Development Initiatives Archives - Défis Humanitaires

©UN PHOTO / Marco Dormino , Haiti, A rescuer holds the hand of a survivor of a school collapse.

We often talk about “localizing” aid as an ideal solution for bringing funding closer to the communities concerned, and giving them back control over their future. But in reality, this ambition comes up against a cumbersome and costly chain of accountability: from citizens to states, from states to donors, from donors to international NGOs, and finally at the very end to local organizations, which are often fragile and poorly structured.

At the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, the Grand Bargain initiative set a clear goal: to ensure that at least 25% of humanitarian aid is allocated as directly as possible to local actors by 2020. The idea was to reduce intermediate costs and improve aid effectiveness.

©WHsummit World Humanitarian Summit May 2016 Istanbul Turkey

Standards such as the Sphere Handbook also stress the importance of centering decisions on affected communities, and of strengthening both local involvement and accountability. In practice, however, they remain unclear as to how to proceed, how to simplify procedures and how to empower local players.

As for the Core Humanitarian Standard, it too calls for support for local capacities and accountability to communities, while acknowledging that such good intentions all too often come up against the complex realities on the ground.

I’ve seen it all with my own eyes.

In 2000, in the Gnagna region of Burkina Faso, I joined a team where half-yearly reports and training workshops sometimes took longer than the intervention itself. Meanwhile, our village partners had no accounting system in place, and no staff trained in monitoring and evaluation.

In 2004, with MSF in Sudan, at the height of the Darfur emergency, the administrative procedures of the HAC, UN, donors and NGOs could delay an intervention by several weeks or even months. In the meantime, IDPs were dying of dehydration, or creating their own emergency response to immediately meet the vital needs of their neighbors, with an invisible chain of solidarity.

©Doctors Without Borders, Darfur North Sudan

2005, with the 9ᵉ EDF in Côte d’Ivoire, each disbursement for the emergency program passed from Brussels to the local delegation, then to the State (CONFED), then to the international NGO, then to an umbrella organization, before finally reaching the farmers’ groups. The result? Six months of waiting and dozens of pages of reports and audits for each tranche of funding, totally sidestepping the constraints of the seasonal crop calendar.

Still in 2020 in Mali, an EU resilience program Despite a solid method, the multiplication of reports and bridging mechanisms (clusters, donors, consortium), and despite the establishment of a unified monitoring platform, cumbersome procedures have further slowed down each phase of implementation, and the State is absent from the appropriation and continuity of achievements.

These few examples are only a sample of a much wider experience. They simply show that localization is not just a matter of funding percentages: it’s above all a delicate balance between administrative simplification, shared monitoring tools and strengthening local skills.

Vaccination of livestock ©Hamada (Wandey) AG AHMED

For localization to become a sustainable reality, it is urgent to :
1. Alleviate accountability requirements Harmonize and mutualize expectations between donors, clusters and partners to free up valuable time for field work.
2. Invest genuinely in local capabilities Not just in money, but also in know-how, management and tools, right from the project design stage.
3. Test and deploy innovative technological solutions Blockchain, digital money transfers, collaborative platforms: all levers to fluidify flows and guarantee greater transparency.
4. Building trust The true measure of localization is the ability of local players and communities to make their own decisions, to manage funds themselves, and to be accountable and transparent.
5. Ensuring sustainability Any action can only endure if it is part of a framework of local ownership: either via a structured community system, or through a state mechanism capable of absorbing and sustaining the gains made. Any action that does not come under the heading of “life saving” must be designed to guarantee this prerequisite of ownership. This means, of course, that the time required to prepare and formulate a proposal needs to be extended, with specific funding and dedicated resources that go beyond a simple “proposal writer”.

Rethinking every link in the design and accountability chain, from the taxpayer to the village cell, is the only way to move localization from a mere slogan to a concrete, sustainable transformation driven by the players themselves.

