Examination of Witness (Questions 280-299)
MR JAN
EGELAND
17 JULY 2006
Q280 John Battle: It seems to me
that sometimes within your work you are hardly able to get from
under one disaster, whether human or war, before the next one
is upon you and that does not give you much space and time to
reflect and analyse how to do things better. I almost feel reluctant
to ask you the question, given what you have to cope with, but
it is in the spirit of the fact that in Pakistan—and I refer
to the Pakistan earthquake—I think the work that went on
there to ensure that the disaster was not even worse in the winter
was spectacular. The co-operation of the Pakistani Government,
NGOs, the UN agencies and the donors and the work that went on
there to ensure that there was not another catastrophe in the
winter was exemplary. I wonder in the light of that comment if
I could perhaps press you to put under the microscope some of
the processes, not at the end of the clusters but at the stage
before the clusters, those very early days when it comes across
on the wires and through the TV that the earthquake has happened
and you have to make decisions and you refer to the stand-by teams,
pushing the buttons and systems go. If I remember rightly, in
Pakistan what happened was the resident coordinator became the
humanitarian coordinator straightaway and then there was a bit
of time before the deputy went into position. I wonder if I could
ask, do you think you have got in terms of the push-button approach
the right people in the right place at the right time ready to
go?
Mr Egeland: Not always, and that
is why the third leg of this three-legged humanitarian reform
effort is really to have predictable leadership. Number one is
predictable funding and the Central Emergency Response Fund is
helping us in that regard. The second is predictable response
capacity, to be equally good at water and sanitation as we have
been at food and as good at shelter as we have been in emergency
vaccination drives which are phenomenally good. The third is predictable
leadership and, as you have implied, no, we have not been predictable
enough, we have been great in some aspects and with some people
and not been great elsewhere. That is why now we have identified
a pool of 30 leaders from the UN and from NGOs. We are training
them systematically now and have them ready to go to places, so
again we do not have today, I think, the same problems as we had
in Aceh to ensure that we had field marshals who are really there
to act in the field at all times.
Q281 John Battle: Are they different
people from the resident coordinators? Do you need different kinds
of skills and specialisms if there is an earthquake?
Mr Egeland: Absolutely, we do.
Q282 John Battle: Would that be generally
true?
Mr Egeland: That would be generally
true. To build consensus in a longer term development effort is
not the same as to be the general in an emergency response. We
need other kinds of leadership. In a way we do not necessarily
care to build consensus with 400 partners if it is a question
of getting shelter to three million people in no time. Then you
give a lot of orders, but of course there has to be a general
or a leader who knows how to give orders. We are a little bit
more of a military operation in the emergency phase than we would
be later on when a vast number of actors have to pull together.
Q283 John Battle: And have some of
the ideas for those changes come from the Pakistan experience,
do you think?
Mr Egeland: In the Pakistan experience,
and of course, we had to do both there, we did not have predictably
good leadership in all of the clusters. We need people with authority
around whom people rally, especially with the NGOs. We have to
give them an offer they cannot refuse. We cannot force them to
do anything. If they feel they are wasting their time at our meetings
they will not come. I saw that they came more and more in our
shelter meetings and in our health meetings because we became
better at leading them. We have had, for example, problems in
the early recovery cluster because it is not seen as vital to
many organisations and it should be vital to go there because
there is nothing as important as doing early recovery operations.
Q284 John Bercow: Mr Egeland, last
week Jean-Jacques Graisse from the UN World Food Programme told
us in an oral evidence session, based on his experience, that
donors were reluctant to contribute funds to the CERF because
it meant that their contribution to a particular crisis would
not be evident. His assessment from the evidence was that donors
preferred to be able to contribute funds at the time of a crisis
in a very public way so that their contribution was visible rather
than having in a sense to tell their constituents that their contribution
had been made indirectly through a central fund, so there is quite
an interesting issue here of on the one hand countries wanting
in the literal sense of the term to flag-wave and be able to say,
"Look: this is what we are doing", and on the other
hand the understandable desire, if not imperative, in having a
central fund to which countries contribute on an ongoing basis.
