The key problems facing humanitarian operations
admin February 11th, 2010
Yesterday’s blog post looked at the size of the humanitarian sector as seen through the prism of a new report from ALNAP – ‘The State of the Humanitarian System’. This is a pilot study (details here) for what is hoped will be a regular assessment of how the sector is performing.
Aside from the interesting data on its size, it is also illuminating to see what the key problems are from the perspective of the people who work in humanitarian operations. Number one amongst their concerns, by a long way, was ‘Poorly coordinated response efforts and lack of effective leadership’. This was cited by 150 respondents.
The next most serious concern was ‘Inadequate funding’, with 90 responses. Following on, with 40-50 responses each were ‘Insecurity’, ‘Poor programme quality not meeting Sphere standards’, ‘Too few aid workers to meet needs’ and ‘Limited access to areas and populations’.
It has to be said that you could go into any company or organisation in the UK and you would be likely to find criticism of the senior management. Every corporal does indeed carry a field-marshal’s baton in his (or her) briefcase or handbag, and many are not shy to say (especially in an anonymous survey) how their leaders are making a mess of things.
But even so, the predominance of this particular complaint about coordination and leadership should give both donors and senior managers in aid agencies pause for thought.
There has been a lot of effort put into improving coordination since the Tsunami, with the implementation of the cluster system in particular, but it is not yet clear exactly how much progress has been made on the ground. The Haiti earthquake will certainly have tested any new (and hopefully improved) systems to destruction and evaluations of the responses to that disaster will probably be very revealing.
In their conclusion the authors say, “It is important to remember the inherent limitations of the enterprise, and to judge it within contexts of what is possible rather than against ideals of humanitarian perfection…Evaluations consistently find aid getting to people who need it and making a difference in enabling them to survive and recover during and after crises”.
What this report, and to its credit the whole humanitarian sector, addresses head on is how things could be done better in the future.
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[...] overwhelmingly cited ‘Poorly coordinated response efforts and lack of effective leadership’ as the key problem facing humanitarian relief efforts, Sir John Holmes, the head of the U.N. Office for the [...]