Examination of Witnesses (Questions 49-59)
MS JANE
COCKING, MR
MARCUS OXLEY
AND MR
TOBY PORTER
6 JUNE 2006
Q40 Mr Davies: It is all listed in
this note which I had better pass to you. Germany, Ireland, USA,
$5 million pledged; Australia, $7.5 million; Japan, $10 million;
the Netherlands, $1.2 million; Norway, $5 million; Canada, $1.7
million; European Commission, $3.7 million; China (that is an
interesting one), $2 million in bilateral assistance. It is all
set out here. It amounts to a very considerable amount of money.
Of course the disaster is appalling—
Mr Porter: The total is what?
Q41 Mr Davies: The total from the
figures I have just read out must be in the order of way over
$40 million.
Mr Porter: That would be $50 per
family for people—
Q42 Mr Davies: It simply says: "Over-subscription
is a potential reality." If DFID says that over-subscription
is a potential reality, I take it that was not said frivolously
and it is quite likely there will be over-subscription.
Mr Porter: As I say, I have not—
Chairman: This raises the other issue
of promises made and not delivered so outcomes can vary. Anyway,
I think Quentin has made his point. John Barrett?
Q43 John Barrett: To follow up on
a slightly different angle from that, I am sure there is always
more work to be done than can be done when individual emergencies
or calamities or whatever happen. As you said, there needs to
be better coordination, whether it is amongst the donors, the
NGOs, or whatever. We saw that for ourselves in Mozambique. It
was mentioned by one member of the Government that they have had
to try to coordinate 400 groups in the fight against AIDS alone.
There is plenty of work for everyone to do but if the donors are
not coordinated, the NGOs are not coordinated, and other groups
are not coordinated, you are not getting the most efficient use
of the money or resources that are there and the people who are
working at the front-line are not being the most effective. We
have seen excellent coordination happen but do the leading NGOs
have a specific role to help get this sorted out because we hear
it again and again? I would say that as the years go past it seems
to be getting worse because more donors are joining the field,
more and more varied NGOs are appearing, so it is actually getting
worse rather than better. Do you now have a key role because in
your own submission[2]
you say that we have got to get a grip on this?
Ms Cocking: I think we do. I think
the agencies around this table step up to that role. For example,
just speaking for my own agency, we frequently offer to take the
lead in coordinating sectors that we have particular competence
in, so again to pick up the Java earthquake, we are coordinating
water and sanitation. We were asked if we would also coordinate
shelter and we said "sorry, no". That was not because
we did not feel that shelter required coordination; it was simply
that we did not have people to put on the job and we also did
not feel we were particularly competent at it and there should
be others who were. I think your point is absolutely right, that
if we are going to enter a sphere of any sort of operation then
we have a responsibility to engage with others as far as we can;
and we do. I think that can only be helped by beginning that coordination
earlier. Obviously it is very difficult to coordinate before a
major earthquake or something because, sadly, we do not have too
many crystal balls into which we can gaze, but where it comes
to chronic food crises which are going to reach a peak of acute
need at certain times of the year in certain years, then investment
by agencies such as ourselves and also by bilateral and multilateral
donors in early warning systems will have not only the impact
of greater prediction of the scale of the need that there is going
to be, but can also mean that response is better planned in advance.
To give you a good example, in Southern Africa, which was arguably
a very poor example of prediction and good, coordinated response
in the food crisis of 2002-03 RIACSO (Regional Inter-Agency Coordination
and Security Office), the UN office in Johannesburg, grew its
capacity significantly during 2004 so that we would not be caught
in the same position again, and arguably by putting that investment
in—and I know that the people in Johannesburg had to fight
on a six-monthly basis to continue to exist and to continue to
get their budget from OCHA in New York, which is where they were
funded from, that investment undoubtedly paid off in last year's
food crisis because we were able to have discussions as to who
was where and who was doing what last June rather than waiting
for the real peak of the crisis to happen round about October
/ November. So there are good examples. They are a bit scarce
but we need to focus and learn from them.
