Examination of Witness (Questions 80 -
93)
THURSDAY 6 JULY 2000
MS CONSTANZA
ADINOLFI
Chairman
80. Have any non-governmental organisations
who have contracted with you been forced to close because you
have not delivered the funds to them?
(Ms Adinolfi) I am not aware of that but I am not
completely sure about it. I will check with my services but I
am not aware of that. In any case it should not happen because
we accept or include in our network of NGOs with which we sign
the framework partnership agreement or, if they can also demonstrate,
those who can establish that they are not totally dependent on
us. We will not sign contracts with NGOs who depend 100 per cent
on ECHO financing. We want to have partners who have certain financial
solidity, I would say, and have also the capability to have other
financing. The procedure we use to enter into partnerships with
NGOs is that when they ask to apply to be part of the partnership
agreement we go through a financial audit of those NGOs and we
check their financial capacity and how their budget is composed
and their capacity for getting finance. Normally we do not enter
into contracts with people who depend more than 50 per cent on
ECHO or the Commission because we fear that we can take a risk
on our side if they are too dependent on us.
Ann Clwyd
81. Can I ask you about your levels of staffing
in ECHO because it seems to be a general complaint across the
Commission that the Commission is under-staffed compared with
various departments of government in other countries and councils
or whatever. Can you tell us whether you feel you are under-staffed?
(Ms Adinolfi) Yes, it is very easy for me to answer
because we are in the Commission through this exercise which is
called perhaps a peer group exercise, that is to say, certain
commissioners themselves are going through screening in relation
to the deficit of resources of the Commission compared to the
objectives and policy that we are supposed to implement. I have
been through this exercise for ECHO with Commissioner Nielson.
My own evaluation is that for the time being ECHO is short of
staff. It is not very much, what we are short of, but I would
say we are short of some 15 people here in Brussels in order to
make sure that we can accomplish our mission in good condition
and without taking too many financial risks, in comparison with
the budget we are supposed to manage, which is about 450 million
per year, the numbers of countries in which we intervene and the
numbers of transactions we have to manage. Just to give you an
indication we have at the moment between 200 and 300 partners
we work with. We have an average per year of some 1,000 contracts
to manage—this is initial contracts—but afterwards
we have also to manage the modification of contracts because in
many cases operations do not last exactly the duration which was
first anticipated at the beginning because of the evolution of
the situation in the field, because of administrative problems
that the NGOs face in the country and so on. We have a huge administrative
burden to support in managing the aid. On the other side I have
quite some experience in management of resources because of my
background. I have come to the conclusion that we do not need
a huge reinforcement but if we could get 10 or 15 persons more
in Brussels this would really put us more at ease. For the time
being at each desk which is managing funds and contracts each
person manages between 10 and 12 million euros and something like
between 50 and 70 contracts per person, which is completely crazy.
I do not know how they do it. I admire my desk officers for the
professionalism they put into this, but this is done by enterprise,
by being in the office sometimes 12 hours, by coming to work on
Saturday and Sunday, by having very long periods of leave which
are not taken and so on. This is why I say, because I have done
some screening work in one sense of the Commission in my past
life, there is a shortage of Commission staff, which is not huge,
which is quite sensible, but in ECHO particularly there is some
shortage. If I can just give you a comparison, if you take the
case of Mozambique, the United States for example had 35 persons
in the field. Some Member States had 5, 10, 15 persons. We had
one person we could put in the field. This person was there from
the beginning. I have in the office one desk which could cover
Mozambique. It was actually the head of the unit responsible who
could cover Mozambique and the real problem we were faced with,
as I have been discussing with Member States now for some time,
is that at the same time that we were supposed to be in the field
making this assessment, signing up the partners who could deliver,
preparing the decision, preparing the contracts—it is always
the same person who is doing that—we had also meetings every
day in the Council, meetings in the Parliament, and this is already
the same person who was also supposed to go the Council and to
the Parliament. We have learned lessons from this and what we
have done now in the new organisation of ECHO (because there is
a new organisation in place from 1 June) is that we have decided
that we will create a support system in-house. This means that
if we have a new crisis of the type of Mozambique there will be
at least two persons who work in a co-ordination unit and who
deal normally with the question of interaction with the Council
and with the Parliament and with the preparation of general briefing
also, which we can call in immediately to support the desk officers
and the geographical units. If there is a need they will not only
be supporting and preparing the briefings, going to Parliament,
going to Council, and helping on these more general matters, but
they will even be able to support them in preparing contracts
and assisting those needs. We have taken this decision, but that
is a very limited capacity. This can work if we have just one
crisis at a time.
