Select Committee on International Development Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 29-39)

MS JANE COCKING, MR MARCUS OXLEY AND MR TOBY PORTER

6 JUNE 2006

  Q29 Chairman: Thank you for being so patient. I trust that you found the last session interesting and there will be questions that may arise out of it directed at you. You will appreciate that we are just getting stuck into this and we are really looking for information from people who work on the ground as to how they perceive these things. I guess what is of interest to us is that we have had a long discussion about the high-profile disasters and the impression one gets sometimes is that everybody wants to be in the high-profile ones, to the point where people argue that agencies trip over each other and get in each other's way. I would like to know, first of all, the extent to which that might be true but how do you as agencies in the field resolve the issue of, "It is high profile and everybody will be there but how important is our role and how necessary is it for us to be there or could we be doing something more useful? Do we all have to be there? Do we all have to focus on that?" I do not know who wants to take it first.

  Ms Cocking: As our journalist colleagues were saying, it is a perennial problem, how we get the balance right, and it was very interesting to hear Lyse Doucet's assessment of what happens on a Saturday morning when there is an earthquake. It is remarkably similar to the process that goes on in most aid agencies, I think. The word, though, that is very high in the conversation in our discussions which did not come from Lyse (which is probably right) is need. That has to be and quite genuinely is the first priority that feeds into our decision-making. Are we talking about a crisis which will unfold and affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people or are we talking about a crisis which will unfold and gather many column inches or television time? That is the basis on which we would make our decisions and that would very much influence the scale of what we do and also the nature of what we do. However, it would be invidious of us to pretend that it is not difficult to get the balance right between responding to the earthquake in Pakistan on 8 October and maintaining a presence and an impact in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both of them are happening in chronic and very deep-rooted crises and both of them are places where organisations like Oxfam have been for many years and we maintain a commitment to be there, but it is easier to raise money to respond in the first days following the Pakistan earthquake than it is to continue doing the work in Eastern Congo that we have been doing for many years.

  Q30  Chairman: I do not know whether it is a fair question to you but it must be a question that relates to some agencies, which is if something happens which is clearly going to be big; is there not going to be a discussion that says, "We will not get our share of the money unless we are there, even if we are not the best agency to do the job and we are not the best equipped to do it." How easy is it for an organisation to say, "Actually we have not got a huge amount to add to that. We are just going to pass it up even though we know it might affect the fundraising"?

  Ms Cocking: You are right it would be very difficult for an organisation like Oxfam to say, "We are not going to respond to a high-profile emergency." It would be very difficult in terms of our global profile. What we have done to guard against that and also to put it positively to ensure that we do have something that we believe we can always bring to the table is invest in particular competences and particular expertise. In the 15 years I have been working in humanitarian crises, I think we can say genuinely that we have got much better at that. For example, nine years ago—as long as that—we took a decision that we were not going to work in curative health, that there were others who were much better at it, that it took a huge amount of investment, both human and financial, to be good at that, and we were simply not going to do it. What we would do and what we have done is we have invested in developing our capacity to respond to water and sanitation needs and so we will bring that to the table on all occasions, and that is how, if you like, we answer your question in saying are we going to always respond. We always will respond if we can but in a way we have sidestepped your question by saying we will make sure that we always have something to bring to the table.

  Q31  Chairman: I wonder if either of your colleagues wanted to add anything, particularly if you have been faced with that decision at any time; should we not respond, should we opt out of this one?