Mr Oxley: One of the problems
is that all the evaluations that come up say that coordination
is an issue, and we know that, and one of the problems is that
it must be a bit of a nightmare. If I was in local government
there, it must be a nightmare when these disasters happen because
of this huge influx of all these foreign NGOs and different UN
organisations. They are already working in the white hot heat
of a crisis and then all these other foreign bodies come in. It
must be tremendously challenging for them to have to divert the
resource that they want to use to engage in sorting out their
own internal issues to coordinating all the NGOs and the UN agencies.
I have empathy with the governments in the challenge that they
face in doing that. The point being that in the white hot heat
of an emergency these things are extraordinarily difficult to
do. What that says is it is about preparedness. What we need to
coordinate around is planning. To be able to coordinate effectively
you have to have a plan. A lot of people confuse what we mean
by coordination. They seem to believe that if you go into an inter-agency
meeting and you share some information, that is coordination.
Of course, proper coordination is much more than that. It is about
having a coherent framework, understanding where the gaps are
in the system, and then allocating resource against where those
gaps are. That requires preparedness. It requires planning in
advance and there is very limited investment in disaster preparedness
and much more money goes into the actual response side of things.
The point being that if we want to improve the effectiveness of
disaster response then we have to invest more in actually being
prepared to respond. Particularly in the case of natural disasters,
which is what the subject matter of this Committee is, we actually
know with a relative degree of certainty which countries are affected
by natural disasters, so it is not too difficult to identify which
are the higher risk countries and where that advance investment
needs to go. If that was done I think it would help the coordination
issue.
Q44 Mr Davies: Just one very brief
one there. What you are talking about there, Mr Oxley, is preventing
countries from allowing building on flood plains or forcing countries
to insist on earthquake-proof construction standards. How the
devil do you do that? We are talking about often poor countries
or countries like China which are certainly not open to foreign
interference in the way that they run their show. These things
sound wonderful in theory but in practice they seem to me to be
extraordinarily difficult to deliver.
Mr Oxley: There are two slightly
different issues there. One is about disaster preparedness and
what disaster preparedness is saying is there is going to be an
earthquake and there is going to be a cyclone so what we need
to invest in is how better do communities and governments and
NGOs respond to that. That is what we call disaster preparedness.
The other one, which you are alluding to, is actually mitigation,
and what mitigation is saying is how can we prevent that cyclone
from happening in the first place or how we can prevent that flood.
That is things like plans to move people out of the flood plain.
That is called disaster mitigation and that requires a lot of
long-term, up-front investment. It is very much a developmental
challenge while disaster preparedness is saying, "We know
this flood is going to happen. We know there are a lot of vulnerable
people living in that flood plain, how can we be better prepared
to respond to that?" Mitigation and preparedness are two
slightly different issues, one dealing with causes, the other
dealing with effects. Both of them save lives; both of them prevent
the disaster from occurring: we need investment in both.
Q45 John Battle: Just on the question
of over-subscription, what strikes me is that sometimes once a
great crisis is announced on television and people give to NGOs
funds and resources, that sometimes you can have more than you
need for that particular emergency. It strikes me that the charity
rules you are under that only let you spend the money on that
background framework might need looking at to allow you to release
those funds to other emergencies. That really brings me to my
question of whether we can make distinctions in natural disasters
between what I would call the geological ones, the great earthquakes
and the great tidal waves, and the almost slow-burn humanitarian
situations of chronic vulnerability, particularly harvest crop
failure, which may or may not be linked to climate change but
which certainly occur pretty regularly, and that means drought
and that means famine. Niger was a case the media picked up and
said "no-one is paying any attention", although the
aid agencies were trying their best for a year before that hit
the media. Malawi and East Africa come in and out with crop failure.
How do you address specifically the challenges of chronic vulnerability?
What are the major challenges there for you getting ahead of those
crises and not seeing them in terms of the high drama but getting
resources in behind them?
