Global Humanitarian Assistance 2012 – what are the emerging trends?

Ed Cairns (right), Oxfam’s senior policy adviser on humanitarian advocacy, reviews the new 2012 Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) report, released yesterday 

Like all landmark reports, the GHA’s greatest value is not really in what it says about the year under review. It’s what it reveals about the longer-term trends facing the humanitarian world.

This is particularly true with GHA 2012, which would be horribly easy to misread – and hence celebrate 2011 as the year when humanitarian crises ‘returned to normal’ after the megadisasters of the previous year. To some extent, of course, that is true. 2011 saw no Haiti earthquake, and floods in Pakistan that were less severe and very much less reported. Partly as a result, the year’s UN appeals sought $2 billion less than in 2010.

But what’s most interesting is not what’s changing from one year to the next. It’s what’s changing in the medium-term as donors cut budgets – and in the long-term as needs continue, and probably increase.

Last month the 2012 DATA report on total aid spending (not just humanitarian) showed how the crisis in the Eurozone has driven cuts in aid. When it comes to humanitarian funds, it’s no surprise to find the biggest cuts in the countries at the heart of the crisis. GHA 2012 shows the largest reductions in humanitarian spending between 2008 and 2010 from, among others, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Greece and the EU’s own institutions.

Will those cuts deepen as the Eurozone struggles on? Who knows? But they sit uncomfortably beside the humanitarian needs we already face in semi-permanent crises, and – in the long-term – the rising number of people exposed to disasters. Late last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that, even without climate change, the risk from disasters will increase in many countries as more people are exposed to extreme weather. And Oxfam’s own research shows that, where records are available, reported weather-related disasters in developing countries have already increased by 233 per cent since 1980. At the same time, few of the top recipients of humanitarian aid – like Sudan and Afghanistan – seem to have very good prospects of sustainable peace.

GHA 2012 reminds us how difficult it is to assess the scale of even current crises. And any projections into the future are fraught with uncertainty. But as one of my colleagues in Oxfam put it a couple of years ago, when pondering the impact that climate change will continue to have, “it doesn’t look good”.

The answer is not just more humanitarian aid – though that is desperately needed. And GHA 2012’s most arresting statistic is that last year saw the biggest shortfall – 38 per cent – in UN appeals for a decade.

Any solution must include far more investment in resilience than today’s still small amounts, and in the capacity of states and civil society to prepare and respond to disasters.

A greater and greater proportion of humanitarian action is likely to come from within developing countries themselves. And if the report’s most telling statistic is that 38 per cent shortfall, its most telling comment is Judith Randel’s call in the Foreword for better data on that domestic assistance.

That must be a big priority for the future. The GHA reports are already an invaluable resource for everyone involved in humanitarian action. So far, their focus has inevitably been on international aid, rather than global or total humanitarian aid, and the difficulties of collecting data on national responses are obvious. But it would be wonderful to think that the GHA of, say, 2015 will be able to say much more about that domestic action.

Till then, GHA 2012 is a vital source of data, analysis and comment – a reminder of how much has been achieved, and, most importantly, a warning of how many needs are still unmet, and how much more work is still to be done.

Ed Cairns is Senior Policy Adviser at Oxfam GB and author of Oxfam’s latest overview of their humanitarian thinking, Crises in a new world order: challenging the humanitarian project

And here’s the top 20 humanitarian aid recipients, 2001-10 (click twice to expand)

Top 20 humanitarian aid recipients 2001-10

Big Decisions today on Food Crisis in the Sahel: here’s the background

A high level collection of EC and member states officials, UN big cheeses and West African leaders are meeting in Brussels today to discuss the unfolding crisis in the Sahel, where a disaster is looming. Some communities already find themselves in crisis, others see disaster on the horizon as an early lean season approaches and the annual ‘hunger gap’ lengthens. Overall, 18.4 million people are vulnerable to the food crisis, 6 million of whom are ‘severely food insecure’ – in a serious state, but falling short of outright famine (see table for March 2012 figures).

The meeting will focus on the serious funding gap. Only about half the estimated $1.6bn has been committed so far, despite the alarm bell having been rung months ago. The meeting will also launch a ‘partnership for resilience’, which is what I want to focus on here.

It is this focus on resilience, systems and long-term solutions that stands out when reading Oxfam’s most recent briefing on the Sahel crisis and comparing it to our ‘Dangerous Delay’ analysis on the flawed response to the crisis on the other side of the continent, in East Africa. Restrictions on migration and trade, high food prices, a failure to invest in small-holder agriculture and safety nets, and the conflict in Mali and even the international arms trade are significant contributory factors, alongside the failure of the rains.

The Sahel briefing focuses on the need not just to find emergency money, but to treat crises as long-term and cyclical, rather than one-off disasters (300,000 children in the region die of malnutrition, even in a ‘good’ year). The paper’s recommendations for building resilience to such cycles are worth quoting in full:

“Firstly, with food often available on the market but inaccessible due to high prices, developing food reserves in vulnerable regions will be critical not only in enhancing access to affordable stocks in order to rapidly respond to future crises, but also to help governments prevent and manage food price volatility. ECOWAS recently committed to defining a regulatory framework for the development of a regional system of food reserves, a process that should be supported by donors, including at the G20 meeting in June 2012.