Hamada AG AHMED

Hamada AG AHMED

Expert in Humanitarian/Development Programs and Contextual Analyst.

AG AHMED Hamada (aka “Wandey”) is a French-Malian expert in humanitarian management, contextual analysis and development program coordination. He holds a Master’s degree in Humanitarian Management and Development Action from the University of Paris 12 (UPEC) and a diploma from the Bioforce Institute in Lyon, and has over twenty years’ experience in emergency aid, resilience and local capacity building, both in the field and at the headquarters of leading international organizations.

After initial missions in Central Africa and the Sahel with several international organizations, he successively held strategic positions as Head of Mission, notably for the French Red Cross, before taking up the position of Head of the West Africa Desk, where he oversaw humanitarian and development operations in several Sahelian countries. He led the implementation of integrated programs combining health, nutrition, food security, climate change adaptation and early recovery.

He served as Crisis Analytics Team Leader at Mercy Corps, leading a humanitarian analysis and operational research unit covering the central Sahel (including Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso). In this role, he coordinated the production of strategic analytical reports, based on mixed methodologies, to inform humanitarian responses in complex and unstable environments.

In 2019, he joins Groupe URD in Mali as coordinator of the KEY program, funded by the European Development Fund, where he supports Malian authorities and technical partners on strategic planning, results-based management and capacity building with a strong focus on practice analysis and operational agility.

A committed analyst, he is interested in the structural dynamics and weak signals affecting vulnerable populations. He has led several prospective studies, the most recent of which focuses on the forgotten human and environmental heritage of Lake Faguibine, in collaboration with AFD. He advocates an integrated approach combining local knowledge, foresight tools and scientific data to strengthen resilience and territorial governance in fragile areas.

Articles by Hamada Ag Ahmed previously published in Défis Humanitaires :

The resilience of populations and the importance of (very localised) governance in the Sahel.

Tomatoes put to the test

So here we are. The world before us has collapsed. Humanitarians who see the world through its sufferings could feel it coming, even if the brutality of the shock allows us to be a little dazed. It is all the more violent because the system, already under great external pressure, is collapsing from within. The budget cuts announced by many European countries gave us the beginnings of what was to come.

All of a sudden, we’re left with nothing. For a long time, report after report, we have all known that the concentration of humanitarian funding in the budgets of a small handful of donors represented a danger. Many efforts have been made to diversify, with little result. Why is this?

Development cooperation and humanitarian aid are so ingrained in our systems – the rich help the poor – that we forget why they exist. It’s not really a question of morality. States do not fall within the realm of morality, and if your government spends your tax money to give it to people outside the national community without any obvious return, it is because it has an interest in doing so. When this interest is no longer perceived or perceptible, then there is a problem.

Source: Official Development Assistance (ODA), OECD

America’s ruthlessness should not obscure the fact that many donor countries have been announcing budget cuts for months. But no one is giving any more. Why should we give to countries whose governments, and sometimes whose populations, no longer want to hear from us? Why should humanitarian aid, which is counted in the budget as official development assistance and financed almost exclusively by the countries of the political West, be perceived as neutral? For a long time now, humanitarian neutrality has only been perceived by those who provide it.

With a clear political objective in mind, development aid was designed to enable the least economically advanced, newly independent countries to compensate for the lack of a tax base that would have enabled them to invest in their own physical and social infrastructure. Some countries, particularly in Asia, did this and integrated into the world economy, while others did not. Development cooperation then became a way of getting the least developed countries to converge towards a Western model, not only in economic terms, but also in political and societal terms. Democracy, human rights, gender equality and so on. Can there be economic development and a reduction in poverty outside this model? It would seem so, as surprising as it may seem to us.

