How We Can Improve Relief in Crisis and Conflict Areas
By David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and Ravi Gurumurthy, the IRC’s Vice President of Strategy and Innovation
HUMANITARIAN AID and the people who provide it are on the front lines of crisis and conflict every day. From climate change to demographic pressures and new wars popping up in various corners of the world, the number of people fleeing their homes is now almost one million every month. We as the practitioners of the humanitarian sector must find innovative ways to solve the world’s worst crises. In an essay in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, we explored in depth five potential opportunities for improving humanitarian aid. We’ve outlined them here:
1. INCREASE AID IN FRAGILE PLACES
Aid is given a variety of labels. Money used for saving lives and alleviating suffering in war zones and after natural disasters is categorized as humanitarian relief, whereas funds that support economic growth and long-term improvements in quality of life in poor countries are classified as development assistance.
Donors also distinguish between aid for low-income countries and that for middle-income countries. But those categories are increasingly unhelpful. While countries like Jordan and Lebanon are dealing with millions of refugees from Syria’s civil war, they are deemed ineligible for World Bank support because they are considered middle-income countries. Similarly, when wars last for decades, as is the case in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia, it is strange to separate supposedly short-term humanitarian relief from long-term development aid and senseless to have so little alignment among the objectives, processes, conceptual frames, and institutions for the two types of aid.
A better prism for considering how to focus spending is “fragility” — defined not just by how much a state lacks the capacity, will, or legitimacy to provide basic services or enforce the rule of law but also by the extent to which that country is exposed to violence, poverty, economic instability, and environmental shocks. Fragility covers both low- and middle-income states, and it cuts across national borders, since relatively stable countries can contain pockets of instability.
Statistics show that fragile places are falling behind their stable counterparts. When it comes to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), four-fifths of the states classified as fragile by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are not on track to achieve universal primary schooling by the end of this year, and two-thirds will fail to cut poverty in half. And the proportion of poor people living in fragile states is on the rise with the OECD estimating that even in a best-case scenario, more than 62 percent of the world’s extreme poor (defined as those living on less than $1.25 a day) will reside in fragile states by 2030, up from 43 percent today. With just 38 percent of aid spent in fragile states today, the growing concentration of poverty, along with the current mismatch between need and provision, makes the case for doubling aid spending in these places.
The changing geography of poverty in recent decades makes it possible to rebalance funding from stable states to fragile places. Rather than larger aid budgets, eradicating poverty in places like India, China and the rest of East Asia requires sharing the proceeds of growth more equally. In stable low-income countries, aid will continue to play an important role, but the focus should go beyond aid to policy changes. Expanding foreign direct investment, removing international agricultural trade subsidies and tariffs, and facilitating migration and remittances would do far more to eradicate poverty than foreign aid.
2. FOCUS ON EVIDENCE-BASED AID
To improve the impact of aid by anything like a factor of four, a doubling of the funding in fragile places needs to be matched by a doubling of productivity.
Every dollar of aid needs to deliver greater impact, reaching more people and achieving more profound and longer-lasting change in their lives. Donors can drive this shift by creating incentives for generating and applying evidence of what works.
A database compiled by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation counts more than 2,500 impact evaluations of various approaches to tackling poverty in relatively stable low- or middle-income countries. Thanks to such evidence, donors have been able to focus their investments on services that they are confident can make a difference — for example, vaccinations, HIV/AIDS treatment, and efforts to lower the financial and geographic barriers to school attendance.
But research suffers from the same flaw as aid itself. It is not going to the right places. Fewer than 100 impact evaluations have been conducted in fragile states. Many of the lessons from more stable places may seem transferable. Vaccines, for example, will help tackle the spread of infectious diseases whatever the context. But in fragile contexts, problems impede the delivery of services. For example, immunization rates are low in fragile states because health workers may not show up at clinics or families may not make the long journey there due to the distance and cost. Both of which may be compounded by security threats.
As well as investing in new evidence, donors should focus on applying the lessons. Yet in many instances, the knowledge does not move from research to practice. Take cash transfers. As a substantial body of evidence now shows, money not only helps people buy essential items; it also helps families raise their income, so they can send their children to school rather than work. Yet between 2009 and 2013, only an estimated 1.5 to 3.5 percent of humanitarian aid went to cash.