Secondly, national policies and programmes promoting social protection measures and social safety nets are needed for the most vulnerable people and communities, especially children, pregnant and breastfeeding women and the elderly. This will increase the long-term resilience of households, improve the nutrition of children, pregnant and breastfeeding women, and lessen the impact of the future droughts. The meeting of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in Rome in October 2012 provides a key opportunity to promote and support these investments.

Thirdly, a change is needed to the system of producing and consuming food, moving away from a focus on investing in a limited range of export crops and towards investment in small-scale producers who can increase local food production and break the dependency on fragile and expensive international markets. This should include allocating at least 10 per cent of national budgets to agriculture, as promised in the 2003 African Union Maputo Declaration, but greater attention should also be given to ensure this assistance is targeted to small-scale farmers, particularly women.”

The response to date has in some important ways been better than in previous such crises: the early warning systems functioned relatively well; governments in the region raised the alarm quickly; and some donors mobilised funds more quickly than in the past. Regional governments, Niger in particular, are showing more leadership, as is the regional body, ECOWAS. But such leadership remains largely absent in some of the region’s more fragile, conflict-ridden states. There are some good policies in place, such as an ECOWAS charter for preventing food crises, but implementation is another issue. There is still a long way to go – the cup is perhaps a quarter full.

Despite the funding shortfall, donors are also doing better, with ECHO, the European Union’s humanitarian body, the star of the show in terms of acting early, before the horrifying footage hits the TV screens.

Looking ahead, the peak of the crisis is expected in July/August, with three potential complicating factors:

- A possible African Union or ECOWAS military intervention in Northern Mali to deal with armed groups there (shades of Somalia, in terms of security/anti-terrorism playing havoc with the humanitarian response)
- Predictions of lower than average rainfall (due from now to end August) in Western Sahel, which could tip Western Mali and Senegal into protracted crisis instead of recovery
- A locust epidemic, mainly in Niger and Mali, could be devastating, but is hard to deal with because of restricted access to Mali and Libya.

Such a long term shift in thinking on humanitarian response is vital, but will be of little comfort to the 18 million hungry people in West Africa – they will be looking to the meeting in Brussels today to come up with cash as well as policies. Click on Oxfam’s Sahel campaign to keep up the pressure.

The IPCC Special Report on Disasters and Adaptation: more than just climate science

Guest post from one time Oxfam research team member Arabella Fraser, who is currently in the Department for International Development, London School of Economics, writing a PhD on climate risk and vulnerability in informal urban settlements. She is also a consultant on climate adaptation and development issues, working most recently on urban adaptation planning in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

The recent publication of the IPCC’s full SREX report (or Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation) certainly provides researchers and practitioners with a 594 page T-REX of a document to grapple with. The product of 220 authors and over 18 thousand reviewers, it is a ‘state of the science’ juggernaut to fill the gap between the 4th (2007)and 5th (2014) overall IPCC Assessments.

The SREX has already generated much-needed headlines about the increased confidence of climate scientists that extreme weather events can be linked to man-made climate change, and the need for investment and improvement in disaster risk management (some of its authors talk about these main messages here).

It would be a shame, though, if the read-out by the wider climate and development community stopped there. Importantly, what SREX does is shift the terrain of IPCC reports onto a better integration of lessons from the social as well as the physical sciences. This was the first time that the IPCC’s Working Groups One (Physical science) and Two (Vulnerability and adaptation) had worked together on a single document. For the first time they joined forces with experts in disaster risk management. The result draws on a long scholarship in disaster studies that has stressed the unnaturalness of ‘natural’ disasters – climate events only become disasters, after all, when vulnerable people are in the way. One of the key messages is that increased exposure of populations and human assets is driving increased disasters, alongside changes in climatic events (see fig).

SREX also changes the definition of vulnerability used since the 4th Assessment to make more explicit the role of social context, independent of physical events. The semantic change may be a tweak, but it matters. The IPCC’s definition has been ubiquitous in adaptation planning documents. The way ideas about vulnerability are framed also influences international discussions. It will be interesting to see if and how this affects debates about the scope of adaptation funding and the relationship between adaptation and development finance.

Alongside this ‘shift to the social’ SREX turns attention to all that we know about ‘the local’, which comes before the chapters on national and global issues. The report pulls in studies about the way people understand the risks they face and the importance of engaging with this knowledge. It finds both ‘high agreement’ and ‘robust evidence’ for the fact that integrating local knowledge with scientific knowledge improves disaster risk management and adaptation. Communicating risk means, in SREX, sitting down and sharing knowledge rather than simply telling people that they are at risk and what to do about it.

