Dear aid workers: Stay home.

Traditionally, when an emergency hits, NGOs get to work. The problem is the COVID disaster needs you to stay home. Don’t go out and get involved. Don’t send workers to start up new programming. Do stay home.

There is a borderline in humanitarian aid between relief and development. Relief workers include medical personnel and scientific experts that mobilize for urgent response and multilateral funders that release copious amounts of emergency funding. Development is the peace-time activity that comprises long-term programming with long-term targets. At this time, only relief workers should be working outside their homes.

An easy way to figure out if you are essential is to answer these three questions:

1. Do you save lives in a critical response?
2. Is critical infrastructure like a water utility, power plant, or food delivery program not going to run without your presence?
3. Would your own government’s State Department or Department of Health take an urgent meeting with you about your work?

An image from NYC Subway station this week

If you do not meet these criteria, you are not considered part of the essential responders that keep working outside their homes. Stay home.

Water and sanitation-facing organizations are flooding twitter daily with their announcements of new programming, ranging from “nudging” the cue lines for water to practice social distancing to setting up new hand-washing stations. For COVID response, it is too late to initiate new programming for hygiene, safe toilets, or abundant hand-washing water.

When it comes to a disaster of this magnitude, as Donald Rumsfield once said, “You go to war with the army you have.”

This is not the time for new interventions or programs. The countries we serve will do their best with the conditions they have.

Even worse, some organizations are practicing armchair science and openly questioning whether warm water can help prevent COVID (it can’t) or whether open water sources are safer than piped ones without lines (they aren’t).You can help this problem by vigilantly watching for false or reckless messaging and stepping in to correct it. For example, we have seen widespread mis-publishing of bad information under the UNICEF badge. UNICEF needs your help catching and correcting this.

Any programming that happens at this time is entirely up to the governments in the places you work. They will work with relief professionals to alter programming but all messaging and directions should come from them. NGOs will usurp the government’s authority by establishing any other priorities or responses. Further, aid makes up 25% of the economy in some countries. Shutting down all of your programming will do more to lessen the pandemic’s damage than any programming you could initiate.

In addition, do not start any “innovations”. Established, evidence-proven programming is needed now. Trying out new innovations is a gamble and this is not the time for gambling. A good Lancet article elaborated on how this effect is seen right now in medical approaches.

Above all, do not hold any meetings in which government attendance is invited. The opportunity cost of meeting with you is far too great in this time of urgent response.

There is a desire to help that cannot be judged. Your home countries need you more right now. Call in to your local radio stations and give an interview on your work. Talk about hand washing and behavior change. Write an op-ed for your local newspaper. Your expertise abroad in development can help western European and North American countries more than you think.

There is a financial reason some organizations are not shutting down their staff activities. A disaster like a cyclone or an earthquake can make a year’s budget when an organization jumps in to help and build on the occasion to run a fundraising campaign. This is the plain truth about the philanthropic funding of our industry: we need to be involved in the crisis to get those donations. The philanthropic donations from initiating COVID programming are likely never going to be available from a public already shocked by a faltering economy. Your aid organization, if based in a wealthier country, can qualify for local financial support to keep salaries safe. You do not need to be involved in COVID for your organization’s financial safety.

Things you can safely do as an NGO:

1. Review your data, clean it, find new results and make new learnings;
2. Hold online trainings to build up skills on platforms like mWater or Solstice;
3. Dive into getting better at working remotely with systems for remote management that meet your organization’s needs so we won’t all just return to a high level of travel and in-person work when all this is over;
4. Keep paying your local staff as much as you can, even if at reduced rates, and ask them to stay home;
5. Reach out to the local government counterparts in-country to ask what needs they have that you might be able to fill. Wait for them to answer, as they are currently very busy with relief-related work.

The problem with not staying home, aside from the danger of moving about, is you are not following the directives of your home government or the governments you serve. You do not know better than the government you serve and you are responsible for obeying their stay-at-home orders. You can only help them by going home and staying home until it is safe to work out in society again.