Mr Porter: I am glad you asked
that because I think the three of us felt that the slow-onset
emergency was a theme lacking from your previous questions to
the media group. It is really important. Lyse said that this year
had not been a year of major disasters but there have been many
millions affected by drought in the Horn of Africa, so it depends
what you define as a disaster and certainly the three of us would
include the chronic ones. On this question of over-subscription,
I really would urge you not to let this become a red herring.
It is not a big problem. The opposite is the case. In 95-98% of
humanitarian crises the more resources that aid agencies have
the more they can do. In Niger last year Save the Children launched
one of our biggest ever nutrition programmes. We had 20,000 children
in four months pass through intensive feeding programmes and you
could drive just 15 miles from where we were working (and we just
could not expand any more) and there was no-one doing any work
at all. On chronic issues can I just explain in headline terms
and then maybe pass over to one of these two. Essentially you
need two elements to have a proper global response to these kind
of slow burners and there are some every year. The first is you
need a proper early warning system, and we know that. The second
is you need predictable funding because, as the Oxfam brief explained
very well, usually by the time slow burners get to generate significant
funding you are dealing with people who are threatened with loss
of life but far after they have lost their livelihoods and economic
viability. What I would say at the moment is that we currently
have early warning systems of various success and sophistication
in various countries, but what we do not have and what we do need
is an early response system, so that there is a linking in of
the early warning information with at the same time a more predictable
source of funding for this kind of situation.
Ms Cocking: To add to that, I
completely agree with Toby's points. I think for us and our partner
organisations on the ground (because a lot of this stuff we do
with local organisations) the two characteristics that we really
need are creativity and flexibility. You raised Malawi as an example
and it is an absolute classic. There will be years when people
do not need emergency assistance but they are still looking for
building their skills and building their choices to improve their
livelihoods. What we have done as just one organisation (but we
are not alone) in Southern Malawi over the last two or three years
is to say that we will make sure that our staff and the local
government staff with whom we work are skilled across the board
in long-term and short-term responses, so that they can talk to
communities much sooner and they can say, "What is this year
going to be like and what is it that you need?" We will not
set up our own systems to say, "Look, you are either in mode
A, which is long-term development, or mode B, which is short-term
disaster," because in one community at any given time there
will be some people who will be having a really rough time because
of their own personal circumstances and there will be others who
are just about getting by and coping. So building that flexibility
into our own minds and into their systems is absolutely essential.
I think that has been a sector wide, and still is a sector wide
issue as to how you do not just have a switch that you flick on
and off, and I think we are getting somewhere on those flexible
solutions. What we need to back that up, as Toby was referring
to, are the sources of funding which are going to support that
kind of work which have a level of predictability and can be multi-year
so that you are not having to go through long bureaucratic processes
in order to change gear. It is like driving a car; you do not
stop the car before you change gear, you just shift up and down.
It is that approach that we are really trying to enforce.
Q46 Chairman: Is there a danger or
a risk if you are the government of a poor country which is prone,
for example, to periodic famine, that in theory it would be much
better to take early action and head off and deal with things
before the famine arrives, but past experience might tell you
that when the famine arrives so do the television cameras and
so does the money and you do not have to spend the money yourselves.
That is not too good for the people on the ground but not too
bad for the budgets of the central government. Is there any evidence
that that happens?
Mr Porter: You are probably familiar
with Amartya Sen's work around democracy and famine. Famines do
not tend to happen in places where they have good governance.
There was reference to the 1994 famine in Ethiopia being much
more complex than it appeared. Obviously the Kenya drought was
again a complex issue because they had just sold a whole load
of grain. Humanitarianism is a very simple thing and governance
is a very complex thing. Humanitarianism says that if people are
marginalised and if governance is questionable or absent, then
the most marginalised communities (who are the ones that are most
likely to suffer) are probably the ones that register least or
even negatively on the radar of the government, so you are then
left with a dilemma about should we encourage good governance
by allowing the communities in the North East not to receive any
assistance when they are under immense stress and threat from
this drought? That is all I would say. I think people legitimately
get frustrated with governance failures and seeing foreign aid
as to some degree compensating for national government responsibility,
but there are inefficiencies also in international policies and
the point that Jane was making earlier is that the later you leave
it to intervene in a slow-burning crisis, the more expensive it
is, so we all just have to focus on our own mandates and on people's
right to survival and assistance regardless of who governs or
respects them.