I suppose my question to you is, do you think and, if so, to what
extent, that donors concerned with putting flags on their humanitarian
aid contributions is going to limit the chances of meeting your
aim of a $500 million annual fund for the CERF?
Mr Egeland: It is, thank God,
only $500 million so far, of which we have $50 million in the
original loan window, so we have to raise $450 million. Of that
we have raised $263 million so far, so the convention that it
would be very difficult to find altruistic enough donors to give
to this kind of fund and that too many parliaments had to know
the end user before they would give money to such a fund proved
not to be true because we have already raise $263 million in the
first few months of its existence, so it is a phenomenal success.
If I compare it to the other efforts in the UN, the Peacebuilding
Fund and the Democracy Fund and a few other funds, we have raised
four times as much money in three months as they have raised so
far in their existence and they started before us. The UK is number
one donor with $70 million but your taxpayers may be happy to
understand that far smaller Sweden with $40 million and even smaller
Norway with $30 million have paid much more per taxpayer to this
fund. Altogether these three represent more than half of the whole
thing. However, there are some 35 nations altogether, of which
as many are countries in the south as in the north and nearly
as many are non-traditional as are traditional donors. China gave
money, India gave money, Estonia gave money, South Africa gave
money, Nigeria gave money. A number of eastern and central European
nations gave money. South Korea gave $5 million, which is not
insignificant. They all do it because of the argument that it
is rational that we do it can centrally. For example, I said today
there is one million dollars now to start the plan on behalf the
team sitting in Beirut and we will give more if need be.
Q285 John Bercow: I certainly do
not want to be a pessimist. If the evidence is looking rather
good that is marvellous news. On the assumption that there is
reasonable transparency, Mr Egeland, in the process, and I assume
that it is the case, individual contributing states will be aware
of what is being contributed by other individual contributing
states.
Mr Egeland: Yes.
Q286 John Bercow: From which it seems
to me that one or other of two things will over a period follow
where you are talking about an annual fund which is not obligatory
but which is a matter for individual states to decide how much
they contribute. One scenario is that there will be a Dutch auction
by individual states to show just how altruistic and public-spirited
and humanitarian-aid focused they are and they will all be rushing
to out-bid the others in future years, and if Britain senses for
a moment that Sweden is in any danger of catching up, not on a
per capita basis which you say it has already done but in absolute
terms, then it will speed ahead and every man will go to his Cabinet
colleagues and say, "We have got to contribute more because
the Swedes are catching up. It is getting very worrying",
and all that, and that is absolutely marvellous. However, the
other scenario is that states start to think, as very often as
you know can happen in these circumstances, "Frankly, we
are contributing a lot but others are not and we are going to
pare back". Can you reassure me that that pessimistic scenario
will not materialise and I can go back to the public-spirited
people of the Buckingham constituency and say to them, "Fear
not. Mr Egeland tells me, with authority, that the contributions
are generally going to get bigger and bigger, not just from Britain
but also from elsewhere"?
Mr Egeland: I think you can tell
your constituents that. Of course, we have to prove that it is
really going to work well and I think we can already. When the
pipeline was breaking in Darfur there was about $20 million that
we could give very quickly when I was there myself and people
were being killed in the camp and it was very bad, and that money
was very important. Even more important was the fact that we could
give $17 million to the TRC, the Eastern Congo, which is consistently
out of the limelight and losing out. It is a little bit frightening
to see that some of the non-English speaking countries in Africa
are consistently less funded by the international community than
some of the English ones—Burundi, Cote d'Ivoire, the Congo,
Chad. They are not well funded.
Q287 Chairman: Does that imply that
France is neither contributing to the fund nor doing it bilaterally?
Mr Egeland: In addition to the
UK and the US being among the top three donors, the Nordics speak
English and we go in that direction too, I think, and the dominant
media are English-oriented so we do give less attention, I think,
on average, to Guinea than we give even to Sierra Leone, for example.
