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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1188-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE TO NATURAL DISASTERS
Tuesday 13 June 2006 MR BEDRELDIN SHUTTA, MR HOWARD MOLLETT, MR ERIC STOBBAERTS, and MR MATTHIAS SCHMALE MS JOANNA MACRAE and MR MICHAEL McCARTHY Evidence heard in Public Questions 64 - 117
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Tuesday 13 June 2006 Members present Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair John Battle Richard Burden Mr Jeremy Hunt Ann McKechin Joan Ruddock Mr Marsha Singh ________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Bedreldin Shutta, Head of Asia Region, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Mr Howard Mollett, Humanitarian Aid Policy Advisor, CARE International UK, Mr Eric Stobbaerts, Senior Researcher, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Mr Matthias Schmale, International Director, British Red Cross, gave evidence. Q64 Chairman: Good morning, gentlemen, and welcome to this session of the committee on humanitarian response to natural disasters, and thank you for coming. I am advised that Mr Shutta is on his way. He will come later and he will slide in when he gets here. We will be having three evidence sessions and would like keep things fairly brisk. You do not all have to answer every question. Having said that, we appreciate your being here and we are anxious to hear your views. Clearly there has been an increasing number of natural disasters. The reason we are doing this inquiry is to look into how well or not the world responds. One of the problems on how it can be done is common sense. I start off by asking whether you can identify clear and critical weaknesses that have occurred to you that could be put right. Having seen some of the comment, for example on the Horn of Africa, at the moment, what can be done to improve the responsiveness to slow onset disasters? We have had indications that all the right triggers were identified and yet the responses do not seem to have been put in place. I suggest that Mr Mollett and Mr Stobbaerts might have a go at that. That does not mean Mr Schmale cannot come in if he has something to say. Mr Mollett: Thank you of raising that issue and for putting the whole issue of the global onset to crises at the heart of your inquiry. From CARE's perspective, this is really one of the major gaps in the current UN reform agenda or reform process but also within the UN system. That is why we made it one of the areas of focus perhaps in our written submission. As to where to start, in terms of the reform process, it reflects a little on some of the weaknesses in the HRR (Humanitarian Response Review) with reference then to cluster system that was launched and put into process before the review had come to a close. So that food through security, livelihoods, and a holistic approach to some of the issues around chronic poverty and vulnerability has not really been addressed within the cluster system, for example, whereas other areas like logistics, for instance, where the existing mechanisms within UN system are perceived generally to function quite well with considerable buy-in from the NGOs in participation and then logistics being dedicated at cluster league, is falling a bit between the stools, with nutrition given to Unicef and not to WFP[1]. From CARE's perspective, and also as we understand it from DFID's efforts in this area, the focus really needs to be on the capacity of governments. One issue that we did not explore in our submission so much but subsequently we have heard from colleagues within CARE is that DFID could really play a role in terms of bringing more clarity on duty bearers in terms of social protection and looking at the issues of chronic poverty and vulnerability and building the capacity of the government. Certainly within the UN system, this seems to be a bit of a weakness. The UN agency is good at doing quick, workshop type initiatives, but not so good at the longer term process of building government capacity, whether in terms of early warning and monitoring or response. Also, with the total lack of consistency across regions, in eastern Africa malnutrition rates are 15 %, which is above the emergency threshold, and that is regarded as the norm, whereas in southern Africa 6 per cent is regarded as the trigger for emergency response. Q65 Chairman: You are really talking about a UN system (a) to get uniformity and (b) to get the governments which are presiding over the problem, if I can put it in those terms, responding consistently and in timely fashion. Mr Mollett: Yes. Mr Stobbaerts: Perhaps I may refer you to the case of northern Kenya and Somalia. I was reading about that area before this session. There is a situation on the early warning system. It is interesting to see that in that particular case that the early warning systems were many and had identified a problem coming. Somehow it resulted in a very low and slow answer on the ground. What seems to have been identified is the capacity of the system to be flexible enough in terms of funding and reallocation of the funds to concrete activities that are not clearly marked by the emergency and touched with the logic that normally in an environment is very much portrayed as a development environment. I think it is one of the cases that demonstrates that it is not only about mechanisms of earning warning, but also about the capacity of the donor to be more flexible and adaptable to an environment that changes. Q66 Chairman: Is that a particular problem for your sphere of activity; in other words in health? Mr Stobbaerts: Yes, because it ended up with a huge problem of malnutrition which we see as a particular pathology. On the other hand, I think that from the MSF perspective, it does show that there is going to be a situation where with development logic one tends to have a difficulty in encountering mechanisms that adapt to a reality which changes and has the capacity to adapt to an emergency. It is as if at times, and I am thinking now about another side of Africa, Niger, MSF has been extremely vocal when it came to the problem of pre‑crises. In a way, they were misunderstood in the domestic sphere so that in an environment where there was such a strong emphasis placed on developing the country, there was an inability of the donor community and those seeking the future of Niger, which is the Government of Niger as well, to face a realty, which was actually a lack of access to food in areas of the country in the most productive area, the granary of Niger. I think that demonstrates again for me, as in the case of northern Kenya, an incapacity at times for the donor community to adapt to a reality that is very much emergency oriented. It may be that this is the case because we have somehow been educated to look at this continuum of logic from emergency to rehabilitation and eventually development when actually reality shows the two things may prevail and we are seeing the same situation. Q67 Ann McKechin: Mr Stobbaerts, in your submission to this inquiry you said, "However, it is true that there are often too many NGOs in the same location, and, more commonly, not enough in less visible crises." You also pointed out the emerging donors, of southern NGOs and their role in disasters. In the light of that, how can donors, governmental donors, improve the way they fund NGOs to undertake humanitarian work? Mr Stobbaerts: I do not know if you have questioned the statement about the situation of clearly those very emergencies such as tsunami or Pakistan having hundreds of NGOs having to be co‑ordinated and trying to avoid duplication and gaps, et cetera. The reality is that in the so-called forgotten crises, such as Darfur, it is extremely difficult of find sufficient actors. In reality, we cannot take the tsunami as a reference; it is all but a reference and it is probably the exception to the rule. That is one point. The other aspect is about the newcomers in the humanitarian sphere, which is southern NGOs organising and new donors as well. You see emerging countries that are more and more coming into the panorama of donors. We welcome that very much in the sense that it is necessary to some extent. There are contexts where, despite the fact that we face natural catastrophes that are extremely politically sensitive, it is very important that there is a diversity and representation of the different sources of identities of NGOs present. When it comes to the role of the donors and promoting NGOs, I think that is a different question. Q68 Ann McKechin: How can you fund them better? Mr Stobbaerts: We take a very special stand. We did take a very strong strategic decision about 15 years ago to go for private funds. We do of course have funds from DFID and a few other institutional donors. This has become a very small proportion of our funding. We believe that in general the NGO community should struggle much more in order to allow much more financial independence. That is a guarantee, we understand, of humanitarian principles. Q69 Chairman: You have just made a very important point. Do you believe that it actually accesses more money? One of the concerns one has is that governments, perfectly rightly and properly, say, "We will use NGOs" but in a sense that is not adding to capacity in the way that you can determine. Is it your experience that you can add more value? Mr Stobbaerts: Our experience is exactly the contrary. It has taken a lot of time and effort within the MSF movement to get up to 80 % being privately funded. We are looking at the possibility of going fully private funds. The case of the tsunami is an example where we have had to face too much in donations from our members, from our donors. That is another her big step we took that is misunderstood. Basically, we addressed the media and therefore our potential donors to stop giving money to MSF because we were not able to use all this money. We received more than €100 million through the tsunami and we have actually used only €25 million in the tsunami affected areas. All the rest of the money was reallocated and derestricted. It was really interesting because we engaged in a very close dialogue with our donors and only one per cent of them asked for a refund. That shows there is the possibility to engage in a closer relationship with donors. We believe that is the way to go when we are talking about independence. Financial independence is clearly one of the very important elements of that. It is certainly not the only factor that guarantees independence, but it is an essential one. Q70 Ann McKechin: I want to ask Mr Mollett and CARE International as they may have a different approach in terms of funding. If you have a huge number of NGOs coming into an area where there has been a disaster, how do you actually co-ordinate funding so that it is most effectively used? What do you do with the multiple currencies and how do you encourage NGOs to participate? Mr Mollett: I would like to pick up on those questions and then bring a slightly different perspective to it. I will highlight some of the issues around a few of the new piloted aid modalities, to use the jargon, the new modalities of aid disbursement and co-ordination under the UN reform agenda, and then also some of the issues within DFID. Some ministers have cut back on staffing within DFID, there has been a shift towards DBS (direct budgetary support), and largely a channelling of additional funds through the multi-factoral system in the UN. I think that is where you do find some of the challenges in terms of supporting local civil society organisations or local capacities from general local government, local authorities and so on. The experience of the Common Humanitarian Funds (CHF) and the pooled funding arrangements in Sudan seem to suggest that basically there are some real problems with a reduction in the diversity of funding streams that are available, both from NGOs (i.e. international NGOs) and then also more generally within the humanitarian system. One colleague from Sudan described his concerns around the CHF and the report on funding mechanisms in Sudan in terms of the potential for humanitarian market failure if there are gaps or flaws in the UN work plan which sets out strategy for humanitarian spending. If the funding is more centralised and NGOs are not providing other sources of funding because they say, "Look we have put all our eggs in one basket", which is what we are hearing from the Sudan contacts, then that is problematic, if there are gaps or flaws in that strategy, but the experience with the pooled funds has also been that smaller organisations and local organisations do not really have the access to the funds. Arguments are made from the UN side about transaction costs, and so money goes through the larger agencies. CARE has received funding from the CHF in Sudan but smaller and local organisations are not able either to engage in the process to develop the UN work plan and strategy and the process. There have been efforts to improve the process but is still perceived as problematic from the participation angle. Mr Schmale: Thank you for inviting us, Mr Chairman, to this session today. May I comment on this issue of local organisations? I think it is important to remember is that the response, in a sense, does not start when the crisis hits our screens: it starts long before then. I think it is an illusion to think that when a crisis hits our screens, we can all go scrambling for local NGOs to fund. The reality is that we need to do preparatory work and capacity-building work when disasters are not immediately on our screens, to ensure that local organisations have the capacity to both respond to a crisis when it occurs, but also to deal with the international system in terms of funding applications. We all know that the way we sometimes work as donors and other agencies is quite cumbersome and bureaucratic. There is something around enabling local organisations, like the local Red Cross and others too, to deal with fairly complex systems and procedures long before a crisis hits. Q71 Richard Burden: In many ways my question follows on. I am sure everybody would agree that there is a real need to build local capacity rather than humanitarian agencies coming in to replace local capacity. In practical