts at improvement collided with reality on the ground.
  4. If it changed in a positive direction, by how much? In other words, did the impact actually save lives and alleviate suffering more effectively? Remember, much of aid work is pretty damned good from a technical perspective – improvement runs into the law of diminishing returns.
  5. If it had a positive impact, did that outweigh the cost/effort/resources that went into producing the improvement? How many meetings and emails!
  6. If it had a positive impact, did it last? Or: did it calcify into a tick-box exercise? Or: did new teams = old ways?

That, believe it or not, is only the first level of analysis.  If it stopped there, the verdict on effectiveness might often come out OK.  The key here is # 5. Here is what the process does not look like: a couple of smart Deskchairs put their heads together, come up with a new [fill in the blank: protocols/tools/reports/guidelines/strategies/etc], show it to their boss, make a few changes and ship it out to the field.

It looks more like this: a couple of smart Deskchairs put their heads together, come up with a new [fill in the blank: protocols/tools/reports/guidelines/strategies/etc] dealing with X, which then unleashes a frenzy of effort to take the good thing and make it very good.  Within the various branches of the organization, there will be ten, maybe twenty or maybe a hundred who have made a heavy investment in X.  Each will need to comment on the new thing. Many comments will replicate each other, others will contradict. Skirmishes will ensue – “communities” vs. “people” in paragraph 7, roll out in August (rain season!) vs November (too late!!!!), and so many more. Complaints will move up the food chain – Why weren’t we involved sooner? You need our approval! Meetings will be held and hair will turn gray. The thing will launch. Now start at Step 1.

And on it goes.  I have been involved in many of these processes. Even the ones avoiding the quicksand of organizational politics involved multiple, duplicative commitments of effort.  More to the point, they involved faith that improvements – objectives phrased more clearly, the addition of a resource annex, newer research included – actually mattered in some way. How could they matter? How could a rephrased set of objectives save lives and alleviate suffering? Faith is beautiful that way.  Proof is not required. A collective investment in the possibility that what we do matters.  The spotlight of effectiveness is unwanted here.  And so is it rarely shined.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

The Problem with Effectiveness (1)

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My first blog sent from the city of Manchester, arguably the birthplace of modern Capitalism: “there are good reasons why those in the Southern Hemisphere view [the big NGOs] as the ‘mendicant orders of Empire’” (Michael Barnett in The International Humanitarian Order). So an appropriate location for an HCRI-Save conference on humanitarian effectiveness.

What is effectiveness? As with many concepts, the further one dissects it, the more wooly it becomes. So a nice generator of the sort of navel-gazing exercises that I find so stimulating and that consume a lot of humanitarian energy.  That said, the discourse of effectiveness warrants being unpacked from a number of angles, especially within a political economy of aid. On that, two initial reflections.

First, the ‘oligarchy’ of global western humanitarian NGOs uses the language of effectiveness to defend its turf, funding and power.  Argument to donors: give us the money, because we are more effective than them.  Here, ‘them’ refers to emerging NGOs from the global south, who are almost by definition going to come up short in terms of effectiveness. After all, it is the oligarchy’s definition of effectiveness in the first place, and the oligarchy has enormous advantages in terms of resources, experience, infrastructure, etc.

Second, the discourse of effectiveness sidesteps ethical issues.  As somebody pointed out in one of the sessions, what is effective and what is right are two different questions.  Those arguing for the supremacy of effectiveness miss the problematic reality of an aid industry that is often ineffective and unaccountable.  Let’s be clear, aid is a tough business, and we should expect that it often falls short of being effective, no different than welfare programs in our home countries, which have regularly failed in efforts to lift the poor out of ghettos, improve public health or reduce drug abuse (for example).  That is the nature of the work.

But there is a fundamental difference. There is something regrettable about our ineffective efforts to do good in our backyard and for ourselves.  But there is something regrettable and unethical with our ineffective efforts to do good in their backyard, with their lives at stake, and yet where they have neither say over how it unfolds nor recourse when it does not go well.