Where now? Too often social vulnerability analysis has been the exclusive preserve of NGO and community work, falling out of the purview of government planners. The problem is partly one of methods. It is a major challenge to incorporate contextual, multi-dimensional, dynamic and often qualitative analysis about risk and vulnerability into planning and evaluation frameworks that mostly demand numbers and high aggregation. In the context of climate change, SREX highlights the benefits of using human ‘storylines’

'Human story lines': farmers in Bolivia

alongside model projections. But what people tell us about how they coped in the past does not necessarily prepare them for an uncertain future, while their ability to cope may also have changed.

No surprise to readers of this blog, bringing what we know about the social and physical worlds together in practice is also a political as well as technical exercise. Not least because it means going beyond risk management policy to seek more structural changes, which get at the fundamental causes of exposure and vulnerability. SREX doesn’t avoid the fact that these causes are often institutional, governmental even. It sets out the evidence for more participation and more decentralisation, but also linking sub-national work better to governance at higher scales. It is hard to imagine a state-ratified report getting much more political than this. At ODI’s event to launch the report summary last year author Mark Pelling alluded to the difficulty of getting even these issues established in the text. Development workers and theorists will have much to add, though, about the workings of power and exploitation in the most vulnerable parts of the world.

Of course, there is more to take from SREX. But that’s my aid to digestion.

What’s the connection between power, development and social media?

This post also appears on the World Bank’s People, Spaces, Deliberation governance blog, although sadly, without the neanderthal

I recently gave a talk about ICT and Development at the annual Re:Campaign conference in Berlin, organized by Oxfam Germany. Anyone who knows me will realize that this is a bit odd – despite being a blogaholic, I am actually Rubbish At Technology. In front of 300 trendy,

So let me explain how Facebook works.......

young (sigh) i-thingy wielding activists, I felt like a Neanderthal at a cocktail party. Still, at least the fear of being shamed up finally got me tweeting two weeks before the conference.

I decided to make a virtue of necessity and set out some core processes in development, and then reflected on what ICT does/doesn’t contribute. Why take this approach (apart from being a techno-caveman, that is)? Because there’s too much magic bulletism in development –microfinance, GM crops and now ‘cyber utopianism’. What all of these have in common is that they are too often presented as ‘get out of jail free’ cards, delivering development without all the messy business of politics and struggle. At best, new technologies shift power balances, sometimes favourably, sometimes not, but they don’t replace the process of struggle in development.

The core of my talk was to take the ‘four powers’ model of power within, power with, power to and power over and see how the spread of IT affects each of them in turn.

Power within – that lightbulb ‘get up, stand up’ moment when an individual becomes aware of their identity and rights – is often the first step on the path of social and political change. It can come through conflict, education, conversation or through old technologies such as community radio for indigenous minorities – Quechua, a language spoken by some 10 million people in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, is rarely heard on television and is completely absent from the Internet. By contrast, 180 radio stations offer programmes in Quechua. What I haven’t yet seen is much link between social media and power within (do correct me if I’m wrong – this really is a first draft piece). Possible future avenues include distance learning, but often what is needed is low tech education – trained and paid teachers, chairs, textbooks, ending user fees.

Power With – newly awakened people finding common cause with their fellows through social movements, faith-based organizations, trades unions, political parties etc etc. In this effort to build collective organization, IT can play a role, whether by facilitating access to information, or lowering the costs and barriers to organizing (think twitter and FB in Tahrir square). It can also help bring dispersed communities together in new and powerful ways – for example the truly impressive diaspora networks of Somalis and others that rely heavily on social media, or one of my favourite Oxfam projects – pink phones in Cambodia.

Power To/Power Over involves aware, organized people expressing their needs and demands, and exercising some form of control over those in authority, first by putting the right issues on the table, and then getting the decisions and resources that are needed. Overall, I think this is where IT has most to offer. Some examples:

Getting news of human rights violations out fast, when urgency is vital, can alert national governments, international organizations and others.

Crowd-sourcing information so the authorities can’t deny what is going on, e.g. the Stop Stock-outs campaign, or Ushahidi: “Ushahidi”, which means “testimony” in Swahili, was a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Since then, the name “Ushahidi” has come to represent the people behind the “Ushahidi Platform”.

Markets: The biggest gains for farmers and fishers have come in access to credit and to agricultural market info.

Feedback and Accountability: Gaining access to official information in a comprehensible format is a core aspect of accountability, but IT can also increase the accountability of northern NGOs and campaigns to those in the South – e.g. the great work by Al Jazeera on the Kony2012 video.

All well and good, but IT is emphatically not a magic bullet. Malcolm Gladwell’s distinction between strong and weak ties is really helpful

Now that's what I call transformational technology....

here. Strong ties are those deep bonds of trust and comradeship that allow you to ‘walk towards the guns’. Weak ties are the shallower, broader bonds that convince you to join the demo or sign the petition. IT undoubtedly helps with the latter, but no-one ever decided to risk their neck because of Twitter.

And let’s not forget ‘Bad Power’. IT can move everything in the wrong direction – strengthening elites, enhancing a culture of surveillance and control, excluding poor people and communities. Here’s a nice 10 minute RSAnimate talk by Evgeny Morozov on the dark side of IT as a corrective.