terms, how is that done? What does that mean in terms of what needs to be done, both in terms of local capacity for NGOs but also for recipient governments as well? Mr Schmale: There are two things and again, from a Red Cross perspective, we always think that we are well positioned because we have a worldwide network of 183 national societies. Practically there is a national Red Cross or Red Crescent Society in every country with local networks of branches and all those things. To answer your question more directly in terms of what can be done, I think one critical component in any preparedness and response work is people, investment in people. It is about training and helping people, as we do in the UK as well, gain lifesaving skills. That is one example. A second one we use very often is that of Bangladesh where we as an outside community have helped local organisations, including the Bangladesh Red Crescent, invest into training of people and building cyclone shelters so that when cyclones hit, there is a system in place. It is a simple technology. People go out on bicycles with whistles to warn the population affected so that they know, and the population at large is told in advance where to go when something happens. There is evidence that the number of deaths as a result of cyclones has been lowered significantly over a period of 20 years or so. There is not enough evidence yet but we can present a few cases in terms of investment in training of people and investment in single technologies, like giving people bicycles or whistles or building cyclone shelters, that is effective. Mr Stobbaerts: As for the role of the local community, it is clear that our experience has shown that in the last big natural disasters - the tsunami and in Pakistan - they have been the ones who were on the spot. In terms of the capacity to respond in time, the role of the local community is clearly very efficient. Perhaps that should be a dimension, as we mentioned, or an aspect of prevention but also within the logic of development there is certainly some work to be done in the role of local government when it comes to not only the early warning systems but also to the first response. I wanted to draw your attention to another issue which is to do with the qualification of crisis. We already face certain difficulties on this issue. Today we are talking of those crises that are eventually qualified as crises or they are on the camera and shown by the BBC or CNN. What about those crises that are forgotten? Do they qualify under that term? For MSF that is a big issue because as a medical organisation we face certain realities: HIV/AIDS and access to treatment for certain diseases are emergencies for us because our response is a purely humanitarian response when it comes to a pandemic of HIV/AIDS but it is extremely controversial. We qualify that as a crisis. Do you not talk about outbreaks or epidemics like the cholera in Angola or the Marburg in Angola and equally Asian flu? Where do you put that? To some extent the response and the need for a response by the international community and the humanitarian community should be up to the spenders as well. I just wanted to raise the question of the qualification, which is a very big issue. On the other hand, because the situation is not black and white but grey, we also have the situation where we have "cried wolf", to use the English term, and basically we claim that a famine is going to take place but it does no occur. Still, there is the mechanism of fund-raising. It is quite strange to see on the television or in the newspaper fund raising for an emergency that has not yet qualified as such or where there has not yet been a needs assessment for donors. We also face this kind of realty. There is qualification. What is a humanitarian need? I think this is a very important issue when it comes to finding out what NGOs define as need and what the donors define as humanitarian need. We do not always put the same thing under the same label. Q72 Chairman: I am just commenting. If you highlight a crisis and respond to it, then there is no crisis. We have had rather mixed responses about Niger. Some people say that it was not a crisis but others say it was but we addressed it in time. Is that a dilemma? Mr Stobbaerts: It is difficult to understand. I have stated the point. Mr Mollett: There is one issue with respect to Niger that is worth outlining in the UK context, that it is not a country where DFID in the UK has traditionally had much long term development presence. So we and other agencies are currently in dialogue with DFID around how this is addressed. Is it a matter of the UK working through some multilateral partners and other bilaterals. Is there a policy leverage to get away from the more reactive approach in Niger and support for social protection and long term approaches to addressing chronic poverty and vulnerability issues there? That is unclear. On the whole issue of building governance, I have a couple of extra comments to add. As my colleague from the British Red Cross has highlighted, this is very much around skills and people, and not just in terms of the technical stuff but, say, from the aid agency perspective, the skills in terms of facilitation and working with people, working with communities that currently make the difference between a consultation process where you end up with a community telling you what you want to hear or what they think you want to hear or something that is more effective than that. It also gets to the crux of a humanitarian response and the relationship between humanitarian response and longer term development programmes. You mentioned earlier the concerns around aid agencies or the UN system coming in and supporting parallel structures rather than supporting the national or the host government. There needs to be a focus on the host government. One issue that then perhaps does not fully capture is the whole issue of social and political exclusion, homogenisation. If we look at Niger, or Darfur or some of the other recent crises, those that are hit hardest are pastoralist communities or other excluded groups who are not really on the radar and only get a response when it comes to an acute point. There is a whole issue around not just government capacity-building but governance and a rights-based approach to that and where international NGOs and civil society can play a really strong role. That role could get lost if the push really is entirely and exclusively towards direct budgetary support in channelling funds through governments or a multilateral system, a UN system that is not really that well geared to working with the local civil society or of supporting the more advocacy civil right type work where NGOs can play a fairly positive role. Q73 John Battle: Before we go along the road of governance, which is a massive question, I would like to pull back the focus to humanitarian response to review that Jan Egeland set in train in 2004 and which was published in 2005. I am wondering whether these reviews take place and we really follow them through. I would really like to ask about both co-ordination and benchmarking and whether you yourselves have taken that seriously to push it forward. In the evidence we received from the British Red Cross, it stated: "Much of the focus of discussion since the 2005 Humanitarian Response Review (HRR) has been largely on the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) and the Cluster system. Other recommendations from the HRR need to be followed through. We are in particular concerned about paying more attention to the need for strong country level co-ordination of humanitarian response and about addressing co-ordination and implementation weaknesses in situations where host governments may be weak and/or unwilling to co-operate" Yes, there is the problem of governance but what about that co-ordination among yourselves? That was really the context of Darfur. Have we taken those elements seriously or are we just focusing on the clusters and the questions of Central Emergency Response Fund, do you think? Mr Schmale: If I may respond to that, the issue of strong co-ordination is work in progress. What has happened is that we have all realised, over a number of years and a number of reviews, that there are weaknesses there. We as the British Red Cross movement are very supportive of Jan England's efforts to try to address this from a UN perspective. We are very supportive of DFID's efforts to support these initiatives. Our concern is that we do not lose focus in terms of where co-ordination needs to happen. That is at country level and not only at national level, by the way. One experience we saw in the Pakistan earthquake response is that there was a good effort at setting in motion cluster systems and co-ordination mechanisms. One of the challenges is always that many of the meetings and the efforts take place at headquarters and capital city level. The actual work, of course, is out in the field. To some extent, that dragged people away from a focus on the actual response. Q74 John Battle: Even at the headquarters and capital city level, were organisations such as the Red Cross, the Red Crescent and the NGOs included in the process so that we can reform the system, or were they seen as marginal and tangential and perhaps coming in late in the day once the programmes are set? Mr Schmale: I do not think we had a feeling of being marginalised or being on the periphery in this. Perhaps I can give you a couple of reflections on the Pakistan experience: one is again the importance of good people. When Hilary Benn launched his humanitarian policy recently, I think rightly he underlined that at the end of the day it will work if you have competent good people who know what it means to do co-ordination, and we do not have many of them around. That is a reflection not only of Pakistan but of many other places. If you have good competent individuals whose work as co-ordinators is recognised, not as food distributors or whatever else they do, I think most people would underline that. The second reflection I would like to make is that we do think it is extremely important that governments realise that there are we think at least three roles in the humanitarian response systems and that each have their own right to existence and are needed for effective response. The first is governments supported by the UN. The second is the Red Cross or Red Crescent world, which we see as slightly different and a separate role. The third is NGOs. We think that co-ordination mechanisms on the ground will work if there is mutual respect between these three for the different and complementary roles that they have to play. There is some work to do. A lot of this is about thinking into consciousness and being translated into good practice. Mr Mollett: May I make one quick comment in the discussion about humanitarian co-ordinator role? One thing that we have seen again and again in a different context is that this role has typically fallen to the UNDP resident representative. Their priority has generally been to build and strengthen their relationships with the host government. They have been risk-averse, sometimes have had no experience of humanitarian response, and they have not really been that familiar in terms of working with the NGOs. There is a discussion now on this and DFID has done a lot of good work on looking at how we can build the capacity of HC (humanitarian co-ordinators). There is a fundamental issue around the separation of the developmental political resident and co-ordinated position and that of the humanitarian co-ordinator. You really need a humanitarian co-ordinator who is willing to take, if you like, a risk within the UN system and play a bit good cop/bad cop between the different UN agencies and argue the humanitarian corner. Mr Stobbaerts: On the UN's response review, of course changes and improvements are always welcome. We always tend to be sceptical until we see results. We think the general principle is a very pragmatic one; it is good as long as it is always action-drive and not agenda-driven. There is an important difference. Good humanitarian "donorship" is one of the initiatives that is extremely positive. There may be some question on this. It is important not to be too naïve when you look at the reforms being undertaken and at capacity. We have seen some contradictions to some extent of donors that are basically an outcome of the government, donors claiming that they want to be independent humanitarian actors. We find there is a contradiction in the terminology and that it does make sense that the government agency would want to be independent from its government. It is a contradiction in itself. I am trying to be polemic but I think there is a need - and I do not want to put things in boxes - for debate as to the notion of independence on the one hand. When it comes to independence of donors, there are some aspects that we may question. On the other hand, and being more practical, taking the example of Niger again or Malawi, to come back to the problem of food, you are better be a mal risqué today in Malawi today than in Niger. Basically I want to show that the donors' policy can vary very much from one country to another. On the lines of what has already been said, the question of the possibility of having free food available at health centres in Niger was absolutely impossible last year. The Niger Government has now moved on and is doing it this year because they saw what happened. Last year in Malawi you would have had no problem. Food would have been available at health centres. There are differences in those terms. I want to come back to co-ordination. It is a buzz word in the sense that it an unquestionable term: it is as if co-ordination is necessarily good. As practitioners on the ground, we tend to be sceptical of these buzz words. It is important not to put everything under "co-ordination". Yes, I agree with what Matthias Schmale has said and I do not contradict that. I am just saying that we can put different things under the term "co-ordination". There are different levels of co-ordination. There is field co-ordination, institutional co-ordination and even at field level, you have different types of co-ordination. Briefly, there is co-ordination around information sharing, security, sectoral