  Mr Oxley: Tearfund is a much smaller organisation than Oxfam and that is a decision that we have to make all the time because we have only got limited resources ourselves and so we are constantly challenged by this question of where do we respond, where do we not respond? We have quite well-established internal procedures. We have a flow chart and on the left-hand side of the flow chart we are looking at what the humanitarian imperative is, what the need is, what the external environment is. On the other side, we are looking at what the capacity and the added value of the organisation is and, all the time, as you make that decision, as the management team comes together, essentially it is a needs niche equation. You are trying to say, first of all, what is the scale and the scope of the crisis? How many people have been killed? How many people have been affected? How many people have been displaced? What is the level of loss? Has the government actually requested external assistance? Have they declared a state of emergency? If you like, that is the official request then for external assistance to come in. What is the level of need? What are the sectors involved in that? Is there unmet need? That is really what you are trying to cut it down to; what is the level of unmet need? What we mean by that is we are looking at what the internal indigenous capacity to respond is, both within the community that has been affected, within the national government of the country that has been affected, what is the unmet need within that and then we are looking at what the external response is to that from the UN agencies, from the Red Cross organisations, from the non-governmental organisations, and that is all trying to define what the unmet need is. Then on the other side of the equation we are faced with issues of do we have sufficient capacity ourselves? Do we have an historic presence in that country? Do we have local partners that we have a relationship with in those countries? What is the level of financial resource we are going to get for that? That is related to the degree of media attention that it is going to get. Will the DEC do an appeal?

  Q32  Chairman: That is helpful in terms of the criteria but can I press you—and perhaps Toby as well—have you actually been in a situation where you have concluded that this is a high-profile emergency but Tearfund is not going to be there?

  Mr Oxley: In Java just recently. We have made a decision that we are going to have a very minimal response to the Java earthquake for all those various reasons that we feel it is not the role of Tearfund to go in there.

  Q33  Chairman: Toby?

  Mr Porter: No. And the reason for that is because with all of the inconsistencies and vagaries that the last group before you explained, the high-profile emergencies tend to be quite significant emergencies, so if you are a global organisation with a global mandate to respond, finding yourself, except for operational reasons, in a situation where you were not going to respond to a high-profile emergency would be a very odd thing in view of mandate. That said, security is obviously a factor. I think a lot of agencies still are very uneasy about the current drought in Somalia because that is not really a place where people want to scale up and have to start huge programmes. Many of us are already there, but I am talking about the last group, and there is Chechnya and earthquakes or other natural disasters in places where access is difficult. Of course for the Bam earthquake in 2003 there was a very substantive response and UK agencies, my own included, had a very prominent role there then. Iran is the most earthquake-prone country in the world. Would we be allowed in there now if there were a similar event given the way that political relationships have gone in the last two years? Almost certainly not.

  Q34  Chairman: That is not a decision that you would be taking. It would be taken on your behalf.

  Mr Porter: That is true. What I would say in summary is that NGOs are not a homogenous group and I would acknowledge that, it has been a feature of my career, indeed I think a phrase was coined for it years ago of "briefcase NGOs"; there are a lot of NGOs whose entire mission and raison d'etre revolves around going to well-publicised crises and the moment the publicity has gone and the funds have gone that they retrench and go off somewhere else. I would say that the professional agencies represented here and through the DEC are not like that.

  Q35  Mr Davies: There has been some criticism recently that too many agencies have responded and there has been great duplication and confusion. For example, 300 agencies were involved in the Pakistan earthquake and about the same number in the tsunami. That indicates that coordination does not seem to be working very well. Is the DEC working satisfactorily? Is it inadequate to try to coordinate on a purely national basis? Are there international coordination mechanisms? How do they work and is it the International Committee of the Red Cross or OCHA or ECHO in this business? Is it excessively bureaucratic to try to fund some sort of international coordination mechanism where people spend weeks arguing about coordination before there is any response at all? Could you let us have your views about the present state of the workings of the coordination mechanisms in this business?

  Mr Porter: Firstly, it is very rare to get too many NGOs working in a place. Take the Pakistan example; you may have had 300 NGOs but, two months in, probably less than 50% of the affected families had received minimal shelter and support; it was such a huge emergency. It is not impossible but it is quite rare. Possibly it applies to the tsunami and possibly, in particular for European agencies, the Balkans crisis, the Kosovo crisis in 1999, where you really did see an enormous plethora of groups because it was within range of the white vans from the UK and other European countries, so people who had never done anything like that just loaded up a truck, all of which is a marvellous humanitarian impulse and everything else, but which led to problems in the field. There are coordination mechanisms. They are usually founded around the host government leading on coordination with the support of the UN, or in places where the host government is unable or unwilling to avail its coordination function, then done directly by the UN. I think it is well-known that the role of the UN and the performance of the UN in their coordination role has been patchy. I think there is wide consensus amongst both donor and recipient governments and most serious humanitarian agencies that it is worthwhile to try and support the strengthening of the UN to enable them to better fulfil their coordination role. That does try our patience sorely at times because it can be pretty dismal. I do not think there is a need to overhaul or introduce a new way of doing coordination. I think the systems are there, the structure is there, they just need to be better. Just a final point; DEC is not a grouping that extends itself operationally to the field as a coordination mechanism. It is a fund-raising group and Brendan will tell you exactly what it is.