In the rich countries, ICT undoubtledly has huge potential for transforming two key aspects of the North’s role in development: Do No Harm and Aid. ‘Do No Harm’ covers everything from climate change to intellectual property restrictions to the arms trade. In all of those IT can improve the speed and scale of campaigns, link up citizens in the North to the consequences of their governments’ or societies’ decisions in developing countries, and challenge pervasive ‘hegemonic discourses’ on everything from resource-intensive growth to privatization of social services.

On Aid, there’s clearly been growing interest in transparency and accountability (e.g. IATI), but the EITI (aargh, acronym-poisoning) provided a cautionary lesson that supply (of information) doesn’t simply create demand (for accountability). IT plus growing disenchantment with institutions, is also likely to drive interest in ‘disintermediation’ in aid, linking punters directly to poor people (GiveDirectly) or budding entrepreneurs (Kiva). At the business end, fast money disbursement via mobiles can massively improve disaster response. IT can also help us plug the realtime data gap after shocks hit.

Final thoughts? For the technophiles like those gathered in Berlin, the key thing is to remember, however platitudinous it may sound, that ICT is a means not an end – are you clear what the end is? What is your theory of change, beyond scattering new kit everywhere?
In developing countries, the key is how poor/excluded people adopt, adapt and use technology: start there, and you’ll find exciting possibilities (see Twaweza in East Africa). Be too tech-led, and you may well end up in a dead end.

As you’ve probably realized, I have a long way to go in linking up the power analysis and IT worlds, so any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

And if you have 30 minutes to spare, you can see me here

Theories of (climate) change and a nice song about complex causal chains……

Spent a happy half day with the climate change team at IDS last week, at the invitation of the team leader Matthew Lockwood, who besides being a climate change star (see his Political Climate blog), wrote The State They’re In, a brilliant book on the politics of African development. We were exploring the theories of change (explicit and implicit) that underpin their work, and the conversation reminded me of similar discussions in the NGOs (only with a bit more Foucault). A few observations:

The discussion was useful because although research is undoubtedly essential in improving our understanding of climate change, its impact, how people are adapting, new ideas for mitigating carbon emissions etc etc, if that research is to influence policy, researchers need to think hard about the political environment and the complex transmission belt that determines whether research findings do or do not influence policy.

The IDS team  seem to have three main targets in mind for their research and advice – donors, states in developing countries and social movements. But thinking on the donors and social movements is much more developed than on the state, with some real ambivalence about whether they see the state as part of the solution or the problem (as you’ve probably worked out by now, I definitely think it has to be at the heart of any long term solution on both development and environment).

Their theories of change seemed attuned to a steady state world – a steady accumulation of evidence, research and nifty policy papers will lead to incremental but in the end transformative (whatever that means) change. Wrong. In reality, most such evidence and research will be ignored until moments of opportunity arise (probably linked to massive natural disasters in powerful countries, but also elections, changes of leaders etc etc). So you need a mechanism to identify those moments, drop everything, rehash and update existing research and advice, and get your thinking rapidly into the hands and heads of post-shock policymakers desperate for answers. That is not going to be achieved through the usual slow grind of journal articles and academic seminars.

The approaches also seemed based on the assumption of positive change, when climate change in particular is currently marked by stasis rather than change – I would have liked to hear more about how IDS is trying to understand why things aren’t changing (north and south) and how research could perhaps help unblock the sources of inertia.

As always in these discussions, success partly comes down to what kind of people we need to be to ensure research has some influence. A lot of what makes research successful in influencing policy is down to networking skills and influencing. But as Malcolm Gladwell so graphically describes in The Tipping Point, we are not all natural networkers, and I’ve met a fair few academics who really struggle with that kind of interaction. In particular, if you’re going to influence elites and governments, you’re much more likely to succeed if you can like and empathise with them, rather than say through gritted teeth ‘OK, I’d much rather be down with the grassroots, but I am now going to engage with the enemy.’ For some reason the enemy in question doesn’t find that very appealing…….

The change processes being discussed often seemed largely linear and purposive rather than complex, random and chaotic – but at this point I will leave it to team member Tom Tanner and his memorable song on the traumas of proving impact.

If you want to check the references in Tom’s song, they are:

1.     Mitchell, T., Tanner, T.M., and Lussier, K. (2007) ‘We know what we need’: South Asian women speak out on climate change adaptation. Institute of Development Studies and Action Aid International, Johannesburg.

2.     Bahadur, A., Ibrahim, M. and Tanner, T.M. (2010) The Resilience Renaissance? Unpacking of resilience for tackling climate change and disasters. Strengthening Climate Resilience Discussion Paper 1. Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK.

3.     Tanner, T.M. and Allouche, J. (2011) ‘Towards a new political economy of climate change’, IDS Bulletin 43(3) pp1-14.

That’s academia for you – even the songs have footnotes…….