aspects and all these different things. We are trying to use the word "co-ordination" too generally. I want to say that basically the purpose of co-ordination is good as long as it is reality based, action oriented. There should not be co-ordination in order to agree on a common plan to build a state or to bring peace to a country. As humanitarian action, we have to be on the spot saving lives; it is about action, not about a political agenda. I would like to stress that. The last thing I would like to say is very important. I think we would probably all agree that when we are talking about co-ordination, we have to remember that timed donation not only comes in money but it comes by humanitarian routes. We are a medical organisation and you can imagine the number of donations of medicine and medical material that come to us donated at times by individual agencies. I would like to make sure that point is relayed to the level or donors and those possibly thinking about development policies. It is just an idea. Basically we are looking at how we could improve capacity at local level to stock manage pharmacy products when it comes to big donations of medical material and medicines. I have in mind very much Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, (Meach) where we had to face warehouses full of the garbage of the world. It is a really big problem when it comes to the ministry of health and reconstruction and the development fix. I am raising the issue of capacity more at the local level and maybe the leadership at the level of UN agencies could look at pharmaceutical stock management when comes to the reception of medicine. It is not all garbage, by the way. There is a very good system of donations but they are just forgotten in a warehouse because nobody knows what is inside the box and nobody knows how to use it. There is a lot of misuse. I wanted to put this point. Q75 Mr Hunt: We have had a lot of very interesting feedback this morning about how the cluster system works. Could I cut to the chase a bit on this. It means that you have to work very closely with UN agencies that take the lead role in specific areas when it happens. Based on your experience, which are the best UN agencies to work with and which are the worst, and why? We will start with Mr Mollett. They are listening! Mr Mollett: Tell me if I am doing the question if I do not get to it within a minute. I want to rephrase the question in terms of what actually clusters are for, what is their purpose, and specifically what it is the role of these cluster leads, the UN agencies or other agencies that take on the cluster lead role? There are three important questions that I want to flag and then hopefully get to somewhere close to answering your question, without massively compromising myself and CARE. One is that there is a lack of clarity as to what clusters are actually for, and that came out in Pakistan and elsewhere. In terms of the cluster lead responsibility, there was some discussion around the cluster leads having something of a last resort role, that if no one else was there on that issue, they were. Yet some of the agencies have put in a caveat that they will not play this cluster lead role. That puts a question mark over what is new about this if it is just that we are going to co-ordinate when we can and when there is funding, which will be a CNN factor crisis but not the other two. What purpose does this serve? As an aside, with the rush into the cluster systems in Pakistan and a lack of real shared basis at the global level of co-ordination, the two other main aims for the cluster system of predictability and reliability also have not been there because it has been to a certain degree made up on the hoof. Q76 Mr Hunt: Which agencies said that they were not prepared to be the provider of last resort? Mr Mollett: Correct me if I am wrong, but WHO and I think UNHCR[2]. Mr Schmale: One of them is sitting here, the Red Cross. We have been approached. The International Federation, of which we are a part, has been approached to lead, in UN terminology, the cluster on emergency shelter. We are in ongoing negotiations and discussions with the UN in particular on what "lead role" means. We have clearly said, and it defeats the purpose of lead role, that we are not able to accept a role of lender of last resort, and we also have difficulties with the idea of reporting to the UN, being accountable to the UN. We find that both for the Red Cross work as well as for NGOs quite difficult. We think there is a need for strong co-ordination within the UN system and that we need to co-ordinate with each other. Eric Stobbaerts has referred to the issues of independence. We think it would be giving up too much of our independence base if we came under the co-ordination of the UN. May I come to your question of lead tables of UN agencies, you have heard some reluctance by us to answer that question directly. Part of the reason for that is that there are very specialised agencies in the UN and it is difficult to compare their effectiveness because they do different things. It is important to have clarity as to in what phases of an operation who is in charge. Q77 Mr Hunt: Perhaps I could phrase the question in a slightly easier way for you to answer? Which UN agencies do you think could improve the way they operate as lead responsibilities to their clusters? Mr Schmale: Before I answer that question, there is one other point to make, if I may. I think there are ongoing efforts to try to establish an objective system to assess the performance of international bilateral agencies, including the UN, and we are supportive of efforts to try to make this non-personal, non-judgmental, but based on indicators of performance. It would be interesting to hear where those efforts are going. In terms of the issues before us today, if we are looking at the immediate response to an international crisis, we clearly seen UN OCHA as being in the lead on this and, yes, we think there are possibilities for improvement there. We have touched on one of them, which is the importance of getting strong country level co-ordinators. We all need to contribute to that. The second one is efforts to build up this Central Emergency Fund (CERF). We welcome that in terms of resources for the UN system to act more quickly and flexibly when something hits. We think similar efforts need to be made for NGOs and for the Red Cross role. So there is room for improvement in terms of pure response. I think you have already heard comments on the more long-term development. Q78 Mr Hunt: Could I ask Mr Stobbaerts and then go back to Mr Bartlett because I know you do want to ask a question. The reason I am pressing you is because I know lots of people in NGOs and they are constantly cursing the UN as being bureaucratic and inefficient and it takes ages to get anything done and it slows things down. Here is your chance to tell us who needs to improve and how they need to improve. Mr Stobbaerts: It is very difficult to pinpoint a particular agency. Sure, MSF clearly has had a lot of tension with many UN agencies. Our complaints are linked to the principle of the need to be action-oriented. In general, it is not only a problem of the leadership and means that the agency has but it is also to whom the agency has to report at the end of day, and what the agenda is. It is purely a humanitarian agenda. We tend to have tension at the bureaucratic level. If the agenda is much more political, then we tend to have tension at the level of positioning, neutrality and independence. We used to have a lot of interaction with UNHCR in the past. Mostly, they were the lead agency when it came to co-ordination. I am talking about the Nineties. Just to be just to UNHCR, MSF was very vocal at some point and that was probably a mistake. During the Kosovo crisis, and I know that was not a natural disaster, we were very vocal about the incapacity of UNHCR to take the lead role in Kosovo. Looking at it retrospectively, that was not fair. We misjudged our role. The real question is actually the fact that UNHCR did not have the means to perform. It was not given the funds in order to operate as a lead agency and that was basically because the donors, who were the governments that were supposed to produce the money pledged, had decided that they would have the armies directly intervening in Kosovo and not UNHCR in the lead role. We are much happier, to some extent, to have NATO co-ordinating some aspects of the refugee camps, et cetera, rather than UNHCR co-ordinating. In that sense, I want to want to be just about our being so vocal about UNHCR in Kosovo because I think we misread history then because something definitely changed from 1998 onwards. Mr Mollett: May I emphasise again that it is partly an issue around the UN agencies, bureaucracy and so on, but there are also structural and systemic issues which relate to funding as well. Just in terms of the clusters and the cluster lead agency issue again, another question we need to ask ourselves is about what happens when the cluster lead does not actually have an operational presence in a country or not a particularly wide or extensive presence. Q79 Mr Hunt: Could you give an example of that? Mr Mollett: One example might be UNHCR in Uganda where it does not have that much of a presence in northern Uganda. There have been some real issues to some extent on competition on co-ordination with UN OCHA. I hear from colleagues working in northern Uganda, a country on which I have no particular expertise, that there are questions about UNHCR's prioritisation with freedom of movement as a priority, a human rights violation issue in Uganda. Of course, anyone who knows anything about Uganda knows that that is not a priority of human rights violation for IDPs in Uganda but it is very close to the ---- position. There are issues to do with specific agencies and individuals in different contexts but there are structural issues to do with UN systems and agencies and their funding and the amount of money available. One other example would be DRC's and Katanga now and where the WFP has less than half the money made available to it and then channelled on to NGOs for basic storage handling and transportation costs. How can that agency's co-operation actually work in that context? That is not really the WFP; that goes back also to the donors. Q80 Chairman: Those are extremely helpful answers. We are restricted for time. It may also be, given your sensitivities, that there are things you think you could usefully tell us in a note afterwards in writing with specific examples, in confidence if you wish. The committee would be very happy to hear them. It may help us. I leave that to you all. Mr Shutta, I know you have had a horrendous time getting here and we are getting towards the end of the evidence session. I will ask a similar question to you. We will give you a transcript of the questions that have gone before and if there is anything you wish to add in writing, please do so. We would be glad to have your views. We will be coming to the end of this session in a few minutes. We have one more set of questions. Perhaps I could put to you a related question about the workings of the cluster system, possibly in particular in relation to the Pakistan earthquake and also how it impacts on the smaller agencies. If you are able to give us a view or a flavour of that, that would be helpful. Mr Shutta: Thank you, Mr Chairman. I must apologise again for being delayed. On the issue of cluster, we came to work closely with the UN in the current Pakistan-Kashmiri earthquake. The cluster worked very closely on the earthquake with the relief agencies and somehow they got into the bureaucratic role of the ERRA itself. That makes it a bit difficult for them to move because the ERRA is about to establish itself in the area. Then there is a lot of dialogue between the UN and the ERRA authority in order to establish things, whereas for their organisations, already they have their plans, they have been down to the community and seen people. The impact actually hinders things and the progress of work is delayed almost by three to four months due to this inefficiency and being slow. In itself, it is very good for us as NGOs to work closely with the UN as well as the government, provided that we also involve the local NGOs and local communities themselves. Chairman: So that the main problem is the role of local NGOs. That is helpful. We can move on to the question to which you might wish to contribute, Mr Shutta, which is the role of the military. Q81 Joan Ruddock: When we have disasters, not very often of course in this country, people often accept that the military will be involved. In fact in the foot-and-mouth crisis you may recall a little more fully people calling for the military - "Bring on the army". Obviously there is some ambivalence to the involvement of the military in the disasters that are occurring in the countries where you are all active. DFID have said: "National and international military forces have proven uniquely able to fill gaps in response capacity in many recent crises. However, the costs of using these assets can be high...." The Red Cross in your evidence have mentioned "observing a trend towards increasing use of military assets" and you went on to say "we urge that this should be exceptional and a last resort". I would ask all of you or any one of you: what do you think the role should be of international militaries, national militaries and civil defence actors in a humanitarian response? Mr Stobbaerts: Why do we tend to react to the role of the military in natural disasters? If we were to talk about military in a conflict, it would be more obvious but the question is that we do not want to be naïve about the nature of a natural disaster. We cannot take away the political dimension when a natural disaster happens and the context in which it happens. Historically, we see a correlation between natural disasters and a natural disaster has an impact on its population. There is bad governance and lack of infrastructure. The case of Armenia comes to mind but Bangladesh in the Seventies with the floods and the evacuation and then all the subsequent consequences of the refugee camps of Bangladesh and India and the move towards to independence. There are definitely links between natural disasters