Weaving innovation through UNHCR’s bureaucracy
By Eugenia Blaubach, Independent Writer
The car had been travelling for over three hours; its wheels churning up patches of red mud as it moved along the path. Inside the vehicle, a team from UNHCR’s Innovation Service observed the landscape’s mountainous terrain. They were on their way to a refugee camp where a creative education project had taken root.
That day, students were once again waiting around for another mission from a far away country to visit their school. They welcomed the group from UNHCR and explained why this programme specifically had made a difference in their lives, and with excitement told the team how they too believed that this opportunity, a pathway to potential employment, should be given to more refugees.
UNHCR’s Innovation Service and Education teams have been supporting the project’s transition to scale, along with four other projects, through the Humanitarian Education Accelerator (HEA) — a joint initiative of UNHCR, UNICEF, and the UK Department for International Development. Together, the partners are working to accelerate the scaling efforts of promising education programmes like this one by providing field offices and partner organisations with tools to improve data collection activities through mentorship, financing and capacity building.
In order to scale, the five education innovations want to collect data about how they operate, evaluate the effectiveness of their education strategy and build evidence about how the programme is impacting students’ lives.
It’s a powerful concept that would not only assist the NGO in refining its scaling strategy, but also provide the humanitarian community with highly coveted insights about education innovations in emergency contexts. However, as with all new ideas, the rollout of the HEA would present a challenge that underlies everyone’s biggest fear: bureaucracy.
The truth is, the team was there to find a solution to an issue that had been delaying the start of the research. Innovation in this context was going to be about overcoming systems that were, perhaps, not as agile and progressive as they needed to be, including culture, mindsets, and processes.
Turning a mountain into a molehill
Like a splinter lodged in an unsuspecting toe or finger, sometimes the smallest problems cause the most discomfort. In the case of this project, it wasn’t a splinter, but a car. The NGO running the education programme had accumulated a hefty transport bill from making regular visits to the camp and needed a budget-friendly alternative to making the lengthy trek toward the operation site. Their solution was simple: buy a car.
Though it was clearly understood that a car would be a useful tool that would assist in the delivery of project activities, the UNHCR team needed to follow due process as laid out in their standard operating procedures. They normally lease cars to their partners for the duration of specific projects and — despite it being significantly more affordable to buy the car — didn’t feel comfortable authorising the vehicle purchase, as it was not in line with their processes.
The leasing option was in line with UNHCR rules, but it was not the most cost-effective option for the partner. It would end up costing them more money in the long run, without the benefit of keeping the car after the project’s completion. In these cases, should the partner’s needs be placed over UNHCR policies and procedures?
This led to a lot of frustration for all involved in order to find a resolution that would make the best use of the funding available. In the end, the pursuit for the car had to be abandoned so that the HEA project could start, but the situation serves as a useful lesson for future endeavors.
Whether it’s a car, a computer or solar lighting, the Innovation Service has learnt, that in these situations, the need to have flexible and agile funding in today’s changing humanitarian landscape is paramount to allow them to innovate. The rules, structures, and processes that are put in place to limit risk should be respected, however, perhaps it is also time to ask: Do these rules still serve in the best interest of those we are trying to assist? Do we need to think about re-interpreting the rules in different ways, or perhaps re-writing the rules altogether if this is a bottleneck being faced across all operations?
“The scope of the HEA is not as physical — in the real sense of the word,” said Salva, who leads financial and administrative activities at the Innovation Service. “What I see is that operations tend to prioritise, or place more emphasis on, projects that are more straightforward: they build a camp; they build a school. The HEA is a concept: scaling education. It’s not something you can touch with your hands, and I think that’s the problem here.”
This was a challenge that Clara, who manages the HEA programme under UNHCR, had witnessed within the organisation and with additional partners. For her, communication was always key to the success of the project.
“Establishing clear communication on the intent of new initiatives, and ensuring the correct people are involved from the start will go a long way in ensuring that overcoming bureaucratic hurdles is a thing of the past,” Clara mentioned. In as much as innovation can be flashy, a large part is also working together with people to shift mindsets and improve internal processes.