How will political and economic shocks drive social change? Please help me write a paper…..

Something almost unprecedented has occurred – I’ve finished an article early. Oxfam Peru is a redoubt of intellectuals and every year publishes an annual collection of essays on the state of Peru and development in general. This year they’ve asked me to focus on shocks and change, so I’ve donned my false beard and cardigan and had a go. Here is a short summary of a longer (2,500 word) paper. All suggestions for improvements welcome, either based on the summary below or the full paper.

As we face a world where multiple overlapping shocks (political, economic, ecological) seem inevitable, it is worth considering (if only to cheer ourselves up), what underlying changes they are likely to trigger.

In 2012, we can foresee some shocks – the ‘known unknowns’ in Donald Rumsfeld’s useful typology (about the only worthwhile aspect of his legacy). Financial crises are likely to continue their forty year trend and become more frequent and more catastrophic, with the Eurocrisis the most prominent of today’s risk hotspots. For many poor communities, repeats of the food price spikes of recent years would be even more devastating than financial meltdown. Thirdly, the current rate of climate change appears to be outpacing even the most pessimistic projections of climate scientists, promising further increases in the frequency and severity of ‘extreme weather events’ . The international community currently appears paralysed in response, but eventually a rethink of humanity’s relationship to nature is the only way to avoid catastrophe.

First, the ongoing global financial crisis. Looking forward, the most likely source of further financial turmoil is a disintegration of the Eurozone and ensuing recession. The most immediate impact outside Europe would be on those countries most integrated with the EU economy (e.g. North Africa and Eastern Europe and Central Asia). Were the Eurocrash to lead to another drying up of global financial flows, there would be wider knock on effects on financially integrated economies in Latin America and elsewhere, via bank shutdowns and the collapse of trade finance as in 2008.   A euro-crash might revive interest in re-regulation, but it could also undermine the global standing of positive aspects of the European model, such as inclusive state welfare systems and labour rights. There are risks and opportunities in abundance here, and progressive movements will need to engage far more with issues of financial architecture and regulation in the years to come.

Rises in food prices, like those in transport fares, have a long history of triggering social unrest and the recent spikes are no exception. Such unrest has been credited as a factor (one among many) in the insurrections of the Arab Spring, has prompted deep changes in how governments think about food, leading to greater attention to building national food security and reducing dependence on volatile international trade. While this has some positive aspects – for example, an increasing level of investment in smallholder agriculture in many countries – it has several extremely negative ones. Countries with money but little food production have resorted to a series of land grabs to obtain long-term access to food supplies, often at the expense of local populations. Food exporters have reacted to high prices by slapping on export bans in the hope of bringing down their domestic prices and securing supply, thereby pushing up world prices still further, to the detriment of food import-dependent countries. Again, progressive coalitions will play an essential role in seizing opportunities and minimising risks created by food shocks.

Since the Second World War, massive economic growth based on fossil fuels has brought material benefits to millions. But now we are entering an age of global scarcity – of water, fertile soil and, above all, carbon. Here the historical record on shocks and change is not encouraging. Much of the technology required is already there or nearly there. But the only precedent for this kind of rapid technological transformation is the wholesale shift of industrial plants to producing arms during wartime. And the difference in this case is that we cannot wait for external shocks to trigger action. By the time sufficient climate chaos strikes the main carbon emitters, forcing them to rework their economies, it will already be too late for much of the world’s tropical belt (where its poorest people live) and the polar ice caps.

Extreme weather events, perhaps especially those in the geopolitically powerful countries, will provide key opportunities to press for the kinds of change required. Progressive forces will need to become more adept at recognizing and seizing such chances as they arise.

Conclusion
Certain underlying challenges emerge from all three forms of shock. Whether through an accident at work, sickness, crime, drought or flood, the lives of poor people are characterised by the almost total absence of security and safety nets. Increasingly, the attention of governments and aid agencies is turning to ways of tackling such vulnerability by building nascent welfare systems in poor countries. This is echoed at a global level in the efforts to stabilise the wild gyrations of financial markets. Dampening volatility (and ameliorating its impacts) is likely to play an increasing role in development thinking.

A second overarching challenge is inequality. In a world of ecological limits, trickle-down economics that feeds the poor with crumbs from an ever-expanding cake is no longer an option. Whether within or between countries, distribution and redistribution of wealth, power and opportunity within a bounded system will become more urgent and important than ever. The resolution of such debates will be highly political, requiring profound shifts in the relationships between less and more powerful communities and individuals. It may not be a peaceful process.

Responses to both financial, food price and ecological shocks require a combination of global coordination and local action. Global coordination is essential if countries are not to indulge in beggar-they-neighbour tactics that become self defeating; and local interaction between active citizens and effective states lies at the heart of successful development.

And successful development is what is at stake. For all that still remains to be done, the 60 years since the decolonization of much of the world has seen unprecedented progress, a veritable ‘age of development’ in terms of education, literacy, life expectancy, poverty reduction, improved health or the spread of human rights. Those gains are now threatened by the pitiless buffeting of financial, food and environmental shocks. Whether these shocks are allowed to wreak disaster, or become catalysts for the many changes needed to complete the development journey will be the ultimate test of our species in the decades to come.