and the political dimension. I just underline that. I have here a quote by Robert Caplan who was writing in the New York Times in relation to the tsunami and in his analysis he states: On a large scale, the disaster relief provided by the US aircraft Abraham Lincoln during the Indian Ocean tsunami probably did more to improve America's image in Asia in relation to that of China than any conventional training deployment. It is a clear example to illustrate this because what we have is basically how the humanitarian response is being used for visibility and for political or diplomatic advantage. Q82 Joan Ruddock: Can I come back to you there? You hope at MSF that when you go in and do a good job that you will get good publicity. Why should not the military, why should not the government, especially a national government which is on its own territory, actually do something which is effective and get good publicity for it? Mr Stobbaerts: The US Army was in Indonesia in Banda Aceh. Mr Schmale: May I make a couple of comments on this? You have already quoted our submission in terms of our concern being that using the military does not become part of the standard response automatically. It should not be involved. It should be a last resort. Having said that, we clearly acknowledge that there are and there have been claims or instances over the last year where the military has played a useful role. Indonesia is one of the examples. Pakistan is another one. We do not need to take that uncritically. Some of us will remember the pictures on our TV screens early on with the Pakistan military standing around for a while while things were happening a few hundred yards away. It took a bit of pushing. We need to hold the military when they become involved as accountable as everyone else for what they do. There are international guidelines for the use of the military in humanitarian work that we have referred to in our submission, which we think are important to keep on our radar screen. My final comment is that I think where we differ a little bit with DFID's position, if we understand it correctly, is that we sense there is a certain uneasiness in assuming that the military doing humanitarian work will just be perceived as a good thing by receiving obligations and be seen as part of the international aid effort. We are concerned that this is not the case. In places like Afghanistan and Iran the military has many other connotations for people there. We think it is slightly naive to think that just by doing a bit of humanitarian work you sort of cancel out the somewhat negative perception of the military. There are serious reasons for us being associated with the military in humanitarian efforts in places that are striven with extreme poverty. Q83 Joan Ruddock: I think all of us understand the difficulties and reasons why perhaps the military should not be engaged. Some of us have argued against military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq for example, but we are talking about situations in which you might have a big physical emergency in which the expertise of the army with heavy lifting equipment and all that kind of thing might actually be entirely relevant and therefore I would have thought possibly even desirable. Mr Schmale: We are supportive of that but you must all be held accountable in the same way you hold us accountable. Are they doing it in the most cost-effective and efficient way? We are not arguing against that. What we are arguing is: let us do it carefully and let us hold them accountable like everyone else. Q84 Joan Ruddock: Can I just get clarity. You actually mentioned a moment ago that there were international guidelines. I would ask if any of you have seen a disparity between the international guidelines and practice on the ground in relation to the military. Mr Mollett: One aspect would be in terms of this emphasis on the military supporting a civilian-led response and as soon as possible a hand-over to a civilian-led response. I can think of several contexts, and I am not quite sure of the sensitivity of risk issues in going into them in a forum like this, where there have been some questions over how that has been handled and managed. It would be fair and safe to say that there were some concerns in the Pakistan response around the role that the national military took in trying to control the entirety of the humanitarian response and there was a real dialogue between agencies in Pakistan military on that. I think it could be said the role that DFID played within NATO in the international military and donor context was quite positive in working through some of these issues. As well as the question around cost efficiency, the other question is: what are the civilian alternatives? In Pakistan it was clear that, perhaps on the positive side in terms of NATO deployment, their helicopters had capabilities that surpassed hugely that available to the UN. In the Pakistan context and the regional context, and given some of the concerns around the complex sensitivity on deployment and political implications at local level, it is not unproblematic; it is a natural disaster but it is not just a natural disaster context. The wider regional and national conflict dynamics perhaps need to be taken into account. Then the other aspect in relation to the NATO deployment was that, the helicopters were one aspect of the deployment but the other aspects included work that was potentially debatable in terms of its actual contribution to life-saving assistance, and perhaps of a nature that was more building, construction work, longer-term rehabilitation work that actually could have been done by other actors and local actors, and perhaps reflected more the need to have a NATO presence and a sort of strategic interest rather than a humanitarian imperative. Mr Shutta: Just to add a couple of things, first of all, definitely what we have seen in Chad and in Sri Lanka and also in other parts of the recent crisis, the military have played a role, and the only concern we have about it is if they had been given the leadership, that is where the big concerns come from, the organisations, the people of the place and also from the UN system. Then also there is a need to have a vision if they had actually wanted to go beyond that immediate relationship. There is a need for the military actors to realise that there is an important link after the disaster, a link where some organisations might have been there for several years,, so there needs to be that kind of vision where the role will be confined to a specific assignment and it will end there. I think the potentiality is there but as long as the military is not in a lead role, that will be negotiated. Chairman: Can I thank you all. We have slightly overrun our time but it has been a worthwhile and interesting session. Can I say that if any of you, Mr Shutta in particular, obviously, want to comment on something when you see the transcript, and if any points occur to you that you want to share with the Committee, suggestions on the latter point, co-ordination of the military, and also reform of the UN, particularly if you feel it is better put in writing or in confidence, that would help the Committee and we would very much appreciate it. We leave that to your own judgment. Thank you very much indeed.
Examination of Witness
Witness: Ms Afshan Khan, Deputy Director, Office of Emergency Programmes, UNICEF, gave evidence. Q85 Chairman: Ms Khan, thank you very much for coming here. I know you have come specifically to give evidence and we appreciate that. You have heard the earlier exchanges and obviously the role of the United Nations, and the reform of the United Nations is something that we are going to be interested in, but perhaps just by way of some scene-setting from your own organisation's point of view, UNICEF, could you perhaps just very briefly give us an indication of how your work and your budget is divided between humanitarian work and development activities and indeed, whether there are tensions, in other words with the situation we have seen recently with an increasing number of humanitarian calls. Has this caused pressure on your normal development activity and how do they interact? Ms Khan: Thank you. I think first and foremost it is important to remember that the "E" in UNICEF when UNICEF was first started stands for "emergencies" so the organisation was founded on the basis of very much an emergency response after World War II. Increasingly, the budget has increased in terms of being able to commit more resources to emergencies. In 2003-04 more than a third of UNICEF's operations were in so-called emergency situations or emergency countries. In 2005 we responded to emergencies in more than 80 different countries. What we are seeing is a shift, in that we are being called upon to respond more and more in terms of natural disasters in particular. We have seen an increase: the tsunami, the Pakistan earthquake, the recent earthquake in Indonesia. What we are also seeing is a very clear and strong public response to fund-raising for UNICEF in emergencies. What we saw was a real shift around the tsunami, where more than 50 % of the resources started coming in not so much from government sources but from the public, and the national committees being a key component in being able to raise resources for that. There are tensions in terms of how much does UNICEF put towards emergencies versus its normal development role. One of the key points to bear in mind is that UNICEF's presence in more than 150 countries means that often at the onset of a disaster, particularly in the sense of natural disasters, we are often the first UN agency on the ground. That came up quite a bit in the discussion, and in terms of local capacity building and working with governments, having existing agreements with NGOs, there is a comparative advantage from having that development presence, both in terms of what could potentially be done with respect to preparedness as well as in terms of the local agreements, with understanding how host communities work, having a cadre of people that you work with, for example, in the ministries of health around immunisation, so if there is a need to surge, provide additional support, measles vaccine being one of the first things we do at the onset of a big crisis, there is a comparative advantage there. I think in terms of the humanitarian reform and humanitarian response review, obviously there have been additional demands placed on UNICEF in particular, as cluster lead in nutrition, water and sanitation and datacoms, but I also think that it is very important to bear in mind three particular things. First, that that cluster lead will imply additional resources and the development of additional tools, and UNICEF is committed to working with its partners to do that. We started much of that work on water and sanitation with Oxfam, where we are working closely on a common platform for the needs assessment, some clear establishment of standards and some clear performance benchmarking. There is a lot to be done to improve predictability, performance, and we are not trying to shirk that responsibility but it is something that will take time. Secondly, I think there was a bit of a misunderstanding on the cluster approach. The cluster approach first of all has some global agreements with lead agencies but I think the second thing that is very important to bear in mind is the decision to adopt those clusters and the definition of cluster lead is made at the country level. So you will not always see the same cluster lead in each and every situation. Uganda is a case in point. UNHCR, because they have a limited physical presence in Uganda, have requested UNICEF to assume cluster lead in health and protection. In other instances we are seeing NGOs, particularly DRC was mentioned. So in some of the provincial teams it is actually the NGO community that is providing the lead. Because of security conditions in Katanga and other places the UN may not have the same type of field presence. So I think the adaptability at the country level, the leadership provided by the humanitarian co-ordinator to be able to define what works best in a country is the key component. Finally, in terms of cluster lead, I would also say that a key element there is also to ensure that it actually leads to results on the ground. The litmus test for the approach will not only be what is the co-ordination mechanism or how many meetings have been held, but what difference does it make, and that is where I think the whole issue of performance benchmarking is very key. Q86 Mr Singh: I understand what the "E" in UNICEF means, but there are two kinds of emergencies, are there not? There are natural disasters and there are ongoing crises. What proportion of your activities and budget are now directed towards natural disasters as opposed to complex emergencies? Is there a strain, a dilemma there for you? Ms Khan: First and foremost is to remember that natural disasters do not pick where they occur. The last two, amongst some of the biggest natural disasters we have had, the tsunami, two countries were impacted, Indonesia and Banda Ache and Sri Lanka. Both of those were also ongoing complex emergencies in terms of military presence, ongoing fighting in Sri Lanka between the LTTE[3] and government forces. So I think while we say we respond, we respond to many different types of disasters. We have not disaggregated how much goes to natural disasters because, in a way, that would be somewhat artificial since we cover many different types of emergencies. I would say many of our natural disaster responses are actually done within the context of where the country office takes a lead. India and Bangladesh are clear examples. Every year there are consistent natural disasters or floods and that is why I think this whole issue of preparedness, ensuring that local communities are well aware, children in schools are taught what to do at the onset of a crisis, is quite important. Some of the larger disasters we have also seen have meant additional resource requirements. Yes, there are challenges in galvanising those resources and being able to sufficiently generate enough money to respond effectively and there I think our governments that form part of our executive board have been very understanding that they would