Humanitarian addictions and how to cure them
Heading in the right direction
After 4 years as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, I remember Louise Arbour complaining about what she saw as the United Nations’ addiction to coordination. Like most addictions, she implied, it leads nowhere good.
Ms. Arbour’s message still resonates among the legions of humanitarian staff at UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, WHO, UNDP, and UN HABITAT — not to mention those at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs — who devote their professional lives to keeping in operational step.
In the field, they are joined by dozens more from the big international NGOs, their local counterparts, and the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement. In the farthest corners of the disaster-hit world, aid workers spend hours every day trying to translate global inter-agency arrangements into sensible action on the ground.
In Jordan, which now hosts 600,000 Syrians, there is apparently one coordinating body for every 12,000 refugees. Relief staff, I am told, have little time to actually meet the affected people because they are so busy talking to one another.
In a non-market environment, with so many competing suppliers of humanitarian goods and services, you need to avoid duplication and generally pull together. But the panoply of coordinating bodies has gotten itself a bad name. Increasingly, they are seen as offering diminishing returns on what is a great deal of time and effort. What’s worse, they embroil national officials in imported red tape that they can ill afford to add to their own.
The result is a humanitarian system that is over-coordinated and under-managed. A senior refugee official in Geneva told me earnestly last week that the focus needs to get back to where it belongs: on delivering aid to people in need.
The challenge is to find management tools that do a better job of aligning effort with outcomes. Successful companies proclaim that their clients are always right, and do everything they can to find out how they can serve them better. If scrupulous attention to this kind of consumer intelligence pays off in the rough and tumble of the market place, why shouldn’t it apply to managing refugee camps and displaced peoples’ shelters?
Increasingly, the importance of capturing the perspective of affected people is recognized and the best run humanitarian programs now include beneficiary input in their planning processes. However, these crucial inputs are mostly pulled together in the early morning fog of an emergency but end up informing implementation long after circumstances – and the way beneficiaries see them – have changed.
What’s missing is continuous tracking of the way affected people perceive key issues, playing back what’s been learned to the people who provide the feedback, and then making the kind of program adjustments that client-focused businesses make as a matter of course.
It’s not rocket science. It’s business 101, and it is time that humanitarian organizations engaged their clients as systematically – and effectively – as the best corporations embrace theirs. It can be heady stuff. Who knows, the practice of listening to beneficiaries and managing to their insights may prove to be that rarest of addictions; one that leads somewhere good.