Getting Somalia Wrong and other background reading for today’s big conference

On 3 February, the UN declared that there were no longer famine conditions in southern Somalia, but six months since that famine was declared, Somalia is still in the throes of its worst humanitarian crisis in decades. Nearly a third of the population remain in
crisis, unable to meet essential food and non-food needs. Key governments and institutions from the region and the wider Islamic and Western worlds are meeting in London today to chart a way forward. So expect the usual grim media coverage and talk of failed states and famine. Oxfam summarized the state of the famine response and the need to move beyond foccusing only on terrorism and piracy to put Somali peoples’ interests at the heart of a sustainable peace process in a paper published yesterday.

But there’s a lot more to Somalia and Somalis than is likely to surface in the media coverage today – for a quick intro try reading Mary Harper’s excellent new book, ‘Getting Somalia Wrong: Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State.’ Harper has reported for the BBC on Somalia since the outbreak of civil war in 1991, and she has little time for the usual story. Some extracts:

‘These images and labels act as barriers to other ways of seeing Somalia. More than two decades of conflict and crisis have forced Somalis to invent alternative political and economic systems. They have enthusiastically seized modern technology, fusing it with pre-colonial traditions to create some of the most advanced and effective money transfer systems on the continent and one of the cheapest, most developed mobile phone networks in East Africa.

Somalia has never had a stable, fully functioning nation state, democratic or otherwise. A new model of statehood needs to be developed for Somalia, perhaps one that combines traditional and modern types of governance, and also one that gives a degree of autonomy to the different regions.

The perspective of the country as a ‘failed state’ is dangerously limiting; in spite of the apparent chaos and lack of central authority, there are aspects of society that have continued to function effectively, even in the regions most badly affected by conflict. Some such as trade and communications, have thrived, particularly in the money transfer, mobile phone and livestock sectors. [more on that here]…. Large areas are quite peaceful, with their own administrations, legal systems and economies.’

Crisp, accessible chapters cover the clan system, history, Islamism, Somalia as failed state, piracy and Somalia’s extensive Diaspora and links to the outside world (especially the Gulf states and ‘Greater Somalia’ in the Horn).

Harper’s conclusion?

‘Portrayals of Somalia as the world’s most comprehensively failed state, inhabited by pirates, Islamist extremists and starving people, have exacerbated the problem and have, in all likelihood, contributed to many misguided policies.

Approaches to Somalia were squeezed into the post-9/11 paradigm, leading to a blinkered perspective; Somalia became part of the ‘War on Terror’ narrative.

For more than twenty years, outside powers have struggled to sort out the problems of Somalia. Perhaps, like the Somalis themselves, the approach needs to be more creative and adventurous. The rest of the world also needs to recognize that Somalis can be very good at doing things for themselves.’

A much needed corrective. Wouldn’t it be great if today’s conference started with what is working in Somalia, rather than another round of foreign blueprints? Alex de Waal says more or less that in the New York Times. Plenty more coverage on the Guardian development site.

Crises in a new world order: challenging the humanitarian project

Ed Cairns, Oxfam’s senior policy adviser on this kind of thing, introduces a big rethink of Oxfam’s humanitarian work

When it comes to humanitarian crises, Oxfam specializes in the appropriate acronym of ‘WASH’.In 2011, hundreds of Oxfam staff delivered water and sanitation and other relief to millions of people afflicted by drought, floods or earthquakes. But in much of the world, a growing proportion of our humanitarian aid flows through local organisations, and the proportion is rising rapidly. In West Africa, it went from 1% to 30% of Oxfam GB’s humanitarian spend between 2003-4 and 2010-11. And other Oxfam affiliates have had a long history of supporting local humanitarian organisations. The expulsion of Oxfam GB and other INGOs from Darfur in 2009 is a well-worn story. Rather less so is Oxfam America’s continuing support for local organisations in Darfur, who are struggling with limited funds, political pressures and conflict.

Many have talked recently of a ‘new business model’ for humanitarian action that values Southern capacity more than ever before. At the end of 2011, the President of MERCY Malaysia – a major INGO based in Kuala Lumpur– argued that ‘a greater role for Southern, national and local NGOs’ is the only way to respond to increasing disasters, and the realisation that climate change adaptation, preparedness and risk reduction are as ‘humanitarian’ as immediate relief. He might have added that traditional Western humanitarian donors, gripped by economic crisis, are not likely to continue to increase their funding to match a rising tide of humanitarian need.

For all these reasons, the centre of humanitarian gravity is moving Southwards. That shift is well under way in many countries. In Bangladesh, the government provided 52 per cent of the response to 2009’s Cyclone Aila (with 37 per cent from INGOs and nine per cent from the UN). Oxfam entirely welcomes that shift, but recognises the challenges – ethical and practical – as it gradually becomes more of a ‘humanitarian broker’, supporting others more than doing aid itself. Its latest briefing paper – Crises in a new world order: challenging the humanitarian project – sets out both sides of that coin.