82. What sympathy is there in the Council for
increased staffing in their bids?
(Ms Adinolfi) It depends where you go in the Council.
I would say from my experience, because I have dealt with that
for five years in the budgetary committee, that there will be
no sympathy at all. I can imagine that the first reaction will
be, you just do as you have done for the last 10 years. They will
always pretend that there is some capability in the deployment
and not well used capacity and so on. There is always the capability
of bettering the system and improving outside efficiency and so
on, but if I look to ECHO I have to say I have no more flexibility.
I will put everyone at work, even the people who are not so good
and not so brilliant, and tell them that they have to work and
to deliver, otherwise there will be sanctions. I am sorry, but
there is a limit to what you can do just by deployment and better
efficiency because when there is a structure lack you can just
cover this. Also, in many cases (and this is the problem we have
for the time being in the Commission) you can deploy people but
you have to make sure that you are deploying people who have the
skills appropriate to the job when you want them to do the job.
For the moment we have a problem of a certain lack of skills on
financial control. This is a general problem in the Commission.
I can decide tomorrow that perhaps we close some services of the
Commission which are dealing with nuclear safety, but how do we
make a nuclear inspector capable of handling financial control?
This is the riddle.
83. Are you saying it is impossible for you
to do the job as you would like to see it done?
(Ms Adinolfi) I would not say it is impossible. It
is very difficult. What we are concerned about in the case of
ECHO is that in reality what we see is that we are less capable
of delivering in time, that is to say, we deliver and we deliver
also, I would say, with good results, but we should be able to
deliver more quickly.
Chairman: In view of the time I am going
to ask Tess Kingham and Piara Khabra to put questions to you together
and then perhaps you can give us some quick answers.
Tess Kingham: I would like to come back
to the issue of these framework partnership agreements and the
instruments that you have for dispersal and tie that in with the
issue about staffing. I can fully accept one person being responsible
for a budget of, say, 10 million euros is ridiculous. However,
surely some of that must also come down to the unwieldy bureaucratic
process that needs to be gone through for fast dispersal of funding.
Are you saying that if, for example, you are working with an NGO
partner in the field who needs to have quick dispersal of funding
and they carry out a project very quickly and expect you to give
them the money back later, you still have to go through the process
of checking out their budgetary background, because presumably
that must be tying up so much of your staff time? Is it not the
case also that if you cut down on the bureaucratic nature of that
your staff time would be freed up to be able to deal with the
issue better?
Mr Khabra
84. What sort of budget is available to ECHO
and is there any underspend? Will more money be immediately available
if more than one emergency situation arises anywhere else in the
world?
(Ms Adinolfi) To answer the first question, we work
normally only with NGOs who have gone through the process of being
audited before we start work with them. When we work with them
they have been accepted and they have signed a contract so we
do not go through the process every time. Once an NGO is in the
system of the framework partnership agreement we do not check
them every time. What we have to check is the project itself.
This is the problem and this is the procedure we have to go through
because of our own regulations.
Tess Kingham
85. And it is checked as if it is a long term
development project?
(Ms Adinolfi) It is not long term. It is quicker and
easier. In certain cases, if the project is well presented and
because the NGO has practice and respects the criteria, this also
goes through quite quickly.
86. I have worked in NGOs in the past and I
have been involved with those projects and I know what a lengthy
process it is in drawing up the objectives, ensuring that partners
are consulted, and so on, and the kind of criteria that are there
are quite lengthy. Are you working on a faster way in emergencies
to cut out a lot of the kind of consultation and partnership criteria
that you need if it is a longer term development project which
probably is not so necessary if you are just trying to get emergency
humanitarian aid to people in a fast way?
(Ms Adinolfi) In every project it is not so much a
question of consultation with partnership. In every case you have
to check if the project is aiming towards something which is sensible,
if the kind of targets and the amounts of food, shelter and so
on are reasonable and linked to the operation, and if the expenses
in terms of human resources, transport and goods are sensible.
At this point you have to check in any case.
87. I can accept that. It is the more lengthy
part of those projects that I would query, the part where you
have sections about exit strategies. Some of it is quite lengthy.
Is that really necessary for some emergency situations?
(Ms Adinolfi) I would not say that we are doing the
exit strategy every time there is a real emergency, but on the
other side, if you take the case of Mozambique, we have been obliged
from the very beginning to have an exit strategy because we know
that Mozambique for instance is not a normal case where ECHO operates,
so we should assure from the very beginning that if we went in
we were also ensuring that DG10 could take up and start immediately
after. There was a need to make some kind of assessment of the
stability of the project we were funding with the aim of handing
over in the best condition.