Therefore, we need altruistic donors who want to give to this
fund which will try to inject more equity into the system. When
we then get this through, yes, I hope we can get the Dutch bit
in. If you visit our web page you will see flags flashing and
so on and which are the big and coming donors and how much various
countries have given, which countries we have given to, which
projects we have given to, how much we have given to each organisation
and so on, in order to be absolutely transparent and give as much
attention to it as possible. My colleague Jean-Jacques Graisse
might have been right in the past but countries have now, through
Good Humanitarian Donorship initiatives, become much better. Where
we still have a problem is in the private sector. Corporations
are more willing to give to tsunami-style concrete action than
to funds like that, with the notable exception of Bill Gates and
Warren Buffet who now give to this huge fund for health and education
in general.
Q288 John Bercow: Do you think that
that might change over a period? It has to be said that that particular
phenomenon is universal, as far as I can tell. I have always found
that business people are much more willing to give to specific
projects in identifiable circumstances, preferably for time-limited
periods, than they are to contribute to a central pot and to subsidise
running costs and so on. I think that is one's experience probably
the world over, but I wonder whether you think that might change
a bit if over a period the fund is so demonstrably successful
that big businesses start to see almost an advertising value in
being part of the action?
Mr Egeland: I think they will.
Big business will go more and more into assistance, not necessarily
our emergency fund but more the kinds of foundations like the
Bill Gates/Buffet Foundation which are really focused on solving
something, such as a vaccine for malaria which is an investment
of so many hundreds of millions and you have done it, or AIDS
for that matter, and, of course, the Gates Foundation, the World
Health Organisation and UNICEF are co-operating in trying to eradicate
specific diseases. It is a little bit tougher to sell the idea
of keeping life-saving alive in a better manner and for that we
need 20 or 30 strong supporters a month, state donors. We will
get more and more in the south but Great Britain must keep its
contribution next year at the same level please.
John Bercow: Thank you very much. The
message is clear.
Q289 Ann McKechin: Mr Egeland, you
have made a very strong argument about the need for greater coordination,
particularly with the increasing number of actors in the humanitarian
response, but in turn a number of NGOs have expressed to us concern
about their ability to obtain funding from UN agencies and some
of them have called for the ability to access funds directly from
CERF. I would be grateful to get your response to that but what
alternative ways might there be of improving the flow of funds
to NGOs given that the number of them is increasing and is likely
to continue to increase?
Mr Egeland: I am myself from the
NGO world. I was for many years in the Red Cross movement, I have
worked for many other NGOs and I was Vice-President of Amnesty
International before that, so I know that to be not only of critical
importance but of increasing importance. What we see in Darfur,
where there are between 13,000 and 14,000 courageous humanitarian
workers on the ground, of whom 75% are non-UN, from the Non-Governmental
Organisations and the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, and most
of them, of course, are Sudanese employees but still we see that
not only are they creating more, they are growing more. The UN
as such in a way is having a shrinking part. We are growing too
but we are growing less, so we have a shrinking part of the operations
on the ground. Our role is becoming more important in terms of
standard-setting, advocacy, coordination, facilitation, heavy
lifting, diplomatic work, negotiations on access and so on. Funding
to the NGOs is growing at a more rapid rate than to some of the
UN family, and I think that is correct. The Central Emergency
Response Fund, CERF, cannot directly give to NGOs because it is
a General Assembly resolution. There was some discussion on changing
the old resolution and opening up for direct money from the UN
fund to NGOs. It proved impossible to get agreement on it. We
would not have had the fund in the General Assembly. However,
for example, the first allocation from CERF was to the Western
Ivory Coast where the Jeunes Patriotes, which is a militia group,
torched down virtually all the UN and NGO offices in Guiglo, a
place on Cote d'Ivoire which I visited just after it happened.
Money from CERF then went to NGOs through UNDP for re-establishing
protection activities for the civilian population. In many other
places the funds go to the implementing partners of the NGOs.
Some of the NGOs are rightly angry with some of the agencies because
they have not been predictable enough in paying up after agreements
have been made. Both sides made commitments and it turns out that
the UN did not get the money we thought we would get. This is
an obstacle for a better UN and your co-operation and we have
to make progress and we are making progress on this, and CERF
will have the money.
