Snatching accountability from Brazil’s defeat

Time to up their game

The World Cup roller coaster has moved on but Germany’s defeat of the host team in the semi-finals continues to reverberate as soccer fans try to make sense of what went right for Germany and wrong for Brazil.

In a surge of post match analysis, one piece stands out for me. Simon Kuper’s insights are as relevant to the future of Brazilian football as they are to humanitarian organizations that want to become more effective at what they do.

Here are eight lessons for Brazil that resonate in humanitarian work:

1. Don’t let a crisis go to waste. As Germany pulled itself up by its bootstraps from its own football abyss a decade ago, the humanitarian system must accept that standard approaches to accountability are not working and get serious about adopting ones that do.

2. It does not pay to rest on the laurels of the past.  Not long ago most people saw humanitarian organizations as on the side of the angels. Greater transparency makes that simplistic narrative history. It’s time to look forward, not back.

3. It is not about one humanitarian organization or another – just as it is not about individual football players. The whole humanitarian system needs to rethink its approach to accountability to beneficiaries and stop explaining away its failure to get serious.

4. As the pass is to football, so collecting and acting on feedback is to humanitarian work. The best way forward is to find out what your beneficiaries see as fair and relevant and useful — and then do something about it. Focusing on these first-person perceptions is more effective than obsessing about log-frames and bean counting.

5. Learn from the best players. If humanitarian organizations want to get real about accountability to people affected by man-made and natural disasters, they should focus more attention on star performers in the private sector. Their pursuit of customer satisfaction correlates closely to success.

6. Set the bar high. Humanitarian organizations need to set benchmarks around perceptions of what they do. Tracking and comparing performance is as powerful in refugee camps as on the football field.

7. Put the right incentives in place. If you don’t, all you’ll get is lip service to greater accountability and precious little action. Donors and the public have a big role to play in making this happen.

8. Keep at it. Germany’s victory was not a flash in the pan but the result of years of hard work. The same is true of accountability. Agencies do better if they are prepared to learn from affected people and continuously improve their game.

It is a moment of reckoning in Brazil as the country collectively contemplates how the national team can make a great leap forward before the next World Cup. If the humanitarian system is to avoid Brazil’s fate it should model its performance on Germany’s creative and coordinated line-up.