Chairman
88. And the budgetary question?
(Ms Adinolfi) For the budget we have this year some
470 millions which are in the budget. Traditionally ECHO has never
underspent. Normally, as I indicated, it has paid and used all
credits. I would say that perhaps we will have a problem in 2000
because in reality our budget has been doubled last year by the
Kosovo crisis. There is a real problem with that because in reality
I am not sure we will be able to spend everything. We have had
some credits which have been imported from 1999 to 2000 and I
am not sure that we will be able to spend them just because we
feel now that there has been too much money for emergencies. We
have some difficulties now in finding real emergency projects
when we are in the rehabilitation and structural phase with other
parts coming on. Traditionally ECHO has been a good spending instrument.
We have had no problem in spending. If there is an emergency in
any case there is also the reserve we can mobilise.
89. Can I just ask about the quality of ECHO's
interventions? We have concentrated upon the administrative side
so far. What is the assessment or evaluation of the work of ECHO?
Have there been any independent assessments? What is the outcome?
(Ms Adinolfi) There has been quite a large evaluation
last year. We had the Commission do an external evaluation which
is called the Evaluation of Article 20 because under Article 20
of the Regulation we had an obligation to make an external evaluation
after a certain period of implementation of the instrument. There
is a huge document which has really gone through everything. On
that basis the Commission has taken a certain number of conclusions
which have been the object of a communication we have made to
the Council and the Parliament, and on this communication the
Development Council approved a resolution on 18 May and the European
Parliament will be voting on the resolution in September. I would
say that the general conclusion of the external evaluation was
that, taking into account the shortcomings and the difficulties
and certain problems, all in all ECHO has delivered at least as
well as other major international donors and in certain cases
it has even done better. If you are interested we can some give
some information.
90. We have an assessment called Community
and Humanitarian Activities which we have looked at. In that
it says that the areas of health and nutrition have been poor.
What plans have you to improve those?
(Ms Adinolfi) I would say that we will take this kind
of recommendation in a very pragmatic way, that is to say, we
will now go through every time we take a specific decision in
certain countries and we will analyse more in depth what are the
needs and we will see to what extent our performance or our intervention
has not been adapted and so we take this general recommendation
in terms of implementing it on a case by case basis.
91. Are you going to take measures to increase
and improve co-ordination between other multilateral agencies
and the European Union Member States who also have their own emergency
programmes? Are you working on that?
(Ms Adinolfi) Yes, we are working on those issues.
There are two aspects of co-ordination. You have to improve your
co-ordination at the level of the planning and the programming
of the intervention every year. Our idea for this is sensible
timing and we will have a discussion with the Humanitarian Aid
Committee next week in Paris, that we will try to have a slightly
different cycle of programming, that is to say that before the
beginning of a budgetary year, so let us say, in October/November
this year, we will have a general discussion with the Member States
on needs assessment and the way we plan to intervene next year
in normal humanitarian situations, not for emergencies because
they are not foreseeable. We would very much like to have a discussion
with the Member States in order to confront first of all whether
our own needs assessment corresponds to their own evaluation in
the field, to make sure that our interventions are as much as
possible also complementary to the overall intervention of the
Union as such, taking into account also bilateral aid.
92. Will you only in such programmes offer to
fund bilateral emergency aid programmes?
(Ms Adinolfi) No, this is not the idea. The idea is
essentially to make sure that the plans of the Member States who
plan to finance on a bilateral basis certain humanitarian emergency
situations match with our own vision of needs assessment. We want
first of all to make sure that we share analysis in terms of needs
assessment, and secondly to make sure that there is a unified
effort between our own Commission intervention and Member States'
intervention on a bilateral basis. The second point is that we
would like to improve, and we are now discussing for instance
with the UN agencies whether to have at some stage also some kind
of exchange of planning and of ideas with the UN agency and some
major NGOs also in order that we share also the analysis of needs
assessment and the analysis of priorities and sectoral interventions.
We are working on that but the system is not yet in place.
93. Can I thank you very much indeed and congratulate
you on resisting the pressures brought upon you by others in the
Commission to take part in that foolish fuel for democracy scheme
which you said was beyond your remit. I would like to congratulate
you in standing firm on humanitarian principles. Thank you very
much indeed.
(Ms Adinolfi) We will be sending you some information
about Mozambique.
Chairman: If you would we would be very
grateful indeed. Thank you very much.
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