By Michele Acuto, Contributing Editor
On August 1870, when the Franco-Prussian war was at its harshest, the Red Cross was almost the sole humanitarian agency on the battlefields, and it had clear goals: provide medical assistance, deliver messages to those separated by war, and channel relief to conflict victims.
Some 124 years after, in Rwanda, NGOs and IGOs dealing with the refugee crisis numbered in the hundreds. Nowadays, in Iraq and Haiti, the total amount of aid agencies is ten times more than in the African emergency, and the “humanitarian enterprise” is a $10 billion a year industry.
Do all of them know their purposes and the needs of the local people? In the chaos of today’s Haitian crisis more than ever, international actors should rely on well-conceived strategies, and understand that relief begins with the comprehension of the framework were it has to be delivered. Nonetheless, reports of uncoordinated relief efforts, lack of basic goods and surplus of ‘aid packs’ of scarce usage, as well as poor response to the local demands are a daily litany echoing from the screens of BBC, CNN and the like broadcasting live from Haiti.
Needs assessment have become of little interest and sporadic practice, based on a front-end process that is required (sometimes una tantum) in order to access funds, and provide accountable performances to donors. Its key role has often been dismissed despite the fact that, as the London-based Humanitarian Policy Group has reiterated in various reports, the way in which needs are framed, named and prioritised has real-world implications for millions of people.
There is no widely recognised framework of reference to evaluate the relative gravity of emergencies and respond accordingly with a balanced provision of assistance. Regardless of the existence of some reliable systems of evaluation, such as the “basket-case” one adopted by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) on the basis of its Global Needs Assessment, there is no broad acceptance of a single practice.
While needs are usually described in terms of goods, an innovative approach has been suggested in 2007 by the Humanitarian Policy Group, which recently recommended that evaluations should rather be based on “acute risks”—understood as evaluation of actual or imminent threats and vulnerabilities. This can renovate the customary view of the victim’s necessity as deficit, providing an inclination toward development and human rights-oriented action rather than describing ‘shopping lists’ for food and shelter provision on the basis of cookie-cutter packages. Risk-oriented needs assessments also require more extensive and accurate studies that, in the context of the lead agency model, can be undertaken jointly by the coordinating bodies, which could eventually outsource area-specific evaluations to the agencies in charge in each sector.
Nevertheless, in the context of many complex humanitarian emergencies such as Iraq and Afghanistan, needs assessments can incur in a dangerous mistake by framing (or “targeting”) individuals that require special consideration without careful analysis. By describing these as “vulnerable groups” evaluators have to consider carefully all the consequences that such denomination bears.
Arguably, not belonging to a vulnerable group can itself be a major vulnerability factor. Relief agencies may introduce dangerous artificial distinctions that, in many occasions, do not facilitate the aid workers’ job, but rather worsen the situation by imposing externally constructed boundaries that could develop in social cleavages, with all the obvious disruptions that these might bear. Misidentification compromises not only the planning of the humanitarian response, but also its effectiveness and outcomes. Vulnerability mapping is therefore an extremely complex activity, which entails continuous reassessment and sensible analysis of the area in which humanitarian actors operate.
Needs assessments become once more a crucial device of aid, as they can deeply affect transition strategies that, in this specific area, cannot be easily co-opted from past experiences. Given the varying nature of emergencies (mostly in conflict cases), the evaluations should be continuous throughout the length of operations.
While formal assessments characterize the beginning or the prelude of aid, some so-called “rolling reviews” can be conducted during the crisis in order to amend humanitarian responses accordingly. Although the donors and some of the main agencies currently underplay this practice, its positive effects are crucial to optimize relief efforts. In this perspective, the processes of functions transfer and skills development that often accompany the transition from relief to development need to be carefully planned along the lines of comprehensive evaluations of the crisis context, and of the main features of the society relief agencies work within: if humanitarianism is seen as a social relationship between givers and receivers that shapes practices and identities of both the ends of the process, then no “light footprint” (to use a popular expression often cited in Afghanistan) is effectively possible when converting humanitarian relief into local development.
In this view, the participation of beneficiaries in the assessment is key to substantial achievements. From a strategic planning viewpoint, locals should be actively engaged in the processes of aid delivery and assessment from day one, with broadening local ownership as the crisis situation is ameliorated. On the contrary, the leitmotif of several aid workers today is often represented by commercial and diplomatic jargon: humanitarianism—referred to as “industry”—is concerned about getting “deliverables” to “clients” often forgetting that the “targets” of the relief are people like those who decide to dispense them “charitable” aid. Assistance and cooperation, not “intervention” nor “delivering”, must be the key words here, as they imply the concept of participation within the overall effort to recover from the crisis.
There is an emblematic episode that can exemplify this clash between the humanitarian world imagined by western donors and the relief requested by suffering people across the globe. A doctor from the Italian medical NGO Emergency once told me how puzzled he felt when, while entering a camp in Sierra Leone, he was asked by a refugee: “How can I help you, sir?” But what the man meant was: “How can I help you to help us?” If not engaged in the process of transition from relief to development, the ‘locals’ might conceive the aid effort as a colonial endeavor, and the eventual humanitarian exit as disentanglement with no future prospects.
The importance of participatory and risk-avert needs assessments for this is unquestionable. These evaluations must be undertaken throughout the whole duration of the relief efforts, and more so when it is time to exit the area of involvement. NGOs and IGOs have the sources to empower their beneficiaries in roles within their relief staff, and should adopt a more inclusive method of delivery. To put it simply, consultation must become participation.