Q290 Ann McKechin: We have now got
major international NGOs like the Oxfams or the ActionAids of
this world, but we have also got a lot of very small NGOs, particularly
southern NGOs. Is there a way that the UN can better respond to
the smaller NGOs where disasters occur somewhere like Pakistan
where, as you said, many local people made a tremendous effort
to help?
Mr Egeland: In Pakistan, in the
tsunami, in most national disasters most of the good work is done
by local people themselves, especially in the first life-saving
moments. I have seen too many places like the Bam earthquake and,
for that matter, even the tsunami, where very expensive search
and rescue teams come from the West. They cost a lot and they
save no-one. It is neighbours, family members, local municipalities
and churches and Red Cross people and so on who save people under
the rubble. We come too late even if we are there after 36 hours
because people are dead by then. We come with the second wave
of relief which is to re-establish some normalcy in the health
sector, water and sanitation and so on. You mentioned in particular
some of the UK larger NGOs which are truly first class in providing
assistance. They are as good as any UN agency in that. The problem
ones are those western and other NGOs who come as a third or fourth
wave of international response to the large media-oriented events,
like the tsunami, and 440 international groups working in a nutshell
is probably 200 or 300 too many. We have to be frank on these
things. You cannot have too many travelling to each of them. Who
will limit the number? That is a very difficult question. The
only ones who can do that are the host communities, the host governments,
and then again we will say we like it maybe in northern Pakistan
or in some of these other national disasters but we would not
like it at all if it happened in Darfur because we think the government
has been part of the problem.
Q291 Mr Singh: Could I explore the
issue and problems that have been identified to us about the flash
appeal? DFID told us that they have concerns, and maybe other
donors do, that non-essential or unnecessary programmes were added
to the flash appeal, and by "unnecessary" I mean non-emergency,
and that DFID now seems to be of the view that they would rather
act bilaterally than through future flash appeals. That is the
sense we are getting. Is it ethically right to use a flash appeal
in an emergency to add things which are non-emergency, in a sense
pulling the wool over people's eyes? Secondly, if that is not
ethically right, what can you do or what are you doing to ensure
that flash appeals are carried out for the reasons for which they
are set up and not for other reasons? Even in the Pakistan case,
the host government objected to certain things being added to
the appeal and they were deleted and then put back in again in
Geneva. There is a problem of trust over that both when host governments
deal with donors and with the public.
Mr Egeland: There have certainly
been problems with many flash appeals in the past. We are under
enormous pressure by donors and others to put out an appeal in
the first few days of a tumultuous situation. For example, there
may be a flash appeal coming out of the Lebanon situation. Within
a week now someone, I am sure, will start to call for it in a
day or two and it will be very difficult to do it because it is
hard to get access even to areas. In the tsunami there were no
roads, there was no communication at all. How could we get to
do an overall assessment and then come out with a good appeal?
Still, I think the tsunami appeal was an enormous achievement
because we had an appeal for four or five countries and it was
done in seven days altogether on two continents and it proved
to be pretty good. It was big, $970 million, but, of course, less
than the very English response. In Pakistan also, by and large,
the appeal was good. On shelter what we could do turned out to
be inadequate because we did not have the full overview but the
elements of the helicopters and all of that were excellent. Problems
with smaller things like preparedness come into the appeal. Some
think it is correct, some think it is preposterous to have an
appeal which is not an emergency response but preparedness for
possible deteriorations again. It has been debatable on the principal
issue of not getting it and sometimes it creeps into it as small
elements of a larger group. We have asked DFID and others to help
us improve the quality and critique it systematically so that
they can learn from one to the other. I am sure that DFID would
not leave the appeal system because it is only rational system
we have. We work very hard to get the Arabs and other Gulf donors
to join the system because they go outside and it creates problems.
They went outside of the system in northern Pakistan and it did
not help us. They have to be part of it but our system has to
be better. I told the Chairman that indeed we now have a set-up
with the World Health Organisation, with the World Food Organisation,
UNICEF, OCHA and some other partners trying to ensure uniform
assessment standards.
