UK starts multi-billion pound review of humanitarian assistance
admin July 16th, 2010
There have been two interesting developments in the past few days relating to the new UK government’s thinking on disasters and disaster relief.
On Wednesday the Financial Times’s Westminster blog speculated that Lord (Paddy) Ashdown was to be appointed by incoming DFID minister Andrew Mitchell to a new humanitarian role as Chair of the Emergency Response Review – and that appointment was confirmed later in the day. And on Thursday DFID itself announced a major tender to review both its humanitarian policy and its delivery.
The review of humanitarian funding has been widely expected. And, according to the FT blog, “It will involve looking at how UK emergency aid is functioning and how it could be improved.” Not before time, many involved in the provision of emergency relief would argue.
Paddy Ashdown is a heavy-hitter, having been leader of the Liberal Democrats from 1988 until August 1999 and then the international High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from May 2002 to May 2006.
Last month an article in The Guardian flagged up one aspect of the review and reported that: “In an attempt to show the public and cabinet colleagues that money being ring-fenced from Treasury cuts will be spent wisely, Mitchell said he wanted to know whether [the £3bn] spent at agencies such as the World Bank and the UN matched up to the government’s anti-poverty objectives and delivered real benefits.”
Now it would appear that the review has moved on to include emergency aid as well as multi-lateral development money. DFID says that it has spent £2.5 billion over the past five years on humanitarian aid.
Then yesterday DFID itself announced a tender for a consultancy to review its Humanitarian Policy. It says, “The need for an evaluation stems both from the volume of DFID’s humanitarian spending and from the dynamic international environment in which the policy is being implemented. New global challenges like climate change are altering the patterns of humanitarian need, while international intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq and a complex international security situation have presented challenges to traditional humanitarian principles. At the same time, there have been ambitious efforts to reform the international humanitarian system, with the creation of new funding channels and coordination mechanisms. Over some years and in a number of situations, humanitarian assistance has offered relief and saved lives. In many situations humanitarian assistance has not offered a solution”.
The last sentence is especially telling – a admission by government that the many hundreds of millions of pounds spent “in many situations…has not offered a solution”.
The evaluation that DFID is now embarking on – which itself will surely cost several million pounds – has to assess three areas:
• Whether the ministry’s humanitarian policy is a relevant policy
• Whether the humanitarian policy has been effectively implemented, and what results were achieved as a consequence
• What factors can explain the results of the policy
What is not clear as yet is the relationship between Lord Ashdown’s appointment and the policy evaluation announced yesterday by DFID. Is the evaluation – which will run through to next April, with evidence being taken from internal and external stakeholders – a way of providing evidence to Ashdown’s Emergency Response Review? Or are they entirely separate processes?
But it is heartening to hear that the new UK government is looking into how emergency relief is provided and is acknowledging that the way that it has been provided up to now may have been, let us say, sub-optimal.
Those interested in applying for the DFID task can find all the relevant documentation here.
- News
- Comments(1)
[...] has already announced a review of DFID’s spending on humanitarian assistance and now he is also consulting on the future of CDC [...]