Accountability to affected people made simple
Valerie Amos and Jasmine Whitbread are not easily fobbed off and it will be interesting to see how their peers in the humanitarian system respond to their challenge to get real about accountability to affected people (AAP).
In a refreshingly frank message to Inter-Agency Standing Committee principals – the heads of the biggest UN and NGO humanitarian agencies – the U.N.’s Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos and Save the Children International CEO Jasmine Whitbread voice disappointment with follow-up on the committee’s commitments on AAP. They call on their colleagues to explain the challenges they face in integrating and operationalizing these precepts, and ask how they plan to do better in future. Responses are due by September 30.
Sadly, this clarion call is unlikely to prompt much more than self-reported lists of piecemeal things the agencies say they are already doing or plan to do more of … a participatory design process here, a grievance mechanism there, a questionnaire somewhere else.
Part of the problem is that there are so many plausible avenues to accountability. You can claim you are doing one or more of a range of activities and effectively shut up calls from people like Amos and Whitbread. But there’s more to the disappointing performance of the humanitarian agencies. A crucial factor is that the system is long on accountability standards and commitments – things the agencies should do – and woefully short on means to verify they are doing them.
Despite promising good practice examples and hard evidence that AAP makes a difference, the last few years have shown that exhortations and voluntary compliance are not enough. How then to move things forward? I am a believer in overcoming complexity with simplicity. In this instance a two-part approach. First, encourage the donors, who alone have the necessary clout, to set the accountability bar high enough to rule out business-as-usual. Second, place the onus on the agencies to respond in a way that truly makes a difference.
It implies moving away from prescriptive standards and instead letting a thousand accountability flowers bloom. The necessary counterpart to this approach is to simply and systematically ask the end-users of aid how things are panning out for them on the ground. They are well placed to know accountability when they experience it and should get a bigger say. The rest of us must step back and enable their voices to play an optimizing role. If the pressures from donors are sufficient and the feedback process transparent enough, the agencies will soon be performing a lot better than they are now.
One thing is to get the donors on side. The other is for the aid agencies to realize that accountability to affected people not only helps them do their jobs better but frees them of a lot of bureaucratic hassle. At the moment aid staff are weighed down by time-consuming and mostly ineffective reporting requirements. If light touch accountability practices could lessen that burden, which they can, the people at the front lines will become accountability’s best advocates.
Something like this has already happened in the consumer services world. As customer satisfaction surveys became a popular tool with companies, the numbers of questions asked exploded and companies got bogged down in the resulting data. In the late 1990s Fred Reichheld began to search for a single question that would yield all a company needed to know. Today the Net Promoter Score movement is the fastest growing way of surveying consumers, with its signature question: “How likely would you be to recommend this company or product…”
In the consumer services space, market pressures drove adoption of the simple Net Promoter Approach. Companies knew that they needed a better tool. Aid agencies, on the other hand, won’t become complicit simplifiers unless donors insist that the half-hearted compliance we see today is no longer an option. They should set the ball rolling by agreeing to cut back on their appetite for quantitative activity reports if, in return, the agencies can show they are consistently seeking and, this is the key, systematically using credible feedback from affected populations.
Deferring to people best placed to verify performance in the humanitarian space would likely trigger a more useful response than the reports from the IASC agencies that will soon hit the inboxes of Valerie Amos and Jasmine Whitbread.