Q292 John Battle: Sometimes I am
left with an impression that the world is divided into the UN
agencies in a building perhaps in New York or Geneva and the NGOs,
who can give the impression sometimes that they are the only ones
in the field and we have now got two camps, as it were, in some
kind of relationship that is sometimes critical. How do you feel
about the criticisms of some of the NGOs, that there is too much
talk of coordination and if all the coordination goes on with
the civil servants in New York and not enough coordination in
the field the balance is not right? How would you respond to that
criticism? Do you think there is enough coordination at field
level and that that is where the action should be?
Mr Egeland: We have, of course,
to coordinate on both levels as we now through the clusters have
a big effort to build capacity in each of the clusters. We could
see in the Darfur emergency in 2004 that there were too few water
and sanitation engineers in the world available for that kind
of operation who could go and stay in a place like Darfur, so
we are now trying on a global level to build such a capacity,
and certainly here UNICEF and Oxfam and CARE and others will work
together on meeting that. I completely agree with you that, of
course, the most important response coordination has to happen
in the field, very often very locally. I have seen coordination
meetings are as big as this group around the table where in Eastern
Congo, in Bunia or anywhere in Ituri, the Kivus or Goma, the coordination
meeting would be 10 people. It would be three UN agencies, it
would be the OCHA person, it would be four or five or six NGOs
and the ICRC person, and they plan together to meet the challenges
of the day: who should speak to that militia leader, who should
organise that convoy to go to this area. "If we go here are
you willing to go there or would you like us to switch?",
and so on. That coordination is wonderful and is getting better
and better. In my time OCHA has gone from having one third of
our staff in the field to having two-thirds of our staff in the
field, it is a dramatic change, and we are now able, as we proved
in southern Sudan, to get people very quickly into very difficult
circumstances. Southern Sudan is among the few places where I
saw the World Health Organisation have its leaders inside the
Sudan before the NGOs, who remained in Nairobi. Even so, I think
the UN is now also trying to be more proactive but we have a lot
to learn from the NGOs in being really flexible in field operations.
Q293 John Battle: Can I just push
that a little bit further, and that shift is welcome from people
at the centre out into the field and that all governments are
trying to do that and make sure people are not in the offices
in London but are engaged. I just wonder: do you see yourselves
as subcontracting out the skilled work or having your skilled
professionals in the field? I will give you a practical example.
We saw in Pakistan up in Muzaffarabad, out in the villages where
they need water now, plus the landslip has meant that the water
wells have gone, so they have to start introducing new water pumps
and new pipes, but that work has been done and coordinated pretty
much alone by Oxfam. Would it be your intention to have a water
coordinator in the field to give that practical example, to work
alongside Oxfam, or do you see the coordination as just an office
job? If we can get enough actors or sub-agents on our behalf out
there we have cracked it?
Mr Egeland: No. Water and sanitation,
which are so critical, would be a typical area where we could
have an NGO coordinating everybody even, including UN agencies
for that matter. UNICEF is leading the water sanitation cluster
at a global level. We usually do it at a country level and also
at a capital level, but in the field it could just as well be
one of the large NGOs. I have tried now systematically to encourage
NGOs to take leadership functions in the overall coordination
and to have UN agencies accept it, but then, of course, the NGOs
have to be predictable not only in participating and providing
this leadership but also in having the resources to do it, and
you, the governments, have to provide resources for them to do
it in a predictable manner.
Q294 Mr Davies: First of all I must
apologise for being late, Mr Egeland. I had a long-standing engagement
in my constituency. Colleagues may before I arrived have already
told you that we met in Pakistan a large number of UN agencies
and NGOs and we had a litany of complaints about the cluster system,
not merely from the NGOs but also from the UN agencies involved.