Building up capacity is a long-term challenge.  It doesn’t free humanitarian agencies of the imperative to act fast when disasters strike in the meantime. In December, tropical storm Sendong killed more than 1000 people in the Philippines. Prompted by a previous disaster – typhoon Ketsana – two years earlier, the Philippines government had been doing a lot to improve its capacity. And Oxfam, in parallel, had seen itself increasingly as a supporter of local NGOs, rather than a direct provider. But when a storm strikes in an area where the local government is totally unprepared, as it did in December in Mindanao, Oxfam found itself having to do more than it planned.

Equally, the traditional Western humanitarian’s tendency to assume that the local response will be slow and ineffective is usually wrong. National Red Cross and Red Crescent societies alone reached 45 million people in 2009. Evaluations of crises up to Haiti’s 2010 earthquake have regularly found that international donors and agencies have paid too little attention to local knowledge and action. As one of my colleagues in Oxfam America asked, “Why is the humanitarian community able to improve in some areas but not this?”

Even in difficult circumstances local civil society can deliver results. In Ga’an Libah in Somaliland, a local organization supported pastoralists whose livelihoods were collapsing in the face of drastic

environmental degradation. With support from Oxfam, they helped the pastoralists construct stone terraces to minimize water runoff, and helped bring about the revival of grazing management and reforestation. The livestock grew heavier and more numerous, and the pastoralists used the new income to send more children to school.

But working in effective states with significant capacity and a determination to help all their people

is one thing. Working in fragile states or those that are seen as illegitimate or corrupt will always be fraught with difficulty. All of this varies case by case, but in general terms, the different models of states and international responses can be summarized by this table, which Oxfam developed in 2011 to help guide its humanitarian programming.

None of this is easy. And as the new paper makes clear, Oxfam has not always found it easy either. But there is no turning back. The humanitarian world will never again be the Western-dominated thing it once was. INGOs will be as vital as ever. But their greatest responsibility will be to help build Southern capacity. And their greatest challenge will be to do that while responding to the new crises that don’t wait for that capacity to be built up.

Here’s Ed talking about the paper:

Why seasonality is back and that’s a good thing

A Welsh friend of mine once came back home after a long stint in Nicaragua. A mate picked him up at the airport and on the long drive back to Cardiff, Alun turned to him and asked ’so, how’s the harvest been this year?’ His friend looked at him as if he’d gone mad. Which brings us seamlessly to this guest post on seasonality from John Magrath……

Seasonality describes the fact that rural livelihoods in developing countries undergo regular, predictable, and often massive, changes according to the pattern of the seasons. In particular, the annual rains bring about – or bring to a peak – all sorts of effects – most of them adverse if you are poor. These include starvation, energy depletion, increases in sickness, migration, shortage of money and going into debt.

It was a regular theme in development studies from the late 1970s – when it was pioneered by the great Robert Chambers at the UK’s Institute of Development Studies – to the 1990s. Then it rather fell from favour. Now a new book, Seasonality, Rural Livelihoods and Development, the result of a conference at IDS in 2009, aims to revive the topic.

I declare an interest, as the book opens with a scene setter of a chapter written by myself and Steve Jennings about the growing influence of climate change. It draws on Oxfam research to describe how farmers in many countries perceive that their seasons are changing, throwing up new challenges.

Advocates for taking seasonality more seriously argue that, by showing how “normal” seasonal vulnerabilities underpin tip-overs into crisis when the weather is particularly bad, seasonality can be a powerful argument for proper planning to even out seasonal variations and enable people to have “a-seasonal” livelihoods.  Furthermore, seasonality affects every aspect of people’s lives, and understanding the complex and ratcheted (to use Robert Chambers’  favourite word) interactions enables one to intervene holistically, rather than sectorally.

But seasonality has always been neglected by governments and by aid workers because they don’t tend to live in rural communities – especially not during the rains. There are urban,  “tarmac” and  dry season travel biases in their understanding.

Then on top of those, in the 1990s interest faded away, largely because of the precipitate decline in public investment in agriculture generally.  With that went the abolition of many of those counter-seasonal measures that actually were in place (though not always effective), like grain reserves.

Many things have changed since the 70s: the growth of towns, communications that reduce isolation, the spread of social protection systems such as India’s employment guarantee schemes.  But the seasons have not gone away. Stephen Devereux, Rachel Sabates-Wheeler, Richard Longhurst and the other authors argue that understanding and building seasonality into policies is still relevant – in fact maybe more relevant than ever as climate change bites. And that still isn’t happening; they say that disaggregated data on seasonal poverty is still hard to find, and one of their recommendations is that poverty statistics should reflect seasonal variation, instead of reporting a single poverty headcount for a given year.

They also make the point that seasonality isn’t, fundamentally, about “blaming the weather”; rather, the weather exposes fundamental inequalities in resource distribution – that is, social injustice. But maybe the fact that seasonality is triggered by weather has made campaigners for social justice wary of embracing the subject and contributes to its neglect.