like to see a certain part of resources go to helping to respond to a crisis, but it is important also to maintain focus on the Millennium Development Goals. There are two issues here. One is building enough flexibility into the ongoing development programmes with governments. India is a case in point. We have actually negotiated that part of our funds will be earmarked to respond to disasters wherever they occur because they occur so frequently. Some of that flexibility is quite important. Q87 Mr Singh: In terms of your approach to natural disasters, do you see yourselves as going in, making a short, sharp, necessary intervention or do you see your work as longer term in disaster areas? Ms Khan: For us it is definitely longer term. UNICEF is there before a crisis, is there during a crisis and they will be there after a crisis. So in a sense we really see three key elements: prior to the crisis working very clearly on preparedness in terms of early warning systems. We recognise the investment in that part is nowhere near where it needs to be and that is partially a fact that it is really hard to mobilise resources for preparedness. Secondly, during a crisis we are able to surge up to meet emergency response needs. Partly, that is a result of having been present in the countries. If I look at Yogyakarta as the most recent example, we were able to use existing stockpiles to help within the first 24 hours to work with local government committees, etc, to allocate resources to respond. Partly that is due to the presence. Thirdly, in terms of the longer term, we will see the whole approach of post natural disaster transition and working more closely with the local communities to build back better as a key component of our ongoing programmes, which has been going on, particularly with the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Maldives, and we will continue with that type of work in Pakistan. Q88 Mr Singh: My final question is how is UNICEF funded? Is it from private donations from the public, is it from donors like DFID? Has your funding had to increase recently because of the number of disasters? Thirdly, are you ring-fencing budgets now to meet the future natural disasters which are expected? Ms Khan: There are three components there. Firstly, in terms of our funding, it has had to increase to meet the number of natural disasters, so we have actually seen the emergency income increase significantly in 2005. We almost raised $1 billion for emergency response. The bulk of that was actually for the tsunami. Secondly, I think we are also clear that the emergency needs depending on the scale are not equitably applied everywhere. UNICEF is 100 % voluntary funded organisation, which means when DFID gives money to UNICEF - which it does, it is a significant and important donor for us - it gives that money not in the same way it does to other UN entities, where it may be an assessed contribution, the Department of Peace Keeping Operations being a case in point. So those voluntary resources determine our ability to respond as an agency as a whole. Our income for emergencies is largely raised through what is called "other resources" so it is based on the consolidated appeal that we give out with other agencies but also, UNICEF has a commitment as part of its core commitments to children that within the first 72 hours of a crisis we will issue a pitch document, which basically identifies within the first two-week period until such time as an inter-agency appeal can be launched what are the immediate needs. Internally, UNICEF also has some resources it can re-programme. Within its own country ceiling about 10 % can be moved around, depending on the amount, to respond to crises. We have a Central Emergency Response Fund internally. Our board has currently endorsed approximately $50 million for that, but that goes very quickly. This year we are almost fully drawn down on that, so it will be important to try and buttress that fund. Other NGOs have a similar type of fund. With respect to your last question on ring-fencing, we have often seen that for us the best way to get resources is what is called a thematic humanitarian financing, and this is very much part of the good humanitarian donorship. We have a number of key donors - Norway, Sweden and a few others - who have given us thematic humanitarian finance. That means getting the money early, it means non-earmarking, getting it used for what the agency feels it is best to respond to at any given time. That allows us the flexibility to give resources towards under-funded crises that may not be on CNN or BBC which have an equal amount of need, and it also allows us to give one report at the end of the year as to how those resources have been used and for us that is the most flexible and the best use of our emergency money component. Q89 John Battle: I am generally favourable to your work, to UNICEF's work. I chair an all-party group on overseas development, where people come from all the academic institutes, as well as the NGOs, as well as parliamentarians, and the most of the focus for the last six months has been on what might be euphemistically called the reform of the UN architecture. Can it be pulled together in a more co-ordinated way? I just want to ask you your views of how UNICEF is responding to that really. What are your views of the Central Emergency Response Fund, for example? Do you go with that, common funds pulled together for specific disasters, improved, co-ordinated leadership? Hilary Benn, our Secretary of State, in March suggested that there should be what he called the principle of the four ones: one UN office, one UN representative, one programme and one budget. Are you set against that? Ms Khan: Let me start, first of all, in terms of UN reform, UNICEF recently issued a position paper on UN reform which we would be happy to share with you afterwards. For us, it is clear that there are some important policy changes that are being made at the UN to see improved response as a whole. I think we are committed to the idea of working with teams. We have committed over the last number of years several people to assume both the resident co-ordinator and the humanitarian co-ordinator function, recognising that it is important to have a variety of backgrounds within those positions. We have also even helped identify NGO candidates who could assume those positions. So I think there are instances where, if the country office is small and the resources that pass through are relatively modest, we would like to ensure that administrative costs do not exceed the costs of the operational budget of the UN, and therefore the idea of having a single UN presence but representing the diversity of the needs of that country would be important. We strongly believe that all UN agencies should have a clear understanding of what children's issues are, and we would hope that the idea of a single UN presence would not detract from that mandate for children and the importance of children being part of social budget processes, recognising that in disasters children are often the first to suffer in terms of separation from their parents or other situations, and it is extremely important to keep that focus. With respect to the CERF, I think it is very important that there is some common predictable early humanitarian financing, so we are very supportive of the fact that the CERF grant facility allows for that. UNICEF was initially the largest borrower from the CERF loan facility as well, because we have often seen that we do not have sufficient resources to respond to that crisis at the onset of the crisis. So some predictability is important but what we also understand is that CERF is not a panacea; it is not going to be able to solve the fact that in many crises there are currently insufficient resources to meet those crises, particularly, again, there was quite a bit of discussion on Niger and the Sahel Belt. Those are chronic nutritional under-funded emergencies that will require a fair amount of resources far beyond the capacity of the CERF. Similarly, with respect to the common humanitarian funds. I think the policy intent of the common humanitarian funds is good. The idea of having a single plan to which donors pool resources to give a contribution is not a bad thing. The problem is that the ability to disburse those resources and the mechanisms to allow for timely and early funding, the mechanics have not caught up with the good idea yet. So in a way, we really need to see early financing, early distribution of resources, if the intent behind those common humanitarian funds is that they are able to be a quick response early on in a crisis. So we have got to get those disbursement mechanisms working better to ensure that funds come in at the beginning of the year, when agencies are planning how they will allocate resources, and not mid-year. Also, there is a real need to improve the whole processes around how those pools of funds are managed, because right now they are fairly complex. So if the idea behind it is good humanitarian donorship of early predictable funding, then let us focus on early predictable funding. Q90 John Battle: With all organisations, if there is a sense of merger, there is a fear that you lose your character and identity, but in a word, would you say that UNICEF is championing change or are you really hesitant and a brake on change? Ms Khan: I would say we are helping move that change forward in a way that is predictable, in a way that serves the best interests of children. I think we have had some remarkable ideas in UNICEF. The whole idea of national committees, being able to draw in public awareness around the development issues - there is not a single UN agency that has that asset. That makes sure that we have the ability to inform the public on what is being done on development issues, it means we are able to gain public support for a children's agenda and it means we are able to influence government policies around what is important for children. So I think there are some important lessons to be learned from what UNICEF has done to help deliver and feed into the UN reform process. I think that is very much recognised by both the Secretary General and the high-level panel that is currently working on UN reform. UNICEF has been asked to address that group on a number of occasions, both in the humanitarian response context as well as in the development context. Q91 Chairman: When the Committee was in New York visiting the United Nations there was an acknowledgement that the organisation is 60 years old and there was a proliferation of agencies, and they never seem to be rationalised or re-invented. You said yourself, UNICEF's origins were post the Second World War. Things change, and in the process of reform people say "Is there not a time to organise things differently?" One gets the impression that the bigger organisations, the ones who are stronger on the ground, are actually saying "We are not very keen on having our independence and autonomy diluted. We are the experts", instead of saying, "Yes, let's reorganise. Let's be prepared to put our expertise in the pot but do it differently." In other words, there is a sort of imperial protection. Ms Khan: I would hesitate to perhaps use those words. I think what we have seen is a movement, perhaps not as rapid as others would like. I think of UNICEF in terms now of in southern Africa in particular, we have worked on a regional alignment and a series of regional directors' teams that have pooled assets and resources in terms of advisory groups around UNAIDS, for example, around the whole AIDS agenda. So we have seen some pooling of resources in terms of technical expertise. We have seen some closer working together. I think, like any reform, there is always some resistance. There are always some who feel that perhaps things need to go more slowly, but I think what we can say with respect to the humanitarian reform agenda is we are committed to the process. We have helped by assuming a cluster leadership role. We are working with others to help develop some of the key tools that were felt were missing in a co-ordinated approach to humanitarian response, the needs assessment, making sure people understand and use the spear standards, better monitoring of what is going on on the ground and better information sharing. That it has not always been at the speed that has perhaps been required by some of the key drivers of the UN reform agenda is agreed, but for any institution that has existed as long as UNICEF has, the reform process takes a little time. Q92 Mr Hunt: May I start by saying I am a strong supporter of the work that UNICEF does. But I hope you will also understand that our job on this Committee is to ask the difficult questions in order to scrutinise particularly how UK taxpayers' money is spent. This morning we have heard quite a lot of comments, quite muted comments but nonetheless comments, where people have reservations about the effectiveness of the UN. For example, we have heard about how in the cluster system WHO and UNHCR are reluctant to be the provider of last resort. We have heard how the UNHCR is in competition with UN OCHA over their role in northern Uganda. There is a perception that the UN is often very bureaucratic and slow to act through its agencies in humanitarian situations. I just wondered what your view was, whether that criticism was justified. Ms Khan: I think our humanitarian performance can be improved. There is always scope for improvement in all of the things we do. I would hesitate to say that anybody has got it right, otherwise no single child and no single person would have died in any humanitarian crisis. I think the latest crisis in the United States in New Orleans around Hurricane Katrina showed that nobody is immune to having problems in responding effectively to disasters, even one of the richest countries in the world and which has the most powerful assets available to it. Having said that, I think we have seen a concerted improvement in the UN response. I think many of the colleagues that spoke here spoke to a resource gap in terms of being able to adequately address that crisis, whether it was UNHCR in northern Uganda or others. I think equally that, if we get predictable financing on an early basis for all crises, you would probably see less hesitancy