  Q36  Mr Davies: Do you see a greater role for ECHO in coordinating EU-based agencies?

  Ms Cocking: To be honest, probably not. I think, as Toby has said, the key thing is to ensure that host governments, which have a legal responsibility to ensure assistance to their citizens, and the UN system which has a similar mandate, are able to fulfil that role.

  Q37  Mr Davies: It would be very nice if they were. We have just heard evidence that the UN is not and we all know the problems about UN reform and the inefficiencies of OCHA, and it would be very nice if host governments could, but in most cases in the third world these bureaucracies are over-stretched and often ineffective and corrupt anyway. When they have a disaster hit them they are even less likely to be able to perform efficiently. You are rather wishing for the moon, are you not?

  Ms Cocking: If I could perhaps share a personal experience with you on that. First of all, let us state the truism: you can only coordinate the willing; you cannot coordinate those who do not and will not come to the table. How you do it and whether the UN is doing it adequately is, as Toby has said, very patchy but I think there are examples of when it works. I was in Pakistan shortly after the earthquake struck for some weeks and the coordination of the water and sanitation sector was an example of both the good and the bad. For the first few weeks when UNICEF, the lead agency, had a forceful personality and organisational commitment to really pull together information and to ensure that duplication of effort did not take place and that the right priorities were set, it worked, and the attendance at those meetings was very high and very positive because people felt they were getting something out of it. To be honest, the quality of that slipped when the chair of the group changed and the barometer of number of seats around the table filled rapidly demonstrated that even those such as ourselves who are wholeheartedly committed to coordination, and even I had difficulty in persuading some of my colleagues to go to some of those meetings. So I suppose I am challenging you that it never works. It does work and it can work, but I think what our role as agencies and the role of donors particularly (and DFID plays a very positive role in this) is to set very clear markers where we expect to see delivery on the UN's coordination mandate and to ensure that they are resourced appropriately. If that means simply putting the right people in the right place at the right time, then they need to be able to do that.

  Q38  Mr Davies: Thank you for that. Let me challenge Mr Porter on what you just said about the fact that over-provision or over-subscription is unusual and unlikely, except perhaps in a special case of when a disaster occurs within easy driving distance of EU capitals. I would draw his attention to the latest DFID report on the earthquake in southern Java in the Yogyakarta area where it says: "There appears to be a significant number of pledges coming from donors in either money or material support. Over-subscription is a potential reality given the apparent and relative scale of the disaster[1]." So I put it to you, Mr Porter, that over-subscription, over-provision is not as unusual or as unlikely a phenomenon as you have just been telling the Committee.

  Mr Porter: I have not spoken to DFID in the last couple of days about Java but I think in Java there is the fact that so many of the tsunami agencies were in Aceh anyway and there are very thickly staffed UN offices in Jakarta, far more than anywhere else, so I think there are some slightly unusual variables impacting on this.

  Q39  Mr Davies: This note specifies the pledges that have been made in relation to the recent earthquake. Let me give you a copy of the note. The note may be right or may be wrong but you should perhaps read it and if you think it is wrong you should let us know it is wrong.

  Mr Porter: Let us put it in the context of one country. The current range—and it is still far too wide a range to be satisfactory—coming out of the government is between 200,000 and 600,000 people have been left homeless effectively by this earthquake. This Government, which is a generous government, has pledged in total now five million pounds for that. So that leaves each family—and someone will be better at maths than I am- depending on the range, with somewhere in between 10 and 15—


1   DFID Situation Report No 7, Indonesia Earthquake, 1 June 2006, 14.00 GMT. Back


 
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