As I say, I declare an interest because I think that seasonality is one of those things that is staring us in the face so closely that we don’t see it properly; we take it for granted as “just another thing poor people have to put up with” when it could illuminate our understanding, analysis and practice. But am I right? Or do people working in development say a) we recognise seasonality but actually, we don’t see it as particularly important compared to other influences on poor people’s lives, or other ways into helping them tackle their problems? Or b), we think it is important but we think that it is already incorporated sufficiently into planning for long-term development, humanitarian response and, in particular, social protection initiatives?

Why did help arrive so late? Evidence v Incentives in the Horn of Africa drought.

Oxfam and Save the Children have a new paper out today that worries away at the baffling fact that lots of organizations knew disaster was looming in the Horn of Africa (and said so), but the system was largely unable to respond until people actually started dying. From the exec sum of A Dangerous Delay: The cost of late response to early warnings in the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa:

“The 2011 crisis in the Horn of Africa has been the most severe emergency of its kind this century. More than 13 million people are still affected, with hundreds of thousands placed at risk of starvation. One estimate suggests that 50,000–100,000 people have died. This crisis unfolded despite having been predicted. Although brought on by drought, it was human factors which turned the crisis into a deadly emergency.

Tragically, the 2011 crisis is not an isolated case. The response to drought is invariably too little too late, representing a systemic failure of the international system – both ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’.

In the Horn of Africa, there were indications that a crisis was coming from as early as August 2010. In November 2010, these warnings were repeated and they became more strident in early 2011. Some actors did respond, but full scale-up only really happened after the rains had failed for a second successive time (see chart, below). By this time, in some places people were already dying. Many had lost their livelihoods, and many more – particularly women and children – were suffering extreme hardship. The scale of death and suffering, and the financial cost, could have been reduced if early warning systems had triggered an earlier, more substantial response. Why was the international system so slow in responding to accurate early warnings? One reason is that raising large sums for humanitarian response currently depends on getting significant media and public attention – which did not happen until the crisis point was reached.

Decision makers are often not comfortable with uncertainty and forecasts, requiring hard data before initiating a response. So, while many people ‘on the ground’ in the region – representatives of many agencies and institutions, and communities themselves – were aware of the impending crisis and trying to set alarm bells ringing in January and February 2011, they were not always able to get traction ‘further up the chain’ from those who needed to act to avert another crisis.”

The underlying problem is that the incentives (or lack of them) are preventing the system (both national governments and international aid agencies) from acting on the early warning system, which is working pretty well. Why is that?

• “fear of getting it wrong – with both financial and reputational risk at stake;
• fear of being too interventionist – undermining communities’ own capacities to cope;
• fatigue – ‘there are droughts every year’ – encouraging an attitude of resignation to the high levels of chronic malnutrition, and an inability to react to the crisis triggers.”

What could change that?

“The decision to respond is ultimately a political one. National governments often see an emergency declaration as a sign of weakness, especially if there is a drive for food self-sufficiency. This can make it difficult for humanitarian agencies to declare an emergency themselves. Early response is more likely when there are clear links with those directly affected by the food crisis – thus multi-party democracy and a free press are necessary, but not always sufficient for the politically marginalized. A strong, vibrant civil society voice is required to ensure that there is a political price for failure to respond. For the donors, their relationship with national governments is a key determinant of early response. Although humanitarian aid should be exempt from political conditionality, political differences can seriously delay the response, as in Somalia in 2011.”

In the end it all comes down to dealing with uncertainty (echoes of my recent reading….)

“Responding on the basis of forecasts instead of hard data requires a shift in dealing with uncertainty.42 Currently, uncertainty too often stifles action; one study in Kenya found that while forecasts allow for prepositioning of food stocks, national decision makers often do not rely on them for scaling up a response. Forecasts involve uncertainty: they are inevitably based on data which is not totally comprehensive and are tinged with judgement; the earlier the warning, the less accurate it is likely to be. Yet this uncertainty is not unquantifiable – standard risk management techniques allow us to convert this uncertainty into risk, which can then be managed and minimised. The figure shows a typical risk impact/probability chart, which plots the probability that a hazard will occur against its impact. Clearly, the most dangerous risks are those with high impact and high probability; these are the risks that should be prioritised for action, and require the closest attention.

Using this logic, it would have been clear from around January 2011 that the high probability of poor March–May rains in the Horn of Africa, magnified by the failure of the previous rains in late 2010, would constitute a critical risk that needed to be addressed immediately.

The principles of risk reduction and management are well accepted in other fields, such as insurance (where paying money upfront is regarded as a responsible approach to prevent high losses in the event of a crisis) and public vaccination campaigns (to prevent epidemics and reduce medical costs). These principles must be embedded in short-term emergency response, longer-term development work and government investment programmes.”

It’s on the front page of the Guardian, a top story on the BBC, and I’m on press duty – could be a busy day.