around lender of last resort. In fact, you remember that the lender of last resort phenomenon is for up to 100,000 people in any one given situation, and it is not just the UN that has hesitated. IFRC also spoke about it, IOM is also hesitating, because to be accountable for that without being given the resources to be able to respond to that crisis, nor the flexibility internally to move your own budgets around to swing that kind of money in to respond to a crisis, is political suicide, for lack of a better word. Q93 Mr Hunt: Could I just follow up on one specific comment that was made by the representative from Médecins Sans Frontières? He felt that one of the things that he would like to see much more of from UN agencies was much more focus on actions and much less focus on meetings and discussions. Ms Khan: Absolutely. Q94 Mr Hunt: Could you tell me some specific measures that you think could improve the focus on actions by UN agencies on the ground in humanitarian situations? Ms Khan: I think we could focus one on the new humanitarian roll-out of the cluster reform process. When we looked at the first evaluation of the cluster approach in Pakistan, it was very much done on the basis of how many co-ordination meetings were held, who was co-ordinating where, and was there sufficient co-ordination in Balakot as well as in the context of the capital, Islamabad. I think ultimately the cluster response should be how well were we able to bring assets together to respond to crises. I come back to the issue of clear standards, clear performance benchmarks. I think the whole issue of performance benchmarking in emergencies, having certain standards for what will be done, is particularly important. So UNICEF has what it has called its core commitments to children in emergencies, what will be done in the first 24 hours, the first 72 hours, the first six weeks. That kind of core commitment then allows us to be judged against what we said we would do versus what we have done. In not each and every case have we always been able to meet those commitments, but at least we have set ourselves some very clear targets to which we can be held accountable. So I think clearer targets, clearer accountabilities, clearly demonstration of resources by donor partners to be able to meet those accountabilities will improve humanitarian response performance and action. Q95 Chairman: We heard before the concern about doing that, particularly if you do it in one centre, shutting out or making it difficult for smaller local NGOs. How do you do it in a way - this is a bureaucratic point - if you are a small NGO and you are on the ground you cannot be at a meeting 700 miles away? How do you make sure those people are not shut out? Ms Khan: There are two ways of doing it. One, you have seen in many developing countries the use of NGO consortia, particularly in the south. The recognition that perhaps the processes that are laid out not just by the UN but by northern NGOs are far to difficult for some of the southern NGOs to use in a way that is effective, so they have pooled assets and resources to allow an NGO representative of the variety of groups - and I think India and Bangladesh are perhaps some of the best examples of this - to actually bring forward people who will participate in the meetings, then go back to their constituency and say "This and this and this can be done." I think in natural disasters in particular local community assets, local community NGOs, particularly after the immediate emergency phase is over, are critical, because they are the ones that are going to be present in those remote locations afterwards to help ensure that there is sustainability and building back better, that local priorities are clearly set. There will need to be some working around perhaps using representation consortia, also some capacity building in terms of what UN and other bilateral donors do in-country, and some streamlining and simplification of our own procedures. UNICEF is working quite a bit on that now, because we recognise sometimes things are too complex, and there is a need to make it less bureaucratic, easier to use. So we are pushing very hard as part of our support to UN OCHA to see clear templates, a single form for working, so it becomes easier for NGOs both to get resources from other UN agencies as well as collaborate with us. Q96 Joan Ruddock: I think you have given us a very clear picture of how you see your own accountability and how you are trying to make a whole variety of changes to improve things, but I wonder if we can move from the theoretical to the very practical. Water and sanitation used to be regarded as a strength of UNICEF, and I just wonder how you see your role in the cluster lead for water and sanitation and nutrition in emergency responses. Ms Khan: I think you rightly pointed out that water and sanitation and hygiene, I would say, used to be something that was very much a part of UNICEF's standard response. When I joined UNICEF 20 years ago it was often one of our largest programmes. I think what we saw was a gradual moving away from that as many of the developing countries took on their own local capacity for water and sanitation and were able to move in that direction. What we recognised as part of humanitarian response was that both malnutrition, often linked to inadequate access to clean water and absence of hygiene, as well as absence of adequate feeding, was often the number one killer for children. So UNICEF recognised that, particularly in humanitarian situations, we needed to increase our ability to respond more predictably in those contexts. What we have done thus far in water and sanitation in particular is worked with a series of NGO consortia and a couple of UN agencies as well as IOM and others to build up how we do rapid assessment to address quickly, within the first 72 hours of a crisis, what is the current situation, map out what are the needs, what are the gaps and map out who can do what to fill those gaps. That is the first thing, the common rapid assessment tool that is agreed to by all. Secondly, we have started doing a little bit of work now on training, particularly so people understand what are the spear standards and what needs to be done within the context of a nutrition crisis or a water and sanitation crisis. So the rapid assessment tool and standards. The third thing we have done quite a bit on in the last little while is really trying to improve our systems for rosters in expertise. We recognise that in some crises we will be able to deploy people internally from UNICEF from other offices, so, for example, in the Pakistan crisis we borrowed from people within the region exhaustively. We have also increased our collaboration with standby partners in particular. That means technical groups, sometimes even DFID, who may have additional resources or expertise which we can draw down on for that period of emergency crisis, that allows us to build up our experts in a technical area for a particular period of time without making a longer-term investment in increasing the numbers of staff. Thirdly, we have also increased some of our staff in water and sanitation and we have a particular proposal through to DFID now on capacity building which really seeks to address how we ensure that within each region and at headquarters level we have sufficient staff to mobilise resources at the outset of a crisis in water and sanitation and nutrition, recognising that in our 150 countries we cannot have a water and sanitation person in every place, to try and use this hybrid mechanism of some additional staff, some standby partners, better use of rosters, to be able to respond to a crisis. Q97 Joan Ruddock: Can I just ask you to direct your comments particularly at your role as the lead in clusters? Ms Khan: The lead in cluster, and that is why I started with the needs assessment, the first lead role requires the needs assessment. The second will require better training. The third issue will be stockpiles, which we have looked at supply and what stockpiles are available globally on the markets. Does UNICEF need to start stockpiling some items? What would be some of the needs of key partners within a crisis? Would those then be supplies and equipment that UNICEF would either help provide or, if not provide, procure on a rapid basis? That is the third element. The fourth element would be on helping define some of the standards and performance to monitor more effectively who is doing what. So as cluster lead, am I able to say that the gap in Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo is sufficiently addressed to meet the minimum standards for water or nutrition or supplementary feeding, and if not, who are the additional partners that could come in to support that crisis? That means an understanding of who are the NGOs that are operating, what are the local resources and assets that area available and if there is not anyone, would UNICEF have to scale up its own op to be able to meet that demand? Q98 Joan Ruddock: It sounds impressive, and it sounds, obviously, as though you have a very clear vision of how to do that task of leading a cluster on water and sanitation, but I have to tell you that the Committee is very concerned by the degree of criticism that has been made by international organisations of UNICEF's role as the lead for these issues. If I just indicate to you the Humanitarian Response Review, which is UN OCHA of August 2005, said "UNICEF has not always fulfilled this role at the expected level." The report on DFID's response to the Indian Ocean disaster in March 2006 said that there was a patchy sectoral co-ordination with particular concerns in the area of water and sanitation, the UNICEF lead. Finally, the Joint UNICEF/DFID evaluation of UNICEF preparedness and early response to the Darfur emergency said that UNICEF was not fully prepared for or adequately staffed to meet the magnitude of the needs. I am sure you are familiar with all of those reports. I wonder how you actually evaluate your own contribution, whether you recognise those criticisms or whether you think they are valid? Ms Khan: I think we recognise those criticisms. In all of those contexts those criticisms need to be taken within context. How would you like me to do it? One by one? Because I think different contexts require a different explanation. What is your preference? Q99 Chairman: I am conscious that the Chairman will be very concerned about the time of the Committee, but I think if you give us perhaps some more generic response as to how you rate your overall performance in this field, which seems to us to be poor, to say the least, and then to add to that, if you are able to without taking too much time, obviously, what you are trying to do to put it right. Ms Khan: First of all, you have pointed to three different crises. I would think in Darfur you are absolutely right. It took us a long time to scale up and, once we did scale up, we were able to mount one of the largest water and sanitation operations in emergency that has been mounted in the last decade. So I think you need to distinguish between early start and the ability to respond. Secondly, there is a clear issue of absence sometimes of resources. I think in the Indian Ocean tsunami, the resources were there. What we saw was probably a very good response in Sri Lanka, where we had an existing water and sanitation response, and not a strong response in Indonesia, where we had no pre-existing water and sanitation programme. Thirdly, I think the whole issue of being patchy in response is a very fair one. When I spoke to the issue of what we are doing in the cluster approach, it is partly to address that gap. When we talk about why the cluster approach in the Humanitarian Response Review, it was put in place because things were not perfect. If everything was fine, we would not have needed the Humanitarian Response Review. The Humanitarian Response Review clearly also identified areas that needed strengthening. As I said, we have put out a global cluster appeal now. We have put forward financing requirements to some of our key donor partners, DFID among them, to see what would be needed to be done to improve the predictability of UNICEF's humanitarian response in water and sanitation, and part of that is part of this capacity building proposal that is before DFID now. John Battle: UNICEF took the lead for years on water and sanitation, and I think it was under the leadership of Richard Jolly that UNICEF was the lead agency, not WHO, in tackling polio, associated with water and sanitation. I just wonder, is it a priority, water and sanitation, still or are you falling back on it as a priority? That would be my impression actually, that you think it has been done now. Q100 Chairman: You are being criticised, you have admitted there is a problem - is it a priority to get back up to speed? Ms Khan: Yes, it is. It is a priority. John Battle: Thank you. Q101 Ann McKechin: If I can turn to the question of funding, in particular the issue of the existing flash appeal system, I think you will be aware that there has been criticism, including by DFID, that they feel that some of the flash appeals have included programmes and projects which were not emergency-related or which were excessive. I think the recent earthquake in Pakistan is an example of that, where the office in Islamabad actually deleted a number of projects but when they got back to Geneva they were added back in again, which hardly inspired confidence amongst the donor community. I am just trying to find out whether or not your organisation believes that there is a need for a review of this particular system so that donors can retain confidence. Ms Khan: I definitely think that there could be improvements to the consolidated appeal and flash appeal process. Partly, that will be done by better identification of what the needs are at the onset of a crisis. I believe the second dilemma is related to the fact that often you will see projects that are slightly longer term in a flash appeal because there is no other way of financing them. So I feel when donors also get clear how they are actually going to actually help finance rehabilitation and recovery efforts... Q102 Ann McKechin: When you just said about longer term rehabilitation, would you directly contact donors in another form or would you try and