Historically, humanitarian aid came from private or religious initiatives. Governments then took over. Since we can’t prevent or stop war, let’s repair its consequences as best we can. Humanitarian aid is as much a reflection of the bad political conscience of rich, democratic countries as it is of our collective good conscience. Funded almost exclusively by government budgets, it has become an industry with no economic competition or ideological adversaries, and therefore resistant to introspection and reform. The marker of success was the constant increase in budgets, and the increase in budgets led to a concomitant increase in the field of humanitarian aid. This cycle has been broken, what are the consequences?

In eastern Chad, the WFP distributes food to new arrivals from Sudan. Photo WFP/Jacques David

The countries of the ‘South’, now very sensitive to external signs of sovereignty, do not want aid, but investment, the only way to stay afloat and develop economically. They have much more choice than before, and are mixing and matching their partnerships according to their interests, sectors and offers. Imagine a country negotiating arms and education with one partner, roads with another, and technical assistance with yet another. Humanitarian aid is rarely negotiated, but it comes largely from the same donors and players.

The countries of the North, now very sensitive to their spending, do not want to help, but to invest, as the only way of maintaining their geopolitical and economic standing. The focus seems to be on the transition from aid to investment, with this summer’s Seville summit on financing for development as the high point of the forthcoming reforms. This means that the focus will be on countries with economic development potential, and that the others will be satisfied with humanitarian aid.

This is how the ‘global Gateway’ model has mapped out a path that is the only valid and politically audible one. The ‘differentiated approach’ to be applied to the most fragile contexts is far from being defined, and it is no coincidence that ECHO is nominally in charge of it, nor that the Commission has postponed the development of an integrated approach to fragility. It is not a priority.

Source : U.S. Foreign Assistance By Agency, ForeignAssistance.gov

So what are we changing?

Aid reform cannot really avoid thinking about why we want to help and how. This is no longer intangible, and the arguments of the twentieth century no longer hold water, either in the South or in the North. Even if humanitarian budgets are better protected from cuts, solidarity NGOs will have to rethink themselves in terms that are audible. Preservation of values or creation of added value? What is on offer? Perhaps this is what we need to redefine, beyond the ‘capacity to manage programmes in complicated areas’ that defines the humanitarian world. Human solidarity still exists, and should continue to exist. Whether this necessarily translates into programmes for the distribution of goods or services on behalf of donors is perhaps open to discussion.

Of course, it’s the closest communities that make the first effort, and sometimes the biggest. Because they are there on the spot, because they themselves have been affected by a disaster or conflict, they mobilise. This effort is not standardised, but it is often adapted. Local organisations exist, and they mobilise all the better because they are known and recognised in the affected communities before the shock. In this respect, ‘localising aid’ is one of the biggest sea snakes in humanitarian aid. But the concept is flawed. Localising aid’ implicitly means that aid is primarily international, but that local actors – often conceived solely in terms of local NGOs – need to be involved. But if international players are providing essential volumes of aid, who said that they alone were responsible for helping victims everywhere? What if our role was not so much to ‘localise’ aid as to support local efforts on their own terms? Because the capacity of local players is built up in the same way as that of international players: by the number of operational responses they have decided on, managed, financed and evaluated, and by the number of mistakes they have made.

This is undoubtedly where one of the changes lies. At the level of mentalities. We need to ask ourselves who on the ground has the capacity to act and how we can help these initiatives, technically and financially, making the most of our technical and logistical expertise, rather like the many very local development NGOs that were very active in the 1960s to 1980s, before the humanitarian steamroller drained all resources. It’s a different approach, based on partnership rather than immediate action, but perhaps one worth exploring. Could we do it?

Cyprien Fabre is head of the “crises and fragility” unit at the OECD. After several years of humanitarian missions with Solidarités, he joined ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian department, in 2003, and held several positions in crisis contexts. He joined the OECD in 2016 to analyze the engagement of DAC members in fragile or crisis countries. He has also written a series of “policy into action” and “Lives in crises” guides to help translate donors’ political and financial commitments into effective programming in crises. He is a graduate of Aix-Marseille Law School.