During their end-of-year missions, the Innovation team invited all parties involved to discuss the research and recap the year’s successes and shortcomings — a tactic that brought the field office and partner closer together. Though the Innovation team sparked the conversation, they encouraged the field office and partner to keep the momentum going by holding monthly meetings, sharing monthly briefings and inviting each other to special events. With more direct and frequent interaction, the UNHCR country team’s have gained a better understanding of the HEA’s vision, which is no longer just a construct from HQ. Ensuring that its implementation could continue without UNHCR’s lengthy processes getting in the way.
Killing two birds with one stone — or not
Hundreds of kilometers east, another HEA project faced similar gridlock. The project partner in this country runs its education programme in two refugee camps. Given that the research would be looking at the impact of the intervention holistically and would be managed at the HQ level, the expectation was to write one project proposal agreement for both camps.
In reality, to split data collection activities between the two camps, two separate project agreements were needed. This meant that the partner had to write two separate budgets, two project narratives and invest double the manpower for the financial reporting of what was essentially the same project. This was another process in which innovative approaches to simplify the work for the project partner should be established.
The project was understood differently across the two camps, which were located on opposite ends of the country. While the development of the partnership agreement went smoothly in one camp, it was a slightly different story in the second camp. Halfway through the second year of the programme, the project agreement had finally been signed, and the research initiative was up and running. But when it was time to renew the project proposal, a changeover in staff ushered in new staff who had not been part of the initial negotiation process, and had not yet had a lot of contact with the project as a result.
As mentioned in the previous example, in order for novel ideas to take root, all stakeholders need to have a full understanding of what is trying to be achieved. Although the partner took the time to explain the intervention — why it is being implemented, where the funding was coming from and how it had been administered — the process still resulted in delays in signing the project agreement.
From the partner’s perspective, it was difficult to imagine how one research project could generate such different reactions from within the same organisation. In hindsight, the arrival of new staff was an opportunity to instill the value of research which would help to understand how to scale programmes better. Clara encourages coordinators of future programmes to take that opportunity.
“When we have a programme that we know does not fit the mold, we need to take that extra effort, take the time to re-explain and re-engage rather than place that burden on the project partner,” explained Clara.
At UNHCR, staff changeovers are common and happen often. Looking back, the Innovation team could have foreseen these challenges and taken a more proactive approach at addressing them.
Although other changes served the project positively. At the Innovation Service, where siloed labs had previously provided the team structure, a new multifunction team approach enabled opportunities for more people to collaborate on the HEA. The Innovation Service recognised that with the simplified structure, a new space for integrated support was created. Future programmes will be able to lean on a much wider range of experiences, in order to ensure that learning and capacity building in new approaches can be targeted throughout frequent staff turnovers and changes in the team structure of a programme.
Square peg, round hole
The HEA is a misfit project in some respects. By UNHCR standards, it doesn’t fit the mold. Not just figuratively, but literally. With its long-term approach to research and emphasis on capacity building, the project was not compatible with the corporate tools. Projects entered into the system need to be categorised using the software’s predetermined objectives and indicators, but the available options didn’t encompass the scope of the HEA project.
The way UNHCR understands and delivers humanitarian aid has evolved over the past 70 years. Realising it is not enough to meet refugees’ basic needs, the organisation is placing greater focus on providing them with opportunities to thrive within their new communities. Projects like the HEA embody this new mindset by funding research and data collection, but the systems used to manage their implementation do not.
While the organisation may be encouraging a shift in humanitarian work, the bureaucracy is still lagging behind. These innovative programmes will be systematically seen as outliers and consequently face barriers to implementation if the bureaucracy does not reflect the organisations widened scope of work. This not only requires improved systems, but also a focus on training of staff who have to continuously deal with projects that are fitting more and more outside of the traditional scope.
Partnerships beyond money
In the nonprofit world, funding is a common problem — the lack thereof, that is — but for the HEA barriers have sprung up in the distribution, not the acquisition of funds.