find funding, say, from private donors? How would you go about the medium term recovery? Ms Khan: It depends on the scale. So for UNICEF it is a little bit easier, because as I said, we are there before, during and after the crisis. So the appeal may be able to fund some of both the immediate urgent needs as well as, if the appeal is successful enough, some longer term, and that longer term, partially because a lot of it is not our humanitarian response is not exclusively funded from governments, so governments often have a three-month, 90-day window, sometimes six months, but the public at large are sometimes a little bit more understanding of the fact that you may not just be providing a short-term service, which does not help a child. If he or she is going to school in a tent, the need to build back that school is as important in the longer-term development of that child. So very quickly, to answer your question, yes, the flash appeals can be streamlined. No, we do not have a clear financing modality for post-conflict transition and post-natural disaster transition. We have seen early recovery plans in the case of Pakistan being issued by the World Bank and UNDP but the financing modalities for those medium to long-term crises are not quick enough to meet the immediate needs. Q103 Ann McKechin: Can I just clarify: different donor countries have different time periods which they will fund for, like 90 days or four months or six months, so you are working with the fact that you have donors giving you different time slots. Ms Khan: Absolutely. Q104 Mr Singh: Could I come back to ring-fencing, please. For the tsunami funding, DFID ring-fenced its grant donations. DFID's own assessment is that that helped to shape the response to ensure all their needs were covered, so they were quite happy with that process. Other agencies were quite happy. Why was it such a huge problem for you? Ms Khan: I think the whole issue of ring-fencing the financing depends how you work. It leads back to the answer I just gave to a previous question. When you are in a country for a long period of time and when donors give you different earmarked pots for different periods of response for different periods, imagine you are in a country, you have 90 days for water from DFID, you have six months from Japan for health, you really have to then juggle. It becomes a full-time job basically just to juggle the different financing terms and conditions that donors apply, and ultimately what they want are the same results. Q105 Mr Singh: I understand the difficulties but can you understand that DFID might want to explain to the British public "This is the amount of money we gave and this is what it went on"? Ms Khan: But we can do that. "This is the money we got and this is what it went on" are what the core commitments for children are about, so we are very clear on explaining results. The issue becomes do you want to know DFID's 45 cents went to this part of the child's vaccine, Japan's 33 cents went to the other part of the vaccine, and 17 % of the public money went to the rest of the portion? Q106 Mr Singh: Quite clearly, that would be ridiculous. Ms Khan: But that is the kind of thing we get into, so if we are able to pool resources, to say "We got $100 million for water and sanitation. The results were X amount of latrines built, so many children and mothers trained on hygiene", that gives us results without having to report on the detailed donor financing. Given that 50 % of the money comes from the public, we have the flexibility to focus on those results rather than just focus on what portion is going to what. Q107 Mr Singh: Why is UNICEF an exception when OCHA, WFP, UNHCR, all welcomed this ring-fencing? Ms Khan: Two things. We have had far more flexibility with our donors because we deliver results. Unlike WFP, we do not focus on one commodity. We are focusing on a multiplicity of actions in the area of health, in the area of child protection, water and sanitation, education, nutrition. To be able to respond holistically to a child not dying, it means responding to all of those equally. So WFP may have some food, but if we do not get the water and sanitation and the hand-washing in there, if that child does not have a safe place to go at night, or clothes during the crisis in Pakistan, that child is still going to end up dead. So the ability to really ensure that all of the composite elements that lead to child survival are adequately funded means that ring-fencing - we can do it if we have to but it does not lead to the best results for children. Q108 Mr Singh: In terms of your expenditure against your tsunami appeal, you under-spent and there are concerns about that, that you had an excess of funding, which was not earmarked, and yet under-spent against your tsunami appeal fund. How do you justify that? Ms Khan: There are two things. You remember the tsunami appeal went in waves. There was an original appeal and that appeal was extremely well funded for the first 90 days. There was a second appeal and then a longer term relief and recovery component. We at UNICEF were quite well funded for the first tranche. We then said that we had already received sufficient resources and we would launch no more immediate resource mobilisation campaigns. In the tsunami the difference for UNICEF was the bulk of the money came through the thematic humanitarian financing. It came from the public, it came untagged, that then allowed us not to be stuck to the 90-day or 60-day limit that some donors applied. So we had to use that money first, and then often use the thematic humanitarian financing for the longer-term recovery needs. So at least with the public there was a clear agreement that we would go beyond that six-month mark to help build back some of the key areas. As for the tsunami, I want to reiterate what my colleagues earlier reiterated: it is the exception; it is not the norm. If we had anywhere near that in the Sahel Belt, we would not be seeing the levels of child morbidity or mortality we are seeing now. Chairman: Thank you very much. Obviously, UN reform is a live issue which is a matter of concern, with the UK government having one of the biggest donor programmes in the world and rising rapidly. These are critical matters, because if British taxpayers are going to give more money to international agencies, they need to know that it is going where people want it to go. So I appreciate you have taken the time and trouble to come and engage with us and I am sure the dialogue will not end here. I hope you have some flavour of where the Committee's concerns are. Thank you for answering our questions, and we hope that you will find the report interesting and helpful.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Joanna Macrae, Humanitarian Adviser, and Mr Michael McCarthy, Deputy Head, Conflict, Humanitarian and Security Department, Department for International Development, gave evidence. Q109 Chairman: Thank you, both of you, for your patience. There are some important issues that we want you to share with us. The good humanitarian donorship initiative, which is beginning to take effect, is one that is of interest to us. I suppose the first question we need to address is why was there a need for such an initiative, and why do we need to have agreed principles? It does imply that there is something wrong with a system that requires the creation of this. Perhaps you can first of all answer that. Ms Macrae: We have been hearing quite a lot this morning about how donor behaviour matters, and it matters in terms of how individual bilateral donors behave, so when DFID decides to respond to an emergency, it matters how much it is going to give and when it is going to give the money and on what terms it gives it. So individual donor behaviour matters but also the collective donor behaviour matters. I think Afshan has described very well how we have to look at not only what DFID decides to do but how DFID's decisions relate to those of the US and ECHO and Japan and Sweden or whatever. I think during the late 1990s and the early part of this century we were becoming very aware that donor decisions had a really big impact on both the quality and the quantity of humanitarian action in any place and at any time. What was interesting is that, in contrast with donor behaviour in other areas, it was basically unregulated. There were no standards or guidance that said "This is good donor behaviour and this is bad donor behaviour." And whereas in the development side the Development Assistance Committee to the OECD has huge swathes of guidance that exist with regard to have you mainstream gender and environment and how you engage in fragile states, there was nothing on humanitarian assistance. I think what donors came to realise in the lead-up to the conference in Stockholm in 2003 was that the volume of ODA being spent on humanitarian assistance was rising very, very sharply but there were no norms against which donor performance could be measured, on the one hand, and I think also whole agendas around harmonisation of donor procedures were getting greater currency more generally, so there was a kind of moment then when donors came to the view that it would be useful to have such principles to guide their behaviour both bilaterally and collectively, and by initially incorporating these principles into the DAC peer review process and, more recently, having them agreed as a reference point for DAC members, I think there has been an attempt made to make sure that humanitarian assistance is basically subject to the same level of scrutiny as the main part of development assistance. Q110 Chairman: It was endorsed by DAC in April of this year, which presumably has some significance, that DAC have picked it up, but to what extent are they encouraging or reflecting the way governments are buying into it? Is that trying to put more pressure for more to buy in or is it an indication of the amount of buy-in we have achieved so far? Ms Macrae: I think it is a bit of a two-way street. I think what happened was that after the Stockholm conference there was... I think you have to understand humanitarian donorship objectively as being two things. One is a set of principles which were agreed in Stockholm and which we have been trying to get embedded into the normative regulatory framework of aid, and at another level it has existed as a forum for the discussion between donors of shared areas of concern, and that is really where issues around this alignment of donor procedures has been happening. For various reasons, that forum for debate has not been in the Development Assistance Committee in Paris. It has tended to happen much more from a Geneva base and as a series of ad hoc meetings at headquarters, I think in part because one of the achievements, I suppose, of the GHD initiative was to say that, although we think humanitarian assistance should be subject to the same expectations and professionalism that we subject development assistance to, it is by definition different, and so the perception has been up till now that there is a need for a slightly separate parallel strand for the debate of donor issues relating to humanitarian action, and that has largely been happening outside of Paris, with the exception of the peer review process. Q111 Chairman: What I find interesting is that of the countries that have bought in, it includes the United States, which is quite interesting because on development issues they definitely follow their own agenda. Is that partly because it is a fresh approach and a relatively blank script, or is it because the United States has a more genuinely common approach to the humanitarian response than it does to development? Ms Macrae: I think ultimately that will be a question that you would need to address to them, but I think maybe some of the answers to that will come out... One of the big wins out of the good humanitarian donorship process is that historically - it sounds small but actually it is big - if you looked at the peer review process of the DAC, there was maybe a paragraph, which was very descriptive, on emergency aid. Now what is happening is that in the DAC peer reviews there is a huge ten-page annex which reviews in great detail donor governments' performance against GHD criteria, and in fact, next week I will be part of the DAC peer review team that will be investigating the US's compliance with those frameworks, so I will be in a better position to at least give a personal reflection on that in a few weeks' time. But their report will be available in December. Q112 Ann McKechin: Clearly, the GHD initiative needs to be widened out to a much broader constituency if it is going to be truly as effective as you hope. I just wonder to what extent it is a problem that non-DAC donors, you have to interact with them in terms of humanitarian responses, and also how you try to engage the NGO and civil society into this initiative as well. Ms Macrae: I think there is a recognition amongst those 23 governments who are now signatories to this process that we do need to broaden them out, to broaden out ownership of them. I think this is a relatively young initiative still. It was only signed up to in 2003 and here we are in 2006, so it is a relatively young process and I think the main effort till now has been in terms of making sure that there is understanding of what those principles are and ability to roll those out within that initial group. I think also, as the initiative, in other words, as the standing forum, we have been aware of the need to make sure that we are not duplicating effort and, for example, the OCHA donor support group has been doing a lot of work on reaching out to so-called emerging donors and part of that work is around trying to promote a more multilateral approach. Q113 Ann McKechin: I think there might be some concerns in the perception of the OECD as the voice of the northern countries of the world primarily, who would be seen to be setting the agenda without involving the integral voice or the southern voices in it. I am trying to see to what extent are southern voices able to be heard and contribute to that process? Mr McCarthy: Through the OCHA donor support group there have been some discussions with the G77 countries in Turkey and in Abu Dhabi recently this year. What we are trying to do is explain to countries