Donors should adopt a simple principle: fund only those programs that are based on the best available evidence or, in cases where impact evaluations (or their equivalent) have yet to be conducted, that are supporting the generation of evidence.
3. MAKE AID MORE EFFICIENT
Better evidence is not only the foundation for making programs more effective; it can also help make them more efficient. The starting point for that is transparency.
In the IRC’s own recent analysis, we found large variations in costs, not just between programs — it stands to reason that vaccinating a child may cost $10, whereas providing time-intensive counseling to a rape survivor could cost several hundred dollars — but also within them.
Unless donors begin requiring aid organizations to report the cost of delivering services, those groups will lack an important incentive to improve efficiency and share best practices. Cheaper is not always better, of course, which is why donors should combine data on costs with measures of effectiveness.
The good news is that costs can be reduced without sacrificing quality. Aid travels on a convoluted journey to recipients. Taxpayers fund aid ministries, which give grants or contracts, sometimes via intermediaries called “fund managers,” to aid agencies, which often subcontract the work out to local groups. Or aid ministries hand the money to UN agencies, which spend it through a combination of implementing projects on their own and giving grants to aid agencies.
The attendant accountability systems are multiple, overlapping, and divergent, all with their own costs. Cutting out some of the layers of bureaucracy could radically reduce transaction costs. And greater transparency about costs would force each link in the aid-delivery chain to justify its role.
4. PROVIDE THE RIGHT INCENTIVES
Much like the past three decades have seen policymakers in Europe and the United States recognize the power of incentivizing the improvement of government programs, humanitarian relief would benefit from a similar focus on incentives.
The goals that shape donors’ behavior need to be clearer, which would mean specific global aspirations for citizens in fragile states. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which will replace the MDGs at the end of this year, risk perpetuating this dynamic.
Despite the excessive number of individual targets, 169 in all, the specific needs of civilians living in conflict zones are all but ignored. That is true even for the proposed goal dedicated to peace and even for the proposed goal devoted to equality for women and girls.
It would be best if the key Sustainable Development Goals were translated into national targets tailored to each country’s starting point and potential. To ensure that fragile states get the attention they deserve, the goals — for example, on education, health, and the empowerment of women and girls — should be accompanied by floor targets for the most fragile states, creating a commitment to raise levels of a given metric to a minimum standard.
Second, the humanitarian sector could direct funding toward outcomes rather than outputs. Donors should shift away from holding aid agencies and private contractors accountable for spending money on specified outputs and instead make them demonstrate measurable improvements in clients’ lives.
So rather than paying organizations to build a certain number of schools or train teachers, for example, donors should award grants that deliver the biggest functional improvements in literacy and numeracy.
Third, donors should incentivize humanitarian organizations to become more accountable to the people they serve. The most powerful way to do this is, again, through funding. Giving cash directly to the poor allows them to choose what to spend it on.
Where cash is not possible, organizations should be required to collect real-time data on the satisfaction levels of those they are attempting to help and make the data public. Doing so would introduce pressure to adapt to the perspectives of clients.
5. EMBRACE HARDHEADED HUMANITARIANISM
For over a century, the humanitarian sector has been a symbol of compassion, ingenuity, and heroism.
It remains so in many ways. The convoys of UN officials shepherding civilians out of Homs, Syria, under sniper fire, the aid workers suiting up to fight Ebola, the women’s groups organizing against violence in Congo — they remain sources of inspiration in the midst of indifference. The principles the humanitarian sector lives by — not least, independence and impartiality — are extraordinarily powerful.
But the sector is also increasingly a place of missed targets: appeals that are not met, pledges that are not delivered, ideals that are not translated into action. The sector must embrace new ways of doing business in addition to more funding. In other words, aid efforts need to be more cohesive, more evidence-based, more outcome-focused, more hardheaded.
This agenda is not a substitute for political action to prevent and stop wars. After all, the humanitarian sector stanches the dying, but it takes states and politics to stop the killing. In the midst of multiple global crises and pressure across the world for governments to focus on the home front, however, the prospects for renewed political will are slim. That forces the humanitarian sector onto the frontlines. The best armor will be best practices.
The International Rescue Committee responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises, helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster. Founded in 1933 at the call of Albert Einstein, the IRC is at work in over 40 countries and 26 U.S. cities helping people to survive, reclaim control of their future and strengthen their communities.