I am sure you are going to tell us this afternoon that this is
a new system and it is having teething problems perhaps but it
is going to work out in time. However, would not an alternative
be if OCHA had the responsibility for overall coordination, if
OCHA did contingency planning of the kind you have been describing,
capacity planning, what the military call force planning, and
when an emergency arises you defined the tasks and allocated the
roles between the UN agencies and coordinated between them? If
you did that, of course, and spoke for the UN as one organisation
and spoke with one voice, you would be the natural interlocutor
and coordinator both vis-a"-vis the host governments
and the NGOs, instead of which you have 25 different UN agencies
all with their own agency or corporate agendas, jealous of their
prerogatives, of their different ways of doing things, and very
disinclined to give ground to rival agencies and so forth. It
is a picture of something very much less than an ideal rationality
and, of course, they would resist giving OCHA the powers I have
just defined, but if that resistance was overcome and if OCHA
really became kind of the general staff of the UN, then would
that not solve the problem much better than the present cluster
system?
Mr Egeland: The cluster system
is working as the main tool of the humanitarian coordinator who
is the lead person in the operation but is also the resident coordinator
and reports to me as the emergency relief coordinator and as humanitarian
coordinator. OCHA is there in Pakistan and the tsunami and elsewhere
with teams of people helping the humanitarian coordinator to be
the leader, assigning very clear responsibilities to the leaders
of each cluster. However, if we have a cluster we need to have
an agency with particular technical expertise to lead it. Pakistan
is an interesting case because nobody decided from headquarters
that there should be a cluster system. It emerged from the first
crisis teams who came on the ground, that they wanted to try it
out, and they then decided to establish what they called a pilot
of the clusters. It was improvised there and then. When I came
down four or five were already set up and they said, "It
is common sense that we do it". However, by that time we
had not yet really assigned who would be in charge of the various
clusters. For example, IOM by default took upon themselves the
leadership for shelter, which was the most critical role, and
IOM did not have people on the ground to lead it. It should have
been in my view the Red Cross and Red Crescent Federation that
had a lot of people, a lot of authority and had a lot of experience
in this area. Now this is established as the way of doing it,
globally, so the next big natural disaster it will be the Red
Cross and Red Crescent. We will have then for the first time a
predictable leadership in each individual area. We have already
an evaluation of the pilot in Pakistan and, of course, yes, it
is mixed. Many of the criticisms that you will have heard I think
are justified—too bureaucratic, too many meetings, too chaotic,
too many people came to these meetings, et cetera. However,
the alternative would have been the tsunami one with 400 organisations
running around trying to adopt villages in a way which was very
chaotic. As I have in my notes here, the programme delivered 800,000
tents, five million corrugated iron sheets and built 550,000 temporary
transitional shelters in weeks that would never have been there
if it had not been well coordinated.
Q295 Mr Davies: A lot of good work
has been done and we saw that and I pay tribute to it and my colleagues
have already done that, but there was a tremendous shambles at
the outset in the first couple of months. I gather that WFP took
two months to get their helicopters working. The question is,
who is responsible for that? Was there a chain of command? There
was not a chain of command. It does not look as though OCHA was
able to step in in a situation like that and either make some
personnel changes or sort things out, give instructions and so
forth. OCHA does not have those powers. My point of view is, should
not OCHA have those powers?
Mr Egeland: I have powers to nominate
who should be the humanitarian coordinator and we nominate the
western coordinator.
Q296 Mr Davies: But his role is sort
of advisory or hortatory, encouraging and that sort of thing.
Mr Egeland: No. I will be very
open with you. It has to come from the Member States or the UN
through with the Secretary-General if you want a commando system,
which we do not have to date, so that I can instruct the World
Food Programme under that system. It has to be changed.
Q297 Mr Davies: But would there not
be merit in that?
Mr Egeland: There are arguments
in favour and there are arguments against. I do necessarily not
think that by ordering them some of the bottleneck problems would
have been much different.
Q298 Mr Davies: In life, Mr Egeland,
there are always arguments on one side and arguments on the other
but people in leadership roles have to decide. I am asking you
today, on balance do you think there would be merit in moving
in that direction?
Mr Egeland: Yes, in the long run
there should be clearer commando lines with a stronger humanitarian
coordinator function. A humanitarian coordinator should be able
to instruct more.
Q299 Mr Davies: So the answer to
my question is yes?
Mr Egeland: Yes, I think that
is the direction we have to go towards with clearer commando lines.
However, if you take the—
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