such as Middle Eastern countries, which are significant supporters of humanitarian assistance, how we do it and to do it collectively around a single plan so that we are more effective, and the UAE are listening and considering these issues, as are India, Pakistan and Turkey and these other countries. Pakistan, for example, although it is all in its own country, is this year a significant supporter of humanitarian action, so it understands the benefits of a common plan because it has happened in its own country now. The OCHA donor support group is working with non-traditional donors to bring them inside the tent so that they at least look at what we are doing collectively. Whether they decide to join or not is another thing but it is a start. They have not been approached before and OCHA are leading this kind of momentum now, and as the Chair of the OCHA donor support group, we are taking over the process from the Americans. Sweden started it, the Americans have taken it forward, and we will take it further again with these non-traditional donors. Ms Macrae: Just to add on in terms of civil society, I think one of the things that we see this framework as doing is actually providing a framework against which the official donor community can be subject to scrutiny by civil society and by other bodies, including public scrutiny bodies. It is interesting, for example, that the National Audit Office in its report on DFID some years back was using part of that GHD framework in its analysis. I think in some ways it has been slightly disappointing perhaps that civil society has not more actively used these principles as a basis for dialogue. I think maybe the fault is both ways, that maybe donors need to be reaching out more to civil society but also whether or not civil society might be using this framework more actively. In some countries that has happened. I know, for example, in Canada there has been a very lively discussion between the Canadian NGO community and Canadian CIDA using a lot of the language in this. Q114 John Battle: It is one thing adopting the norms but the other thing will be measuring the progress really. How do you measure the progress? I wondered if the DAC consolidated peer review of humanitarian assistance threw up any significant issues that would take us down that road, so you can actually have a framework that not only adopts norms but actually tells us how we are making progress. Ms Macrae: Indeed. At the moment there are at least two ways in which progress at a collective level, if you like, can be measured. One is that, as part of the initiative, members - I keep using that word but you know what I mean; there are 23 governments that have been working on this - have as a group identified a number of indicators that it is using to measure progress against these objectives. For various reasons, the main focus of those indicators has largely been confined to the financing elements of the principles, partly because they are the most easy to quantify, as you can imagine, and what we have done is to commission an independent consulting group, Development Inititiatives, to use these indicators and to do two things: firstly, to comment on the robustness of those indicators from a technical perspective, is it possible to collect the data and how meaningful are they, and then the second thing that we have asked them to do is to plug in those data for the years 2004 and 2005. Their report on that will be published in mid-July as part of their annual report called Global Humanitarian Assistance. That looks at things like this issue of time limits, for example. There is an indicator about how much money was allocated to chronic emergencies in the first three months of the year, for example, and clearly, if what you want to see is a more timely response, we want early response to the consolidated appeals that are launched in January because money that is pledged in October is much, much less useful. So it is possible to measure those things. Part of the roll-out of GHD at a country level, which is very much what we are trying to do now, having tackled a lot of the kind of headquarters and big institutional issues like the DAC, at the country level we are also going to be working to refine more indicators about how donors should be working there. In terms of the DAC peer review, as you know, DAC members are reviewed every four years. Up until now we have had Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, the UK, Australia, and what has been very interesting about those is that there has been this very interesting synthesis document, and I think it shows quite a lot of commonality in a number of the issues. Part of what it is trying to do is both to identify areas for improvement but also identify areas of good practice. One of the things it has done is to encourage donors to develop new policies, to articulate how they are going to translate these quite high-level principles into their daily work, and we have seen quite a number of countries develop more GHD-compliant policies. I think there have also been quite strong recommendations to address the issue of inadequacy of humanitarian aid, to which a number of colleagues have referred this morning, and a number of governments were advised that it would be ideal if they could improve their total volume of humanitarian assistance. Quite a lot of thought about streamlining of budgeting. Again, I think this morning we have heard that one of the challenges for many agencies is that they are having to appeal to many different budget lines often. In the UK we are lucky because it is pretty consolidated within DFID but in many governments you have a bit here and a bit there, across government departments, so issues about streamlining of budgetary systems. I think in every single DAC peer review there has been an issue about how to increase our beneficiary involvement in the whole humanitarian cycle and how donors could increase leverage on that, and I think it is very interesting that that keeps coming up. So through that process I think there is quite a lot of leverage for addressing that issue more. Q115 Joan Ruddock: You were talking there quite a lot about process, and I realise this is all relatively new, but I wonder to what extent the principles of good humanitarian donorship actually result in good humanitarian outcomes. Ms Macrae: I think it is quite a complex causal chain that goes between the decision-making processes in an organisation like DFID and what is happening in Darfur. In some ways it is a fairly straight line about have we given any money or not, which will make a very big outcome. I think the question is how we measure those outcomes and what those outcomes are, and it is difficult to say precisely what the outcomes of the GHD initiative have been as a whole, but I think, for example, the GHD as a forum was very important in establishing CERF, for example. If you look at it in terms of an outcome to have a global fund which we hope will end up with more timely and better proportioned responses, that will make a difference. A lot of work we are doing at the moment is about, there is a big commitment in the GHD principles to so-called needs-based resource allocation, and it is to try and prevent, if you like, the tsunami effect, where you have massive concentration of resources in one part of the world, which, do not let us forget, that is not only money but when you have all that money, you are then sucking people and other kinds of assets from across the system. So what we would like to see is more equitable distribution of humanitarian action. So quite a large part of the work that we are doing is to try and think through how do we deliver that in practice, and we know that there are a number of the constraints to achieving that, and we want to work through those both bilaterally and collectively to make sure that we are living up to that commitment to more impartial resources. I think we do have some existing outcomes in terms of instruments, for example, in terms of CERF and the common funds. I think we have outcomes in terms of increased donor accountability. How we translate that on to the ground is still very much work in progress and is very much at the forefront of our agenda at the moment, as we try to roll this out more at a country level, and I think the outcomes should be about more timely, predictable and efficient funding, and I think, in a way, one of the problems at the moment is that - and I think you have all touched on it in your questions this morning - it is quite easy to blame poor performance in the humanitarian sector exclusively on donor behaviour. Our challenge is really to make sure that we are doing our bit and getting our behaviour as good as we can, and then the rest will have to come out of that partnership with the operational organisations. Q116 Chairman: Just on that, we have discussed international reform and we have discussed UN reform. How is this going to feed into that? If we want to use these principles to be, as you say, predictable but flexible, and we have a situation not earmarked, which is what UNICEF wanted, and we have a situation where DFID is expanding its budget but with reduced staffing levels, so inevitably having to use more agencies accountable through principals. How are these going to fit together, from your point of view inside DFID? Is this going to help shape a reform that will enable us, that is, the United Kingdom, to deliver our humanitarian aid efficiently and effectively and accountably? Mr McCarthy: I think the cluster system is an attempt to get away from this proliferation of UN agencies and focus on how to deliver, because there are nine clusters, and they are clear about what they are trying to deliver. The fault at the moment seems to be that you can have a cluster appeal but the response is to a UN agency. So it is a bit awkward in that you cannot fund the cluster; you have to fund the UN agency, and maybe there are two of them. In health, for example, it might be UNICEF and WHO who are making appeals through the cluster system. But I think these reforms and GHD, it is an attempt to try to give some coherence and make it a more manageable humanitarian response, because if you started with a blank sheet of paper, clearly you would not end up with the number of UN agencies that you have today. You would have something a little bit different, I would hope. So we are trying to work from the back end really by changing our behaviour and automatically require different behaviour from the UN system. Ms Macrae: I think that is right, and, just to add on to that, I think, in a way, with the reform agenda it is quite easy. There are lots of different elements of reform going on, and if you take one step back and say what are those trying to achieve? You have mentioned a lot of the key words around predictability and I think also increasing equity of response, this sense of the system not being driven by a variety of pressures, financial and otherwise, to act in some places more than in others, and this whole idea of delivering on needs-based, predictable but also coherent and more co-ordinated. The way in which we finance the humanitarian system will affect our capacity to deliver those. So just to give you an example, part of the reform agenda, as you know, is to strengthen humanitarian co-ordinators. One of the huge in-built weaknesses at the moment to the humanitarian system is that we are requiring that humanitarian co-ordinators deliver the consolidated appeal behind which is the common humanitarian action plan. So we are asking them to deliver a strategic plan, but at the moment the way that we fund that is we say "Thank you very much for the strategic plan. Now we are going to cherry-pick all these little bits that we do like and fund those" in a completely project-ised way. Part of the thinking behind the Common Fund is to reverse that trend and to say "No, actually, we actually want to try and keep the integrity of that strategic plan" and to empower the person who is responsible for delivering it, the humanitarian co-ordinator, with the ability to exert some real leverage over the operational partners, in other words, to influence resource allocation. So I think there is a very strong connectedness between the financial incentives that exist for certain type of behaviour and the ability to deliver those reforms and of course, part of what we are doing within the context of the GHD initiative as a forum is to think about those connections. As Mike has implied, we have, for example, used that forum as a mechanism for donors to exchange views about how to respond to the cluster appeals, because there are shared donor concerns around the way that those clusters have been designed. Q117 Chairman: If I may turn to my final point, it is the GHD leading towards helping to secure the right UN reform outcome, so that we are all working together and are the UN buying into that or are we in danger of finishing up with two parallel and competing directions? Ms Macrae: The objective is certainly not to end up with two parallel things. I think there is a recognition that donors have a very wide portfolio of which the UN is but one pillar, therefore we need to be able to manage that portfolio as a whole, but the idea is that we are identifying these areas where there is a lot of... The way in which donors behave will influence the UN's capacity to deliver on reform, on the one hand, but also donors have shared concerns around this agenda, and I think, just as in the development field we are trying to move away from 12 different donors pitching up and telling the government what it does or does not think about its development plans, part of what we are trying to do is to use the GHD forum to make sure that donors are sending more consistent messages to other Jan Egeland colleagues in the UN about our comfort levels, about where we would like to see certain improvements and also to communicate plans around funding. Chairman: Thank you very much for that. As you know, Jan Egeland will be appearing in front of the Committee, so we may be able to hear his views as well. I am sure we will. Thank you very much, and thank you for being so patient. That has been extremely helpful. [1] World Food Programme [2] United Nations High Commission for Refugees [3] Liberation Tigers of Tamal Eelam |