Chairman: Presumably the international
community's emphasis on budget support could make a contribution
to that, I do not know. Marsha Singh?
Q47 Mr Singh: When a disaster happens
it is my understanding that DFID picks partner NGOs based on its
knowledge of those organisations. What happens in between disasters?
Does DFID do any work on maintaining its knowledge or extending
its knowledge about those NGOs or even assessing the effectiveness
of those partners in the field?
Ms Cocking: Yes is the straight
answer. Just to take us as an example, whether it is here in the
UK, whether it is in regional centres, or whether it is at country
level, we have a continuing and what we would like to think of
as an excellent relationship with DFID. That includes engagement
on early warning systems, on policy, and also on evaluating and
monitoring previous responses. So, yes, it is very much a continuing
relationship. I think we are very clear in our submission, for
us DFID are a top-of-the-range donor in terms of creativity and
in term of progressive thinking and we could not do that together
if we did not have that engagement. I think if we have a criticism
it is just that the kind of systems changes that we struggle with
ourselves we might like to see DFID struggle with a bit more as
well.
Q48 Mr Singh: Does the existing system
crowd out new NGOs? Britain is very much a multi-cultural society
now and there will be ethnic groups here who want to set up their
own NGOs, for example to help in Pakistan or wherever. Is there
any access for them to participate in the work that you are doing?
Mr Oxley: Yes, I think there is
room. Over recent times there has been a proliferation of NGOs,
so clearly there is space somewhere to allow new agencies to come
up because they are coming up literally all over the place. I
know just recently Islamic Relief have applied to the DEC to join
them so even the larger NGOs are able to join the DEC. So I think
there is space there. Perhaps the danger is that some of the thinking
in the NGOs is that the problem is we are not very good at self-regulation
and the issue is how do we make sure that we are more accountable
in what we do, particularly accountable to the people we are purporting
to serve. There are various quality standards that people say
we have got to have and it is all to do with self-regulation and
people saying perhaps you need an external accreditation process
to say these agencies have reached certain standards or international
standards or external accreditation as a way to professionalise
what the NGOs do so that you can get a better quality service,
and a drive to increase the quality of the service. The danger
with that is that you exclude, by professionalising yourself,
the smaller agencies that are trying to aspire to come into that.
So there are various discussions within the sector about how to
stimulate innovation and growth, but also how to enhance greater
accountability between ourselves and how do we do that because
at the moment it has depended on self-regulation and there are
questions as to whether that is the best way to go.
Mr Porter: On that specific point,
the point you make about new NGOs is extremely important. I think
that Islamic Relief is the NGO that most illustrates this and
is fast becoming not just a significant national NGO but in fact
an international federation. I think it is a very good sign that
the DEC has included Islamic Relief in its membership because
DEC members have been accused of acting like a cartel, which I
do not think was the case, and I think it is good that they have
shown it is not a cartel, or at least one that is prepared to
admit new members.
Q49 Mr Singh: Are you not changing
the rules of membership at the moment to continue to be a cartel?
Mr Porter: I will defer the question
to the right honourable gentleman behind me! I think also one
has to apply administrative realism to this question. If you are
talking about groups that are going to be responding regularly
and on a similar scale to a whole variety of emergencies where
they might feel mandated to respond, such as a country where all
or a large part of the country is a Muslim population, then I
think you have the grounds to expect from DEC and from DFID and
everything else that people will look at the credentials of the
agency very closely. If however, as is often a feature, you get
a large number of ad hoc groups springing up for a specific emergency,
I think you have to be realistic and say ad hoc-ery is a very
good thing and often these networks are just as effective as more
established ones but you are talking slightly apples and oranges.
Q50 Joan Ruddock: You will have heard
our discussions with the representatives of the media. I just
wonder if we could hear your responses to things they have said.