Clara explains that challenges rolling out the project comes from the fact that the HEA is giving money for data-collection, research, and evaluation — all necessary ingredients to develop a successful scaling strategy but not traditionally considered priority items for delivering humanitarian aid.
Given that they work to fulfill the immediate needs of refugees, humanitarians must often think in the short term, and within UNHCR, only one year given the annual budgeting structure. While this approach maximises their impact on the ground, sometimes it may limit their ability to look into the future and understand how to effectively scale. If the HEA project is viewed through a short-term lens, research, monitoring and evaluation are seen as isolated actions that don’t have an immediate impact on refugees. The focus needs to be on seeing these components as necessary tools to form promising, long-term strategies that will enable humanitarians to develop programmes that provide sustainable, long-term futures for refugees.
UNHCR’s cumbersome budgeting process does little to make small funds specific to monitoring evaluation and research more attractive. In fact, one office went out of its way to avoid the process altogether. The team concluded it would be easier to charge project expenses directly to the Innovation Service budget line instead.
Another office decided to give the outdated process a try. To have the HEA funds transferred to their budget, they had to start by writing a budget committee memo. The memo has to be approved by many stakeholders before it is submitted to the budget committee for final approval. If we were to track the movement of this document, it would have definitely racked up some airmiles. As it travelled from the field offices, to the branch office, to the Desk Officer for two months — each one changing the numbers until an agreement was reached. When the memo was finally signed, they were told it had been done incorrectly and needed to be redone. This process could be made more agile by using electronic signature authorisations and ensuring that the figures could be made available for viewing by all parties concerned (from the field to HQ).
People are channeling their time and expertise into maneuvering the bureaucracy instead of using them to generate impact on the ground. Money allocation, budgeting, signatures are all a form of logistics in order to get the final project agreement between all stakeholders. They are a means to reach an end goal, and are not the end goal itself. But sometimes the breadth of administrative processes can make logistics feel like end goals in their own right.
As the HEA enters its final year, one of the partners has decided not to receive funding from the HEA in 2019. They will retain a partnership with UNHCR but prefer to seek funding outside the accelerator and avoid the bureaucratic budgeting structures. This unexpected change of plans will allow the Innovation team to bypass logistics and concentrate on adding value to the partner organisation in other, impactful ways.
“What we learned from this is that giving money isn’t the basis to form a strong partnership,” Clara said. “Increasingly, our role is about coordination, strategy and facilitation. If a partner can achieve funding and sustainability from elsewhere, perhaps that’s a success in itself.”
Paving new paths for the future
Despite all the roadblocks and delays, the project teams have managed to roll out their research projects. Looking back at their trajectory, Salva encourages individual employees to cut through the organisation’s cumbersome processes by adopting a different mentality:
“In my opinion, the best way to approach it is to re-engage with all the rules we have set up, improve our financial systems and allow our staff to work in a more flexible way,” Salva explained.
“Things can improve from a bureaucratic point of view if we allow people who know their work to bend the rules to achieve their main goal, paying less attention to details and looking at the bigger picture. We try to make the best of what we have at our disposal,” he added. “Sometimes you end up doing a great job, other times you feel that you are not being given the tools to fulfill your work.”
Overall, these colleagues at the Innovation Service feel the organisation is moving in the right direction. They will take the lessons learned through the challenges encountered, and in 2019 try to do what they do best: innovate to ensure that these bureaucratic challenges become issues of the past, so that UNHCR as an organisation can do better in the future.
This essay was originally posted in the recently released publication — UNHCR Innovation Service: “Orbit 2018–2019”. The publication is a collection of insights and inspiration, where we explore the most recent innovations in the humanitarian sector, and opportunities to discover the current reading of innovation that is shaping the future of how we respond to complex challenges. From building trust for artificial intelligence, to creating a culture for innovating bureaucratic institutions and using stories to explore the future of displacement — we offer a glance at the current state of innovation in the humanitarian sector. You can download the full publication here. And if you have a story about innovation you want to tell (the good, the bad, and everything in between) — email: innovation@unhcr.org.