You will remember that Lyse Doucet said that you are all there
with your t-shirts and buttons making it very, very clear who
you are and getting projection through the media and there were
issues of whether you dump your sacks of flour in order to put
a journalist on a plane, that sort of thing. Where do you stand?
Ms Cocking: I will comment later
on the accusation that we wear too many of our own t-shirts.
Q51 Joan Ruddock: I think she thought
it was justifiable.
Ms Cocking: I think she did. It
was perhaps a slight overstatement but to look at the overall
picture, my sense is that our relationship with the media has
become vastly more sophisticated over the last decade, as Lyse
referred to, and part of that is simply technological. When I
worked in Somalia in the early 1990s the agency I worked with
in Mogadishu owned the only satellite phone in Mogadishu so journalists
had to come and use it, and we were absolutely flabbergasted when
all of a sudden this journalist turned up with a little briefcase
with a sat phone and we thought, "Crumbs, that has changed".
In a way the relationship has been driven to change. There is
something in the nature of it which means there will always be
tension, but the fact that, as they mentioned, we employ specialists
from their world and they employ specialists from ours is a very
clear indicator of the way in which we accept that we have a mutually
supportive role. Undoubtedly, we need the profile and the people
who we seek to assist need the profile, and to claim that there
is something honourable in anonymity would be impractical and
rather foolish. However, there will always be, as they said, difficult
moments. I am not sure if it was the one that Lyse was referring
to but we had a very interesting debate with the BBC when one
of our planes was going to Pakistan just a couple of days after
the earthquake as to whether or not the two passenger seats would
be given to BBC journalists and we said "no, it was more
important that logisticians who could clear the cargo through
Islamabad quickly received those seats", and they were not
awfully happy, but at the same time only yesterday we were engaged
in a very interesting discussion with the BBC's developing world
correspondent about precisely this issue of how we represent chronic
crises better in the media and working with him on planning a
particular piece of work in July. I think, by and large, I would
agree with a lot of their analysis but just add the rider that
I think it has over the last decade grown immensely in sophistication
and we do not always get it right.
Mr Porter: I did a lot of interviews
last weekend on BBC Breakfast, Sky and News 24 and I did not wear
any badges or t-shirts or ask for any boxes.
Q52 Joan Ruddock: You probably had
a good caption, a good introduction when you were on though.
Mr Porter: When Sky News did a
live broadcast with me and stood outside my house I had a For
Sale sign and it did sell the next day, so perhaps that was connected!
You are sophisticated enough and DFID and the media are sophisticated
enough to realise that NGOs are very odd things in that we essentially
spend other people's money on other people again, and when you
appreciate that, then what makes the way we operate justifiable
is that if we were acting purely from an institutional perspective
in a way that had brought no benefit to affected populations,
that would be morally a very problematic position to occupy, but
in most coverage of most emergencies I do believe there is a convergence,
if you like, of profile being used to attract funding to increase
that particular agency's response to that particular emergency,
and therefore it is probably morally justifiable for sophisticated
analysts like yourselves.
Q53 Joan Ruddock: Could I ask you
about skewing priorities and whether you feel media coverage does
skew priorities for you?
Ms Cocking: For what we do I do
not think it does. Has it ever significantly changed our particular
approach to a particular crisis? I struggle to find an example
of a time when it has, and that is looking quite honestly and
self critically at ourselves. Where it does skew things is undoubtedly
in terms of public response. We have been frustrated over the
lack of media coverage for the apparent food crisis in East Africa
so what that means is we have to be honest and sometimes incredibly
fortunate to have our own resources through our shops and through
our own supporters, and what it means is that we have to put more
of our own money into certain crises that do not receive high
public profile because we cannot rely on additional, dedicated
funds for that so it creates a lot of shifting of resources.
Chairman: Thank you very
much. Obviously the Committee has under-estimated the time allowed.
I am anxious that we do have a few minutes at least to look at
the DEC. Thank you very much indeed for coming along and for answering
our questions. Note from witness: This phrase was intended
to convey the DEC's greater success in persuading celebrities
to discuss disaster response issues on chat shows, than in securing
mainstream news coverage for analyses of DEC expenditure.
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